CAVEAT: Warning! These letters have not been edited by Carla. Expect errors.

Dear R,

This is Carla talking to you in the heart of the beast. I received your pliant plea upon returning from an even wilder place than North Carolina (200 acres of mountain, valley and ridge in the North Carolina mountains) called Canuga. It is a retreat center for the Fourth Province of the Episcopal Church, which is basically the southeast: Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee. You basically get the idea.

I am going to just let my speaking role … I am not going to try to think about it very much because you are asking me questions that I have no answers for. But oftentimes I can, by moving into a deeper part of myself, channel within myself and here is hoping I am able to get to that level.

In the first place, I validate the nausea and the horror of human experience as we see it in big cities at this time. In Louisville there are homeless. Our church is heavily involved in caring for them. We have a food closet. We have a clothes pantry. We have a help office, which gets people through the various systems of the government to get whatever help they can, and we have a day center so that the homeless will have some place to go, and shower and be in the daytime as well as at night, and not just have to walk the streets.

This does not attack the root of the problem. As I see it, the root of the problem of the homeless is that it is often seen as an incorrect value and an undesired life to live the life of a moneyed, earning, productive person. This is not to say that these are old hippies, although many of them may be. But to say that the despair level upon this planet, as well as the hope level, has intensified and I do believe the end is nearer than it was when I started in this work in 1962. There has been polarization and there is a significant lack of human respect for humans due to overcrowding.

Now you may perhaps have been telling people for years about this exact experiment, but it made an effect on me when I heard it. The experiment was with rats, naturally. They were allowed to reproduce in a limited environment. They reproduced until they were very, very overcrowded. They then slaughtered each other until they were spacious again. And they went through this in cycles. There was a mass trigger of some kind, just one too many people, just one too many mice in that one environment that made the mice hostile and made them aggressive and all of the negative characteristics that you associate with mice trying to kill each other.

I think that quite literally this is what happens in our downtown areas. The press of people, the energy of people, both sane and delightful and insane in a non-delightful way, is intense. The bigger the city, the greater the intensity and the greater the chance for polarization in either direction, but most especially in the direction of service-to-self because there seems to be so much need to armor oneself when one is in such close proximity to so many other people.

I do not feel that this has come out of your tent for the simple reason that you like people. You don’t mind living in a big sea of humanity. You enjoy it. It is a turn-on for you and M. The variousness of the human race, or races, fascinates you. You and M are sensual. You drink in tastes, and touches, and feelings and sights, and basically, you are not living in New York, you see. You are enjoying New York. There is a difference.

To live in New York as a responsible, metaphysical entity would be to do something sacrificial like volunteer to work in a soup kitchen. I do not feel that this is your calling although it might teach you a good deal. I feel that you have a refined nature that can do its best work in communicating with those who are already on the path. Much in the same way that I feel that my words would be wasted in the soup line, but are not wasted in speaking with colleagues.

I am listening to Jim’s phone call. He is battling the problems of rising costs and people continuing to have the same idea about what to donate to us. It is time for faith. Let’s put it that way. And for stating again and again that we do believe that what we need will come to us.

I know about the drug bit. It is here too. It is a terrible thing. I have had two friends in jail because of it. I don’t know why they wanted coke, but they did and they paid for it because it was illegal. I have no solutions. I have only consciousness and part of my consciousness is that inside each of those people is the Creator and that as I respond to the Creator in them, they will on a personal level respond to the Creator in me. Let me give you a couple of examples of this in the renowned Southern story telling way.

When I was nineteen and a virgin, but engaged, I was hailed on the street by a man who said he knew me in high school. I am gullible and trusting. He said he knew me from high school. He called me by name and invited me into his car. He was going to take me to my bus stop. Instead he drove into a blind alley, came to the end of the cul-de-sac, and stopped. There was no way to turn around. He was upon me in an instant and one of his hands went up under my skirt and tore my pants. It should have been obvious to me that I was about to be raped, but my consciousness has a tendency simply not to believe that people would do something like that. I was foolish and gullible, but blessed are the pure in heart, I think comes to mind.

