Dear M,

Thank you very much for your kind words and for explaining who L.A. is. I don’t think either of us could run through a dictionary and prove anything dialectically. It is simply that I use the term to indicate to people that I fart, and shit, and burp and do things in a very klutzy and unthinking and anything but saint-like way. I enjoy a modern amount of excess. I don’t believe in carrying excess to excess, but I definitely believe in a modern amount of it to keep one from feeling too holy. In general realize that I am human.

I may have a simply adorable soul. It may be perfect, but it is no more perfect than any other soul. What people see in me is basically a reflection of what they are seeing in themselves, which is the Creator. I remember seeing the Medicine Woman books. There are at least two of them because I saw more than one lying about a friend’s house who was on the Native American Indian path and she was quite drawn to them, but they didn’t feel right to me so I just put them down. I did that with a lot of books. No explanation. No reasoning. Just sort of a visceral feeling.

I believe that you are extremely right when you say that the number one, money and the love of it is at the root of the evil in any practice and more especially in the practice of psychic gifts because people are more likely to be easily duped when it comes to information from supposed loved ones who have passed beyond. People love to hear about themselves and they will spend a good deal of money on a psychic reading that I could do without looking at the person simply from looking at the handwriting on a letter. And I am not a handwriting expert, but if someone has very wide margins, for instance, obviously the person is repressed and holding things in. If people write edge to edge on a page and very close together, perhaps they are a little over anxious to get everything out—simple-minded stuff like that.

I think it just this kind of simple-minded thing that people discover where there is money in it and it is to my ever-lasting embarrassment that one of my students decided to form a new Native American way. This guy has no sideways. He is quite tubby. His eyes are lost in a surrounding puff of pale and unhealthy pink flesh. Not to say that he is not a nice guy, but to say that he looks as far from an American Native Indian as one could possibly imagine. He is also fair. The vision quest and dream quest and all that he puts on have been attended by an underground member of a local bunch of people that inhabit this area from time-to-time, sort of in the old ways. They are simply appalled and I am the one who taught him how to get in touch with whatever he got in touch with in doing this.

We all learn from our mistakes. I did not know, when I taught him, how very important it was to challenge spirits and so he is being led for a merry ride and he’s got people on the train behind him that are being powered by the White Hunkawatha engineer. Most distressing.

I think people sometimes are surprised when they come to our meditations as well because we don’t make a fuss about anything. We do have a little offering before hand. We listen to some canned music. We say the Lord’s Prayer. We ask people to visualize light surrounding and protecting the room and that is about the end of it. Each person is free to meditate in his or her own way as long as the spine is somewhat erect. I don’t particularly enjoy the weakening of the circle by one of us members going to sleep, which so often happens at a certain night meeting when one has partied all weekend and has to go back to work the next day.

Needless to say, our group has remained small for some time because of my cleaning out the more tacky aspects of channeling. In my ignorance, I used to entertain personal questions, questions about governmental conspiracies, etc. without really knowing why such practices would be considered presumptuous. It is only through making serious mistakes like that I learned how the channel can become detuned because I am a fairly tuned observer. My observer-self always is working and it was obvious to me by seventy-six or seventy-seven that the road of studying phenomenon was going to lead only to one thing—the mystery.

I think people want something. They hunger for something, but they have been so far removed from the nourishment of any organized religion. In other words, most religions are not nourishment. They are simply empty calories, spiritually speaking, that they will find benefit that otherwise would be laughable in non-traditional paths of learning. Especially will you find people climbing on the band wagon of someone who says, “Do this. Do that, and you will be enlightened.” The old bottom line trick.

It is sort of like joining the Army. You don’t have to know whether it is right or wrong. If it is the Army way, it is the right way. A lot of people need that kind of structure in their lives and so they are ready candidates for prophets false or truth. As a matter of fact, if one does not aim at an ambitious program of publicity, one is likely to remain quite obscure. Personally, I like to be obscure. I hope I am not a bit discovered until some time after I am gone from this incarnation so that I don’t have to put up with the bother of it.

