A woman of words and letters

Last week I resolved to write about Dana (pronounced “Dannah”) Redfield, an excellent author and speaker on UFO experiences and my personal friend for many years. She recently died of cancer. I wanted to share with you her unique gifts to our earthly tribe and to the Creator, for she was a brilliant writer and philosopher who was almost entirely unknown in the mainstream world of arts and letters.

In looking for a good entry into her work, I found myself instead, last week, talking about words of power and asking people to be more careful in how they say what they need to say. For this would have been her primary hope: to help people be more aware of the mystery, the miracle and the sacredness of words, letters and sounds; and of themselves as those wind instruments which produce them.

This week we shall enter into a slightly deeper layer of the essential Dana Redfield, looking more closely at just one of the thrusts of her life’s work: the essential nature of words and letters.

When I first met Dana by mail, she had no computer. We corresponded for years by snail mail. It was not until 2000 that she accepted the inevitability of using a computer to save time. Previously, every word she ever wrote was written by her pen on a piece of paper. Until the end of her life, that is how she composed such wonderful works of fiction as “Jonah, Lucy Blue and the Daughters of Light” and “Ezekiel’s Chariot” and such provocative and evidential non-fiction books as “Summoned” and “The Human-ET Connection.”

Her reverence for words and letters was remarkable. She considered the alphabet far more than a random list of letters. She saw each letter as an entity. Her last work — and whether to call it non-fiction or philology is a puzzle all its own — is a concise yet infinitely expansive little volume called “The Alphabet Mosaics.” About it, she writes in the Acknowledgments to that book:

“This work was started in 1993 with the curious thought, ‘I want to know every letter of the alphabet intimately.’ I could not have imagined the doors that would open, once I began this quest.

“From the start, when I worked with letters and numbers, I experienced something like the opening of gateways in my mind. Then I had to learn to take very seriously the lessons of discernment.”

Being Dana, she found herself constantly bombarded, in doing this work, with entities and their gifts: a rose that hung in the air before disappearing; angelic presences; visions of earth-roots and a silver cord forming her ET-self.

As she pursued this mystery, working day after week after year at her kitchen table, reading everything she could find on language, letters and communication and making her charts and drawings, she found her bliss. She said, in a letter to me written in January 2000:

“This is a mystery I want to pursue for a thousand years or so; the play I most want to do some more. I stand at a portal between the old stories and the new one emerging.

“I’m fired, because it’s a mystery I want to solve. I know I can’t, but engaging in the trying is bliss for me. I have a true ‘quester’ mentality. It is the thing that keeps me at the table, playing with letters and numbers beyond all human understanding.”

To Dana, to work with words was to work with letters and to work with letters was gradually to begin to understand these living entities and be able to tell their stories. The more deeply she probed into each letter, its origins and its subjective implications for her, the more she saw this work as vital to discovering the archetypal basis for the New Age now emerging.

The Q’uo group, an ET source I often channel for L/L Research, agrees with Dana wholeheartedly. To them, also, words are narrow and limited compared to pure concept, but nonetheless sacred tools for our use in thinking and in relating to each other in unity and harmony. In this upcoming quotation, they are trying to bring the circle of seekers present that day into an enhanced awareness of this appreciation for communication. This session was collected on Dec. 11, 2005:

“We would ask each of you to be very responsible about maintaining a guard upon your own temple gates. Please be careful about what you accept for material for thinking. If an idea seems helpful or valid to you, by all means follow it. That is why we are sharing this information.

“However, we are not always those who hit the mark. Be aware of this. Not all of our thoughts may be specifically for you. If one does not seem to be helpful, then we ask you to leave it behind without a second thought.

“We thank you for this favor, for it enables us to speak freely and not be concerned that we will infringe upon your free will.

“By the very words that we have just spoken through this instrument, we have indicated that we consider your words to be instruments of communication that are efficient. We would like to make that point clear, for much that we have to say about words seems to denigrate the power of the spoken word or the heard word. And we would not in any way suggest that there is little or no power in that which you hear and that which you say.

“Remember that you are creatures whose only access to life is through breathing in and breathing out. The train whistle that you hear outside of the dwelling place in which each of you sits at this time is a wind instrument expressing noise or signal through the expression of air. Each of you, similarly and hopefully with more sense, is also a wind instrument. You have far more than one two-note dyad with which to sing your song. You have all the colorations of the voice before you ever come to say a word.

“The simple expression of your voice is enough to tell another person who you are and to awaken in them the emotions created by the dynamics of your energy exchange. We encourage you to have great respect and give great honor to your breath. With it you ride the surf of life within the environment of third density. And with that voice, with that breath expelled just so, you begin to make patterns”

Dana echoes their thought in much more compressed language in “The Alphabet Mosaics.” This is part of her poem on the letter “L”:

This article’s version of her poetry does not have the impact of the work as it was carefully composed in the rare Carolingia font and centered and off-centered to make patterns of the lines themselves, but at least you can receive the wisdom of her words here.

She says, “Language is the paradoxical obstacle to luminescence.” We, who struggle constantly to make ourselves clear and to talk, talk, talk everything out, have a marked tendency to forget that words are not the whole of communication; that they flower into so much more. Dana says, as part of her poem on the letter “R”:

And again, in her poem on the letter “B”:

Dana’s vision of language and communication is so very alive! I love the thought that our words are more-than-words; that they are dance, poetry and that essence of shimmering, vibrating love that is romance. And above all, that between the words are many mansions.

Dana’s and my friendship was built on the solid foundation of our mutual enjoyment of each others’ words and works of writing and, for me, channeling. We wrote voluminously, especially Dana, when she was first liberated to the ease of communicating by e-mail. And we were a mutual admiration society, always delighting in the patterns each other made with our choices of words and special ways of saying things.

Each Christmas Eve, we would email each other one word: “Jesus.” The first time she read that name on our Lord’s birthday, she cried. I think that probably sealed our friendship forever.

The Q’uo group says this about those choices of words and patterns:

“What were your first words? For most entities, the first words are those recognitions of entities that share space with them: ‘Mama,’ ‘Papa,’ ‘Grandpa,’ ‘Grandma.’ We discover within this instrument’s mind that this instrument’s first words were ‘Put me down,’ spoken to her dear mother.

“There is, in the human energy, almost an equal need to recognize intimacy and to create individuation or individuality. Words are used for both purposes. Therefore, before you speak your first word in a conversation, ask yourself, ‘Is this a pattern of words designed to increase intimacy or is this a pattern of words designed to increase individuation?’”

I open my arms and embrace your spirit. As we become more and more aware of the power of words, may we use them to create honest communication, true intimacy, genuine affection, the radiance of gentle wisdom and the ambience of the Creator’s very Thought of love.