I looked at the man. His eyeballs were very close to mine as he was reaching for my underwear. I simply said, “What are you doing?”

And the poor man looked at me and he crumpled into a heap and he said, “You are really good. You are good. You are really a good person.” And he put his head down on the steering wheel, and he sobbed and I patted him on the back, assuring him that although I was already taken, that there would be someone for him. That he would have love in his life, etc. until he got over what he had done.

I did not condemn him for it in any way. I was silent on that point. There wasn’t any need to say anything. He simply said, “I know you don’t want me to know where you live so just tell me what bus stop you want me to drop you at.” So that was the rape that never took place.

Later on in college, actually in my senior year when I had already landed a Ford fellowship through my Masters, one year of it being in Cambridge, I was proposed to by a worthy philosopher named CF, one of those names that delights me. It is like a feather. He, himself, was homely, but he understood the things that I needed at this time in my life and was able to give them to me. That is, he was able to be a friend and a lover without demanding that I marry. Actually I had to leave him finally because he got too serious and changed all of our good times into bad times by talking about marriage.

When C did ask me to marry him, I couldn’t marry him because I wasn’t over DM. As simple as that. He said to me very lovingly, “I want to protect you. I don’t ever want you to know what the real world is like. I want to keep you this sweet, innocent person that you are and I want to give my life to that.” That really sounds sweet, but I am not a person who is looking to be put in a cage, on a pedestal, however you want to put it.

I simply asked myself, Was he right? Was I living in an unreal world? Did I have expectations of the common run of people that were untrue? I do not gamble with money, but I will put myself on the line. I dropped out of school; took incompletes in four courses. This was the last semester of my senior year, but it was important to me to verify for myself my understanding of the way people are, which is that people treat you the way you treat them. I looked and looked for a job that was skuzzy. I was having a hard time finding a job in a bar where prostitutes were waitresses and other prostitutes brought their johns. That is the kind of place I was looking for because I knew that what people would call the scum of Louisville were there. If the real world, as C was describing it, was anywhere, it was in those bars in that underworld, the demimonde as used to be fashionably said.

Luckily my father knew the owner of such a dive because he was a jazz fan and dad was able to get a lot of people in playing at the S and he played real good jazz. So I was able to get on there as a waitress, even though all of the other waitresses were professionals. Now the people didn’t know me at first, so they would ask me for a date. I would say, “Well, I’m not a professional. I’m just a waitress, but I tell you what, I don’t think D has a date tonight.” Apology, apology, apology as if they had done me an insult by telling me they wanted me. I couldn’t imagine a nicer thing to say, but if anything, they respected me to the point of nausea.

Quickly the regulars learned who I was and not so quickly, because I am not that good at faces, I learned who they were. I made many friendships among the lonely people that fix horse races and stuff who frequented the place, and in with the mob some way. They all treated me so sweetly and the only times it got tense was when somebody new came in to the S and tried to proposition me and would not take no for an answer, but probably because of being a little ribbed, continued to insist this could not possibly be so.

At that point, you would hear at least two bottles breaking and the guy was in fear of his life. I did not appreciate that kind of protection because I didn’t think I needed it, but given the people who were there, it would have been logical for them to do that.

At any rate, they always treated me with the utmost grace, respect, kindness, love. I would sit down at a table and talk with my regulars and they would be so grateful and they could just pour out the things that were in their hearts and I could listen. I really felt that I was more of a core service in that job than most of the jobs that I have had, probably not including this one.

Now I will tell you another story that focuses in on New York. It was in 1978. I was visiting T because he wanted Don and me and a couple of other people to sit with him and do some consciousness work for the planet. We did that for five days. Interesting people tended to drop by to T. That never fazed him. He was never involved with the cooking of the meals or anything to do with anything and I have seen him eat raw dried beans. So the man just doesn’t care so everybody is always welcome to him. The people around him who are trying to get enough food on the table sometimes go bonkers.