I would think it would be very difficult to be very well known and be rather inundated with people wanting to come and be the great channeler, you know, that bit. I have enough of that without advertising and I am not fond of even that much. As a matter of fact, Jim and I have made a rule, except, of course, for personal friends, and that is we will see people on Saturday and Sunday, but Jim will not see them except Saturday and Sunday night at the meditation. I talk to the person over the weekend and any amount of talking they want to do and they can help around the house. If they are flush, they can blow thirty bucks on a motel down the street, eat in or out, whatever, but at any rate, they can come here and be with us on a weekend. This leaves our week reclusive and calm. It is a practice that has served us well.

[Carla discusses their land, what it looks like and how they got it.] As I spend most of my time sitting in my little nest of mine due to the fact that I do have arthritis, I find myself most blessed indeed. Jim is out playing basketball.

I must tell you that when I read your sentence which contains the phrase “E. and M. don’t put on those great and dazzling shaman displays like shrinking someone to the size of a stamen,” I read it “to the size of a statesman,” so that he can sneeze himself into a coma from giant-sized pollen.

I doubt we will ever agree on clay feet because my reading of it and my meaning of it is completely different from yours. To you a person who has clay feet is simply a fraud. To myself, having clay feet is the human condition, which we all share and if I lack the humility to admit that, that I contain everything inside of me: the murderer, the rapist, the thief, liar, etc., then I am cutting myself from part of myself and that part of myself will need to express itself.

I don’t feel the need to act out all that I am, but I know that I am all that there is and I know that my path has been light and generously blessed, not because I stayed in an ivory tower and avoided the hoypaloy, but specifically because I left the ivory tower and sought out the meanest and most debase form of humanity I could find in Louisville, Kentucky.

I quit with a Rhodes scholarship in one hand and a Ford Foundation scholarship in the other because a fellow that I had been dating for years in college said that he wanted to marry me, but the reason was that he wanted to keep me from seeing life as it really was. Because I was so sweet, he wanted to protect me.

To make a long story short, I have never been treated better in my life. All I did was be myself. No, I wasn’t a prostitute. Every other girl in there was. I didn’t have to be, but I certainly took no offense at anyone’s asking me for a date. I was very flattered and I said so. Somehow the guilt that was released by my accepting their approaches and not condemning them made me into a terrific friend to them. Someone that they could trust. That I didn’t judge them; that I wasn’t hurt that they asked me. I would simply tell them whom I thought was free.

Never have I been more nicely treated and these were people who specifically were the underground of Louisville: the mobsters, primps, prostitutes and their johns and that kind of thing. Very seedy. I couldn’t possibly have gotten a job, but my father was a jazz musician and the owner of the club loved jazz so I asked my father to intercede for me and I got the job.

I spent most of the time when I wasn’t slinging beer or drinks around, looking around for people who were sitting at a table alone. They were always men and they had come just to be a part of something, a part of an ambiance. They were terribly lonely and I would sit down and say, “Hi. Do you mind if I join you for a few minutes until I have to work again?” “Oh no, I don’t mind at all.” Then we would be chatting on what they wanted to talk about.

I remember that job with great fondness because I believe I was probably of more service in that job than in almost any other job I ever had except possibly this one, which I doubt if the IRS would consider a job since I do it without any fee. I imagine they would attempt to label it a hobby.

One thing to say about people like Lynn Andrews and Shirley MacLaine and Kevin Ryerson, just as soon as I become appalled by a book, I put it down never to pick up again. Like for instance, it happened most recently when I picked up “The Right Use of Will” because someone had asked me to read it and tell them what I thought. It was just terrible channeling. All roads pointed away from Rome, if you know what I mean. Yet, this person had found it to be the most helpful book that he had read in a long, long time.

There is a place for these people who are serving up the supermarket schlock. There are people with supermarket schlock mentalities who are doing their very best to wake up, even if they are still in their bowling shirts.

I will accept that I am disqualified for clay feet if you will accept the fact that I am just a bozo who has through a long period of persistent seeking began to find out who she is beneath the bozo. What is her relationship to deity? Why she is living? What she would die for? And the nature of her imperishable self? I give myself respect. I give other people the same respect. I know I am looking at the Creator at all times and I know that I am looking at very distorted versions of the Creator. This is a fact that does not particularly perturb me.

Yes, the path of service-to-others is never for the self. If it is done in order to meet some goal of oneself, it is self-serving and, therefore, a tainted effort, which will inevitably fail on some level, in my opinion. I think that we sow the seeds that others reap and others sow the seeds that we reap, which is precisely why I encourage spiritually-based communication. I feel somehow that we are similar to those of the late middle ages and early renaissance. We are discovering things in a different field, in a different way of thinking and being, but there is not yet an orthodox set-up where we can express to each other without the need of sending letters back and forth and speaking on a one-to-one basis at all times.

Certainly New Agers can give seminars, but all of the seminars that I have ever given, I have been told that they were very boring except for the few that wanted to come and learn, not to come and get their egos stroked.

I have more or less figured out that my public role will have to be limited to doing the channeling itself and to talking about our material, but not teaching channeling and not attempting to help people with their personal problems through private sessions, all of which I have done in the past and which I find makes people very dependent on me. Who needs that? They don’t need that. It doesn’t burden me because I shrug if off, but people who attach themselves to others so that they may learn are people who have left themselves behind. It is sort of like urging people to pop out of their shell before they are readily warned just so they can sit around in somebody else’s frying pan and enjoy the heat.

I mean, really you just kill yourself if you blindly follow another without using discrimination.

About your California chauvinism—no, I did not note the large bows in your cheeks because I have several California friends who are absolutely bonkers about California. One was directly on the fault line. Several others were near and all of them give me the same bland explanation as to why they continue living there. They say that the weather is so great and California is so terrific that they would rather take their chances out there than live anywhere else.

People who believe that strongly in a geographical location are people that I respect. I may not understand them. I did not like California myself at all simply because of the crowded conditions. Their vibrations kept me buzzing all night and I couldn’t get a good night’s sleep out there.

I do not lament anything about the physical distance between us and against your wishes, I will hold up the standard spiritual [inaudible], which is that a true spiritual affinity knows not physical separation. I will admit that one good solid meeting, one time spent together, will help cement and universalize a relationship that might otherwise have become provincial and stultifying to one or both of the members of the relationship because then when you are answering, you are not simply answering the vibrations from the letter you are holding in your hand. You are answering, in my imagination anyway, you are face-to-face with the person to whom you are talking.

You know that person. You had insider jokes with that person. You have made a true physical contact, but I really do feel that people are safe in my heart.

Of course, I was always the one that was given the bank when we played Monopoly as children. I don’t think everyone is quite that steady or transparently honest or vulnerable. These are things that normally come out only in a more intimate relationship, but for some reason, I was born without fear when it comes to making connections with people and I seem to be able to pull the teeth of any snake. I seem to walk unharmed through difficult circumstances, ones that may have seemed dangerous.

I truly believe that anyone who was ever loved by me is still loved by me. And when I can meet that same person again after twenty years, there would be no gap whatsoever in my feelings. It would just be a matter of catching up on the news.

I don’t see the world as one big night. I have a very strong inner world. I am a mystic and to me, all of life is fused with the radiance and the glow and an authentic sheen of Godliness. To me, everything is alive: my lamp, the trees, my kitty cats, my pictures. I have invested love in everything that is around me and everyone that is around me. One of the great joys of having written a few books is that I am able to meet people like you that are too far away to meet physically because now I have another person to tuck away into my heart. I realize that A. and you will one day be on your way to some place very small townish because Louisville is in the middle of nowhere and find the possibility of stopping off for the weekend, or in your case, if you gave me enough leeway, like two weeks notice, I could calm Jim down and assure him that nothing would interfere with his work. He is very single-mindedly devoted to doing the work that we do.