This woman and this man were an interesting couple. I can’t remember their names. He was one of those new shaker types who was running seminars on how to be spiritual, or how to succeed or to get money. One of those goals that isn’t how to find the Creator, how to be with the Creator, how to steep oneself in the mystery of the Creator. I wasn’t particularly interested in him, although he was extremely charismatic.

He was espoused to an absolutely beautiful model. She felt that her modeling days were over because she was a little long in the tooth, but let me tell you, R, she was lovely and she was heavily into meditation and into the present moment. For instance, she said to me that she had done the dishes that morning and the dishes said, “Gee, thanks.” She had that kind of a consciousness going for her. She was able to interact with every day in a non-mundane way, which is basically the characteristic of a more spiritualized person.

She was on the train into New York City, as they say around there, into the City, when a very burly, very tall, very black black man with a gun walked into the car and told everybody to move up to the front of the car, that he was hijacking the train and he had some demands to make before he would let the people go or he would kill them if they fought him.

Everybody was absolutely terrified, but this woman was meditating when it started happening and she was in a very deep state. She was really out there so she was only peripherally aware of the outside reality at that point and as he came towards her, she became aware of his presence the way an animal would become aware of another body, just body presence. She opened her eyes, looked up and gave him a great big smile, closed her eyes again and kept on meditating. He walked right by her. Everybody else on that train was hijacked and had to be messing around all day first with him and then the police, although nobody got hurt. It was just a waste of the day. She simply got off at the next station and took another train.

What I am trying to say in these stories is that life is lived in a spiritual person from the inside out. We have to know who we are because we have to know what gifts we are going to use. In some of us, that is quite a challenge because we do many things well. In others of us, the way is fairly clear. We do one kind of thing well and we continue to do it well and we enjoy it.

I feel that you are probably in an excellent position to be a light source, although of course, it is a high risk posture and I would say that the most important thing that you could do would be to visualize and allow the white light of Christ consciousness to permeate every cell of your body and M’s body, to clothe you in the armor of light and to be unafraid. The worse thing that can happen is that you are going to get killed. Then you enter into the gates of a lager and more spacious light anyway.

Basically fear is not a useful emotion in this context.

“Why should you stay in New York and not simply leave?”

That is a good question. What is happening here is that you are in Oz. You are not in New York. You are enjoying the city. You are not living in the city. You have not identified this city as your city. Therefore, you see the situation as from afar. I have no fault to find with that except that if you wish to polarize more, it would behoove you to go through some kind of process of meditating, contemplation and analysis about what your gifts are. What you could share. What you could do to help. Recycling is obvious. Burdensome, but obvious. Teaching people to read or to speak English is obvious. Working with people in prison with teaching to read, maybe helping them get ready to graduate from high school.

These are all things that it would be possible for you to do, but your time is obviously extremely valuable to your company. They are paying you a lot of money and you are under an obligation to them, so basically you simply have to be priced in your own environment. If you can radiate good feeling and a smile to someone who is homeless, fine. That is good work—working on realizing that all of us are one and that what happened to that guy is only happening to him because it is not happening to you.

We, all of us, have the capacity for everything and what you are looking at here is an identity that is winding down. The inconveniences began some time ago and are continuing and I really wouldn’t be surprised to see catastrophe strike in terms of not human actions, but in terms of the shifting of tectonic plates, the shifting of the axis of the earth, the coming of a new ice age with the destruction of too many of the trees, the greenhouse effect because of the stupid plastic cups we drink out of.

I do not worry about this because I know that I am not called to action in this world. I went through college and opened myself to the radical, liberal elements in my college. I went to a march in Frankfort, the capital of Kentucky, asking for equal rights for Blacks. I was very disillusioned at that time. I felt that the Creator was telling me in no uncertain terms that this was not a calling, not my vocation and not mine to worry about.