I had trouble moving from Louisville to California twice for seminars that were arranged by people for me and I just simply showed up. That is the way it has to be. We just don’t have the personnel to go around setting up seminars nor do I feel they are particularly helpful. It has been a settled conclusion for some time now that the most help that I can do is to get them talking to each other, and get them to begin to generate questions that they are all interested in and then to have a series of channeled communications, which you call your basic structured rap.

I stay pretty much out of the process of what is going on, but simply act as a channel and in my gentle way, kind of a facilitator of balancing people’s energies out against each other. I am a peace-maker by nature.

I do not know P.A. and I think he would be terribly disappointed in us because we are not at all commercial. I think he would be much more happy with Kevin Ryerson or any one of a number of people who do more entertaining things: speak charmingly in an accent, or walk around like J.Z. Knight does making like King Kong. It just doesn’t happen that way with me. I just meditate and tune and if I get a contact, I challenge it and usually two out of three go away, and a third one will be the best that I can carry stably and I will be satisfied with it. Then I turn the whole process over and just stay out of the picture.

I no longer go into complete trance because Ra suggested that I no longer do that. Because I did not have the capacity in my spiritual body to defend myself magically. That would be necessary were Ra itself not right there at the same time.

I shall not depend on Lynn Andrews. As a matter of fact, I will be quite astonished if he is interested in me. But the way I run seminars these days is the way I said. I use Jim because he is a scholar of the Ra material more than anybody I know. Jim goes through a couple of different discussions: one on energy centers and blockages, etc.; one on pyramid this and that; one on healing; one on archetypes. He is not creating. He is explicating. He is acting as a professor. This is a role in which he feels very comfortable. He does not feel comfortable in channeling before a large number of strange people.

Well, I just never knew a stranger. I am shy to a certain extent. I don’t go up to people whom I don’t already know and have small talk with them, but I am easily approached by anyone, and will listen gently and careful to whatever needs to be said, so Jim teaches the Ra material. He teaches journaling, dream analysis, and distance—basically group therapy clearing the lower energy centers. There is plenty of free time for the people to get to know each other because I have found at last in the seminars we have held that it is the students themselves who inspire each other more than the teacher inspiring any of them.

Then when they have picked out their line of questioning for the evening, I will go ahead and we will sit in meditation. We have been doing this over a three-day period and it could be extended, but I don’t think it should be extended too much longer than that because the material is intensive. The effort needed to grasp it fully is immense and I don’t like to overload people. I like them to take something with them that they can go home and work with the tools and resources, which they have gathered at the seminar. I don’t particularly want to blow people out of their chairs.

Thanks for wanting to be close. All I can say is that truly as we write letters to each other, we will know each other more and more intimately. We will find more and more about each other to support and to criticize. We will become real to each other. I have had spiritually-based communications going on sometimes for ten years with people. It is just a certain kind of person who remains on the spiritual path persistently who finds such inter-communication vastly helpful. We teach each other. We learn from each other.

Here you go at the bottom of this page saying, “Maybe I’ll lose when you say princes and pretenders is the province of mendacity.” You missed [inaudible]. That should have been in there somewhere. You know it is a works.

They do their part. The best that I can give, and I do consider myself a fairly good channel, is still baby food compared to real work. The work is not in the reading. The work is in the doing, the living, the being, but before people can even hear what I have to say, quite often they will have to go through a period of bliss-ninny where they go, “Oh wow,” and “gee,” and “Isn’t this wonderful?” and sort of have plastic smiles on their faces like some strange desert bloom.

As to the two hospital journeys, prayer does do wonderful things. I am very grateful for it. I was supposed to be at least fourteen days in the hospital working on a liver reaction that I have had to some medication I had taken. They didn’t expect to see any results before the tenth day and possibly it might even go on to three or four weeks. My liver functions were normal in four days so that was blessedly cut short by grace.

Grace is a cousin of surely, as in, surely you know.

The other hospitalization is a good news, bad news kind of thing where I went carefully and got opinions from everybody that I knew and I discovered that there was a real gray area about what I was doing. I finally got the attending surgeon to admit to me that fusing the neck where it was unstable would do absolutely nothing to make me more comfortable. I would still have all of the back spasms, the shoulder tendonitis, the elbow tendonitis, the thoracic outlet syndrome, the whole nine yards. All I would gain would be a neck, which could endure a whip lash if I had another fender bender, and I wouldn’t die.

Death is not a painful thought to me. Dying is not good. Dying can hurt. Death is a wonderful experience. I did it once when I was thirteen. I was told I had a choice of whether to go back and finish what I had begun or to stay, and, of course, being the responsible idiot that I am, I came back. I figure as long as I am alive, I still haven’t finished whatever it is that I came to do.

I found out that what really was hurting me, was paining me, was not yet bad enough to fix.

I do, indeed, believe that our lives are but a whisper in the wind of foreverness and that what we do here is important only in the sense that we are in complete resonance with the present moment. If we remain in the present moment, we are in eternity. So I will be friends with sister pain for a while longer, not surprising given that I have had rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus and various other things since I was thirteen and my kidneys failed.

I guarantee you one of my failings, one of the reasons I say I have clay feet, is that I am almost constitutionally incapable of reserving anything that is asked for along the spiritual path. I would gladly have died for the Ra contact. It would have been an honor because I felt as though I was being of great service. I would gladly put myself at risk in any way to be of service to the one Infinite Creator whom I love so sincerely and who loves me so much. I want of my life not that it be long, but that it be beautiful. I don’t care how large a rug I weave, but I want the tapestry of my life to be rich, multi-hued and splendid. I would like my life to be a poem, not some badly written ad copy. I would hope to die while I was being of service to someone so my attitude is constitutionally guaranteed to undercut my more sensible self and I will almost predictably overdo.

However, I have an extremely over-protective husband who pulls me back from the edge and I guarantee you that if for some reason you are able to find a producer and arrange for a seminar, if I come it will be because Jim feels that I am able.

It is not that I give up my rights to self-assessment. It is that I find them unimportant. It is my intention to live sacrificially. I want to do whatever it takes to do the Creator’s will for me because I believe my higher self planned opportunities for me to take and I don’t want to miss a one. I am very passionate about that. I am very, very serious. I don’t want to miss a lick. I want to give it my best shot and I want to keep giving it my best shot and I imagine that attitude has kept me out of a wheelchair, among other things, for a long, long time.

But I do appreciate your concern and can assure you that Jim will see that I am sufficiently guarded.

Esotericism is not a particularly good word. You can use the occult, metaphysics, the paranormal, all of which I would say would be better than esotericism. Why make a new word when you have got perfectly good old ones?

On the other hand, your day of bilogis dementia is really funny. I really enjoyed that phrase and I do think that in the bigger cities there is auric pollution—people infringing upon each other’s auras. People, therefore, becoming more and more on edge, more and more uneasy, and less and less open to the warmth of real love between one and another. Indeed, I wrote the channeling handbook for the simple reason that I felt it has gone too far and that people were teaching students to open their channels without giving them one single chance to learn how to do more than play chopsticks before letting them loose on a world of spirit that is most richly populated with all sorts of beings.

For most people who do not have a natural ability in this area, it would just be another one of those mountain top experiences that one would remember. There are a lot of seminar junkies, as you know, who just sort of collect them. But for that one person in a hundred or fifty, who is a natural, you train that person to get in touch with an impersonal source of information, but fail to continue to teach that person until the person is capable of making sound judgments on whom he will be willing to contact, you simply have done a heinous thing. One of the most irresponsible acts I can think of. It is frightening to me. Perhaps my little book will help in some ways.

It was written not for people who wanted to learn how to channel, but for channels who already knew how to channel, but were having trouble getting a clear channel. However, I have found people writing in saying, “This isn’t a book on channeling. This is a book on life.” Apparently there is something about the book that is of help to people and hopefully, it is a metaphysical EPA, but I certainly do feel most sad for the masses who hunger, but who do not know of what they hunger and who strive but do not know for what they strive.