The sign came to me when it was raining cats and dogs and I walked up to a Black lady who had a big umbrella and asked her if I could share her umbrella. She said, “No.” So I stood in the rain and listened to three or four lackluster speeches, which meant absolutely nothing and then people sang songs, which were not good the first time and have not improved with age. On the way out of Frankfort, the capital, I discovered that capitalism never stops. Kentucky Fried Chicken had lined the road with hundreds of boxes of KFC just waiting for our $2.00 and everybody was stopping and buying KFC to take home.

This did not strike me as something that I was going to be able to deal with. This is the gray area, right? I know my limitations. I don’t really do that well with the gray area. I do a lot better when I am trying to help people move more towards the ideal; encouraging people to keep an idea; encouraging people to be passionate about that ideal. But in terms in what you are doing in New York, and what is happening around you, I believe it is as simple as this. Those that are positive are becoming more positive. Those who have the temptation to be negative and have yielded, are becoming more and more negative. The time comes at some point, at which I don’t know, when their densities and incarnations will quite simply be unviable here because we have ruined the atmosphere, the ocean, the land. You name it.

I refuse to worry about this because we are imperishable spirits. We are here for the duration and by here I mean in the creation. Sometimes it makes one feel a bit weary to think of oneself as an unlimited and infinite being. One would prefer sometimes the illusion of an end to oneself, a solution to the mysteries of one’s deeper nature. This will never happen. So you must feel your way, use your discrimination, and count heavily on meditation and prayer.

If you are not giving some kind of money to help feed the homeless or to support a mission that gives them 50 cent flops or something, you might feel that is something that you could do would be to give a donation on a regular basis to the program that you find that you feel is the most effective in dealing with the homeless. That way you have engaged your concern with action and you have expressed in your life those things that are valuable to you inside of yourself.

I would like to give you my opinion that the gazing at masses who are hungry and homeless is not the same thing as gazing at masses of limited consciousness. People on earth today are here because they have a chance to graduate. Seniority by vibration, as Ra put it, means that anybody who was able to get in the door here is a helper, a wanderer, or somebody from this third density who actually has a chance in this lifetime of making the decision. You are looking at a lot of people who are going through the dark night of the soul. You are not necessarily looking at limited consciousness. You are not necessarily looking at vice, or hardness of heart or lack of intelligence. These over-generalizations may make you feel better, but they are incorrect.

It is not just the energy of the homeless that you pick up as negative in New York City. It is the endlessly exclusive nature of various bunches of people in New York City. It is the, you know, if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere as Liza Minnelli and Frank loved to sing. That energy, the energy of the beast is the true negative thing. The worship of money.

You are not doing this. You have no part in this consciousness so you are fine, but I encourage you to suspend judgment on the homeless. There are a lot of stories out there, some of them are stories told by people who can’t think clearly and don’t know anything. Other stories are told by people who have gone through much, sacrificed much and lost much.

You speak about mankind’s sheer stubbornness and its resistance to higher awareness. Actually there is little resistance to higher awareness. The problem is that you have to take people where they are and move them a baby step. You can’t take somebody in first grade, and move them into junior high school and expect them to do well. Then you could say, that person has too limited a consciousness to appreciate this. What you do with people is you just start with little basic things like a smile; like finding out if they need to learn to read. Things like that. Like what can I do for you? That sort of attitude is really very helpful and I do encourage you to refrain from judgment. Mankind is not stubborn. It is confused.

It is not resistant to higher awareness. It doesn’t know how to get there. The Christian myth has been ruined by doctrine and dogma and almost everybody that you see out on that street is an unchurched Christian. They love Christ. They want to know the mind of Christ and they want to live according to the parables of Christ. They are just not having a lot of luck at doing it.

There is no “e” by the way in judgmental. It is judgmental. Since you so seldom make any mistake of any kind in your writing, I thought I would just tell you because it is embarrassing to stand up in front of the Vice President and I know you do this kind of thing and then spell something wrong. You don’t want to do that.

“Do you sound dismayed? Do you sound discouraged?”

You sound as if you are grappling with what is there. You sound as if you are trying all different ways of thinking about it. You sound as if you are trying to relate yourself and your wholeness to that situation in its brokenness. You must remember that you, too, are broken. That although you and M are living the sweet life, that there are things in your life, which have broken you. It is your faith that has made you whole again each time. Those who are broken and who do not know how to use will and faith are in a terrible predicament right now. I don’t look at most of them as negative. I look at most of them as terribly, terribly befuddled.

So I encourage you to do something financial since you really don’t have time to put time in a soup kitchen or something. This is a real concern, not just to you, but to anyone. It is a concern that is global. We are ruining the planet globally. We are having homeless and drugs etc. planet-wide. If I were the kind of person who is apt to engage in yellow ray activities, I would probably be a revolutionary. I think it is time for a revolution, but the thing of it is, I think the revolution is going to happen outside of the ken of any nation state, but rather it will be a global rat-clearing. There will be enough room left for those who wish to be in fourth density here.

I appreciate this letter. I really do. I don’t know what you have gotten from other people or whether what I have said has helped you at all. My basic feeling is that we must stand and look unflinchingly at the illusion and must also remember that it is an illusion. All is an illusion, including our bodies, everything, in fact, but our consciousnesses. When one puts things back into that perspective, one may see that it is important to keep that perspective. To move always from the present moment outward. To originate your actions, not to react. This is basically what we are all trying to do. Learn to know ourselves; learn to know our gifts; learn to know how to help.

I encourage you and remind you that the one thing that will see you through is persistent faith. And so I ask you to be without doubt, full of radiance and experiencing just as you are experiencing in New York City, enjoying it. You have earned, literally and metaphysically, the fairy tale that you are now living. I am convinced of that. There is no harm that this occurred to you. You are not flung by the love of money. You simply enjoy yourself. You would enjoy yourself if you had less money. This is fun for you. This is not a life and death thing. Money never has been for you. The first time I got a letter from you, I think you had just lost millions at publishing or coffee or something.

So I wouldn’t feel guilty about having all that I have and other people not having anything, but rather, I would ask myself,

What kind of stewardship of the wealth that I have should I practice with regard to this problem? I can’t give to everybody. Let me pick the best one to give to and give on a steady basis so that I do feel that I am not a part of the problem. I am making a difference.

I guess I have pretty well said all I can about the illusion that we are living in. I don’t pretend to understand it or to be able to explain it, but I know that the secret is to be without fear and persistently full of praise in the ultimate kindliness of the Creator. These manifestations are occurring in an illusion. What is of interest to me is how against the back drop of this panorama, a very exciting series of events are taking place around us like Tiananmen Square.

My thought basically is that we need to view this inclusively and in no case to make exclusions, to make any kind of judgment as to the cream of the crop, or the elite or the advanced, or whatever. What we see in this illusion and to a large extent what we project to each other intuitionally, is trash. Most of us do not move straight from the heart ever. People that do move straight from the heart, and I am one of them, do not always find themselves in peaceful waters and I have come to grips long ago with the phenomenon of which you speak. I think if Jesus were to come again, his ministry would be to the homeless just as it always was to those who were disdained by the society: thieves, which tax collectors were then as opposed to now; prostitutes, etc., and I myself in my experience in the bar knew that I was meeting nobody who was not in the mob, or a professional prostitute or a customer of that prostitute.