I would, if I could, reach out to all of them, but that is not mine to do. What is mine to do is that which is in front of my face, which at this point, happens to be a letter from you.

I do have the faith that the work I do, one-on-one with people like you, doesn’t just help me and help you, but helps to lighten the planetary consciousness so that the sewer-rich of the heart that has gone uncleansed too long, may be freshened, and be wholly ameliorated and improved.

Agreeing completely with your Seth experience and the video, I won’t comment on it. I will simply say that I think that you expressed with excellent clarity the tragedy of the straight and narrow path, which has been lined with sticky, candy shops and Bob Evanses and precious big boys, and Howard Johnsons and other fast foods. Somehow I don’t think the straight and narrow path is ever intended for fast foods. That is basically what we have been watching happen to the spiritual path for a long time.

It is too bad, but I feel serene in the face of it. I know that there is so much I can do and that I will do, and I have perfect faith that the people who don’t make it this time will have plenty of other chances to make the harvest. They have all of the time in the world, literally.

Yes, you are right. It has become more and more of a challenge to keep pure this place of seeking. Luckily Jim and I have never had a shouting fight. Both he and I, we come from extremely variant backgrounds. We have a love of harmony, which makes us reasonable people. It is a rarity. I have never seen it anywhere else. But if he is misbehaving in some way, I immediately drop everything that is going on with my own self so that I may see him through his problems. And if he discovers me in the middle of a crying fit, he will drop anything that he has going and sit with me until it is all cried out and worked out and harmonized. So our house does not have any hostile vibrations to it. It is cleansed and we keep it that way.

However, I have to walk the watch tower much more carefully these days than I ever did in the past. It is too bad, but it is true. The negative entities that are able through openings made by the people who come to our group to attempt to enter the group and attempt to contact me are more and more frequent. I find myself up against the full stop of my own passion and absoluteness as a metaphysical human being spirit.

As I drive them away that I may receive what positive information I may channel, it means that it takes me longer to tune. It is as simple as that. I tune, I protect and then I begin a marathon sometimes. One creature after another wants to speak through me, but cannot answer my challenge and we start all over again, re-tuning, re-opening the contact, receiving the contact, challenging the contact. I always challenge at least three times. I figure I can be fooled at least twice. At the end of that time, which may well be fifteen minutes and people are getting restless sitting there waiting for fifteen minutes, but I figure tough luck. I will do my job right or I don’t do it.

It really is amazing how much more grimy the lower astral does seem than it used to be and how much more it is able to come into the type of mental manifestation that would fool an inexperienced channel. However, I do not lack in faith. I know that by my self-forgiveness, my realization of my own work, my love of myself, I am then able to turn out works and be a light through which the Creator may shine unhindered by my lower energy blockages of fear and self-concern.

It is in turning out work and offering oneself to the world that the radiance occurs. I still feel that I stand on very firm ground. It is simply a matter of taking more time and being more careful and ever vigilant of one’s sources of information. I also tell all of my people, whether I am talking to them or whether I am channeling, this is not infallible information. This could be wrong. If this is not your personal truth, drop it and go on. Don’t let this be some kind of a stumbling block. Don’t let anybody tell you what to think.

I think this is a PG rating tape 2 so I expect you can play it to people, if you wish. You are certainly welcome to.

Jim is very interested in our correspondence because he thinks that you are intelligent. For Jim this is tantamount to saying, he thinks you are a genius. And Jim is not particularly easy on anyone, including himself and me, which is all to the good because I have much too big a machine on my head and would never trust anybody that said I was always right.

I know too well the traps of intellect and if I have not made a slave of my intellect, it enslaves me and I will not allow that. I thrive on a good objective view and that brings me back to the clay feet that I was speaking of at the beginning.

No matter how purely one attempts to do a service, one is constantly being given opportunities that are sometimes very devious and subtle, whereby one may become less positive, where one may begin to lose positive polarity, and at that point, someone who knows you well and is able to say, “Excuse me, wait a minute. There is a problem here. We’ve got to talk about this.” That person is invaluable and I think that is what mated relationships are really all about is an aid to each other in mutual, spiritual evolution.