I was not dealing with what you might feel free to call real advanced vibratory levels. What I was doing was straight from my own heart. I wasn’t afraid to be myself and when I didn’t know who myself was, I worked on it. If being in the heart of the beast, which I believe describes your experience, is causing you to ponder and wonder, then I say good for you. Think about it. Think about it not literally alone, but metaphorically. Do some reading if you ever have the time. Maybe you are somebody who can figure out how to untangle some of this mess. Who knows?

I have always said, ever since I have got to know Jim well, that he should run to be County Judge and get into the judicial system because he is always so fair and so objective. This is not a gift given to most people. Most people feel more than they think.

What is needed in the case of a broken world is not a judge, but one who feels, who cares and who engages oneself in the situation in some way. I engage myself by the giving of money. Because I am disabled, I don’t drive. I don’t have the capacity to go, and sit and do things for hours with people. However, I go to a church that has a huge downtown ministry and I give sacrificially to it. This does not justify my existence. It merely expresses who I am and I just suggest that you go through the same process. You may decide to move. You may decide to be who you are there. You may decide that being alive in the midst of such terrible darkness is the best service you could provide even if the light is available only to each other. You two are healers and you two are ministering to each other. So all is well and all is falling apart. That is the divine cusp upon which eternity rests.

I think it is our choice as to whether to try to bring our tuneful sense to eternity or to bring our God-field self to time. If this malarkey hasn’t helped you, I can see from your letter that you have really sent out not a form letter because you sent it out to only dear friends of these and other better days, but knowing you, your friends number in the many severals. I hope that you get an outpouring of the web of Love that surrounds this planet, that strengthens the faith within ourselves that is available to all of us, that leads us from illusion to mystery, from sadness to joy.

I am sure with all of the marvelous people whom you know, somebody is going to find something to say to you that manages to hit the spot and that makes me happy because I would like to see you both happy. M seems a happy soul. Of course, I haven’t heard much from M. I guess perhaps if I had spent a couple of weeks with you, I’d have discovered what she was miffed about. Social issues or something? She seemed to be real laid back. I think the only actual correspondence I have had with her is the darling little Valentine’s card, which I thought was so sweet.

News about ourselves: The headliner this week is that after years of shilly shallying on the part of KH, she has finally decided to move to Louisville. I taught her how to channel three years ago and Jim invited her and her roommate B into community with us, which I accepted and agreed to, feeling that this was a tremendous opportunity for me because both of these women were single; yet both of them were attractive and both of them younger by quite a bit. I know that Jim wasn’t embarrassed about it, but he had sort of been flirting with her through the mail. B, that is, not K.

I thought to myself, “You know, jealousy is one of those emotions that you really need to face down and you really do need to express behavior that is not jealous and do the best you can in a situation like that to enjoy, what to me were very real advantages. The advantages of sisters around. I really miss having a girlfriend and I imagine that M just hears me on that one if she doesn’t have a close one around. I make very deep friends with women. It goes down real deep and we are talking friends for life. The only problem is that life in the U.S. is for almost everyone, but myself, constant movement so that little by little, all of my friends are outside of the easy range of coming to see me. I have wonderful correspondences and I have wonderful visits, but I don’t have a girlfriend, not locally. Having a girlfriend makes all the difference. I can’t exactly explain it, but there is something to sisterhood that is very powerful.

Anyway that is the way it was three years ago. Then B and K decided to go on the great peace march first and at the end of that nine-month experience, B was married and pregnant, and K had fallen for a 21 year old. She was 32 at the time, who lived on Long Island. They were about as unlikely a pair as I am going to see soon. He looked like a Nordic warrior except that he stood about 5 foot 4 inches. I expect he was one of the descendants of those great Norsemen who came marauding England’s shores so long ago. But he was petite. I don’t know how else to say it. He was a small man and I thought of him as a sailor immediately because that is just the way he looked.

K is probably an inch or two taller than I, and willowy, but built. Not like me, not just slender, but real curvy and she has got real pretty blond hair. She doesn’t do anything to it. She just lets it fall down her back like I let mine fall down my back. A lot of people take us as sisters and we don’t really look that much alike. It is just that we have the same kind of energy. People feel comfortable around us.

So she will be coming. I am not sure just when. She said it might be as early as some time in July, which would suit me just fine. She wants to use the house as a base only until she can find herself a little place near here. She really wants her own four walls and I know she’ll be a terrific help to L/L. She is very dedicated and she is moving here specifically for L/L. Not just because she likes me, or she likes Jim or even that she likes the Box Society, which she is crazy about. She has got a Fine Arts degree or two in music in instruments and the piano, which she plays wonderfully.

Her coming will be a significant event to us. Of course, we have no idea of how significant in what way. When three people come together and form a bond of intention, something happens, but it is not really within the ken of the conscious mind of any present. It is an organic thing that moves far, far below the surface of the subconscious and expresses itself in fruits that will surprise us as opposed to dainty little morsels and tidbits of information. It will change us in some way. The question is, “How?”

We are looking forward to that very much. K is just a lovely, lovely soul and if she just didn’t have low self-esteem and if I just didn’t have low self-esteem, it would be perfect. Both of us tend to feel unworthy and we are going to have to help each other out of that. I am real up about her coming.

I continue to be faithful to the extent that I can be. I am kind of on a sick list right now and this nerve pain in my head won’t go away so I have to keep down a lot, but I go to exercise every day. It will work out. It is just taking longer than I had hoped. It doesn’t seem to hamper me very much from doing what I need to do. And like in Canuga, when the hard chairs got too hard for me, I just got Jim to bring me my chaise lounge, and I sat on a nice padded chaise lounge and was pretty comfortable for the rest of the conference. I probably should have done it from the beginning. I was a little self-conscious.

My handicaps don’t seem to be handicapping me too much right now. About the only thing that is handicapping me is my weariness and I don’t understand that and there could be something going on. My blood count is way high on something called lymphocytes and Jim just counted fifteen bruises on my body, none of which I can remember getting. Put all of that together and you say to yourself, Oh, oh, there might be something like mononucleosis here. That would be fine with me because at least you can cure that. Eventually. I like having something to cure.

Well God bless, R. That is what is happening with us except there is one more little piece of news. We decided to alter our plan of teaching channeling because every single channeling intensive we have had, nobody has been able to go back to their home environment far away and continue with the channeling because there is no support group back there. There is no teacher and you don’t get better in channeling unless you are just plain, totally gifted without rehearsal. That is just one of those rules.

But I recognize more than somebody like Jim who tends to think in terms of nuts and bolts, what a value this place has been to people. Jim and I live a certain kind of life, the kind of life that we prefer to live and the kind of life that we hope increases the rate of our spiritual growth the most. Although we ourselves are from time-to-time personally, completely overwhelmed by the changes that we want so much, we are quite terrier-like, both of us at sticking with the path, which makes this place very, very peaceful.

We don’t fight. Jim and I don’t fight. If there is something that is on my mind, I say it and we talk about it and we work it out. If there is something on his mind, ditto. I will admit that there have been many words between the two of us because he and I don’t think a bit alike. In other ways, this is a blessing because I am always able to get from him something I wouldn’t have thought of myself, whereas with Don, it was like he and I often had the same idea. I like the options.

After that we are going to go on vacation the last two weeks in August to Polly’s Island and maybe I will get tanned this year. I didn’t last year. I never got to the beach. It was a fun year though.

God bless. I answered this the day I got it. I hope it was soon enough. I heard some real urgency. I want you just to touch in to that net of Love and rest. You are loved and you do love. And it is a mystery. And don’t forget your sense of humor because when you are dealing with one spiritual paradox after another, it is the only possible way to play it. On that note, I shall leave you with a pretty little song that I learned this last weekend that might really might be kind of a monitor for you in these next couple of weeks.

[Carla sings.]

God bless. Love to M. Cheerio,

Carla