I think all of this stuff about replenishing the earth with babies and self-worth is certainly one of the reasons that men and women get together, but my suspicion, and this could be because I feel that God is Jewish, is that it was cleverly designed as a means by which people would be forced into relationships that lasted a long enough period of time in order to gather catalyst, process it into experience and learn. If men and women were not attracted to each other physically, I think it would be much less likely that people would learn the lessons of love that must be learned in this density.

I shall just forge ahead as I am sure you will too. I do appreciate your kind words about my work and assure you that I would give my last breath to make it as good as it can be. I do not feel like a martyr. I simply feel like someone whose job it is to do one’s best in a field that is risky, very risky. I don’t feel that I am impervious. I simply hang in there. That is all. I believe very strongly in faith. Now that sounds like a tautology; like I have a great deal of faith in beliefs. Well I don’t have a great deal of faith in beliefs. I have none. I think belief systems are for the birds. The hymn, “I Love To Tell The Story,” is an exact expression of the way that I feel about the Christian religion. It is a story. I am a mystical Christian.

Being an Episcopalian, I am not only allowed to drink wine at picnics, I am also allowed to be in a state of utter confusion and doubt the whole time that I am worshiping the mystery so palpably before us and that ever received as we progress so that we never get closer to the truth of the mystery.

I have no belief in Gnosticism. No belief that there is a stairway to heaven; that one can learn certain things and then certain more things and then have certain more knowledge and eventually become enlightened beings and become one with the Creator. I don’t think that is it at all. I think, instead, we give ourselves away bit by bit by bit, chipping away at that human personality until what is left is the willingness to be a channel for the love and the light of the Infinite Creator.

Mind you, I believe in having lots and lots of fun. I think if you cannot be light hearted and merry in your seeking, you are doomed. You are absolutely doomed. You have got to have a sense of humor. This is too tacky, too weird an area to work in seriously without having many a laugh at the ultimate absurdity of doing such a thing as trying to save a planet who basically is enjoying its darkness very much. But it appeals to me. I have always wanted to be the village drunk or the philosopher who was always penurious and out-of-pocket. The town fool appeals to me greatly. That is what I am. I am a fool in a world, which has no evidence whatsoever of perfection in one’s dealings with oneself with mankind or with the deity.

I choose to believe in the possibility that the mystery that surrounds everything that we know empirically is kindly, and loving and willing to help us along in our path of evolution, which at this point, I think, is pretty strictly spiritual. We have come pretty far, as far as we can with this particular kind of physical vehicle. I don’t think there are too many more improvements that are possible with the possible exception of going backwards and getting pelts again, which would be nice. We wouldn’t have to wear clothing, but that is just my opinion.

So we are all here to serve each other, to love each other, to care for each other and to bring each other home. We all know that home is some place far away and our kingdom is not of this world, to steal a light-filled phrase. But we will never pull ourselves to that place by our boot straps, but only by another’s inspiration. We are the enablers of others. We engage others in fruitful thought, and action and others do things that engage our passion and our desire to be and to do that which is pure, and loving and compassionate.

So we learn the lessons of love together. All is one.

I do hope that some time you can come and visit us. We would love to have you all. To show you beautiful down town, which is just a sleeper exurbian town outside of Louisville and have a nice long gab fest and perhaps share channeling. It would be a delight. I look forward to the day when hopefully it may occur.

Is there any news that I have from this end? Jim has been making like a house husband for the last three days. He tore up all the old carpeting off of this 75-year old grand dame of an old bungalow. The carpeting must have been there since some time in the early fifties when it was first considered fashionable to have shag carpet. It was just absolutely grotesquely filthy and all of the washing in the world could not penetrate to the filth. So we finally tore the thing out, scattering approximately l,212,000 brads all over the house, which we had to pick up. I never knew there were so many little nails in one of those carpets, leaving Jim with a very unfinished floor and very badly chipped paint, which was a necessary part of prying this wall-to-wall carpeting away from the spare walls.

He rented a machine that does the sandpapering automatically rather than you having to use your elbow grease and sanded down the stairs and applied a couple of coats of varnish and a couple of coats of polyurethane and when all of that was done, he repainted the trim all the way up and down the stairs. My goodness, it certainly has improved the looks of the house.

Living in a fixer-upper is kind of fun, but only I think if you are a materialistic fool like myself. I am a Cancerian and I enjoy having places to put things and I enjoy looking at the things around me and saying, “Oh yes, mother gave me that and Aunt Sally made that for me. That was from Don. My grandmother gave me that. My ex-mother-in-law gave me that.” I love that. I love to have my things around me. It is very, very peaceful for me.

A lot of people follow the line of Thoreau and feel much more that you don’t own things. Things own you. This is only true if you move. We don’t intend to move for a while.

We do have a 90-acre wilderness upriver that I have named Avalon because it is so magical. It is well watered and has five gradual hills surrounding the bottom land that the creek runs through, a sizeable creek. Jim is able to go there by himself whenever my friend, Sheila can come down. We were going to have a third member to the group and we invited her in for life because she seemed to have made up her mind to do that and she seemed to be just suited for it perfectly. Unfortunately when she got here, she discovered that we really did live the way we had lived once she came here on vacation and whereas she liked as a change, she didn’t like it as a way of life.

In this light, I would like to visit New York but I would never want to live there. She thought we were too-single minded in our doings, that we lacked sense of humor, the list went on and on. The truth of it simply was, she was not ready give up on a personal agenda. She was not ready to be open to the divine wind that blows one where one needs to be.

That concept demands a kind of patience and faith that I very much believe in. When I say that I believe in a life of faith, I am not talking about faith in anything except that there is a Creator; that we are part of that Creator and that the Creator’s nature is infinite love and infinite intelligence.

Anyway K. popped out of here. It only took her a couple of months to size us up and decide we were just not her ticket. She went with our blessings, leaving most of her possessions in boxes in our basement. I expect them to be there forever, but Jim says that if she doesn’t pick them up within two months, he is going to hand deliver them. Jim must have some irritation there about the whole thing. I know he feels betrayed because he made such an effort to get along with K. and found it utterly impossible because she saw both Jim and me as authority figures so K. is gone, but S. B., an old friend of mine (she was in my wedding in 1987 and I have known her for about fourteen years), has agreed to come and baby sit me, which is really what it takes. I have not so good ability to do almost anything any more. My hands are basically decorations at the end of my arms so that Jim can go down to Avalon and get some real solitude. That is what really feeds him the way church feeds me.

It has been a great blessing to have S. around and she as well is enjoying being here because she is at this moment in a relationship with a practicing alcoholic and needless to say, things cannot go smoothly usually in relationships of that type.

I think she is a nut for putting up with somebody who drinks. She won’t go to Alanon, but it is not my business, and having said that once, I can shut up and let her deal with it. She is a rescuer by nature and it takes a lot of growing up to discover what you can rescue, namely yourself, and what you cannot and to know the difference between the two.

Serenity is not really her strong point at this point in her life. But her basic vibrations are so sweet and giving and she is such a self-starter that she is an excellent candidate for community. She doesn’t wait to be asked to do this or that. She simply does whatever there is to do. That is the way Jim works. That is the way I work insofar as a person lounging about in a bed in the living room can be said to be working. That is the kind of self-starter that we need around here. Someone who will define her own role, and make her own place and do her own activity as he/she has chosen to do.

I was unable to determine precisely whether you wanted an invitation to Louisville. Given that odds are that you would like to hear the words, do come, my brother and my sister. If you do not have the money to fork out $30 a day for a motel, we have a guest room. We both think you are doing a terrific job. We applaud your continued use of the English language and we leave you in hopes of prosperity, peace and blessings.

Lots of love and light,

Carla