Dear B,

Greetings, B, and love and peace to you. I do enjoy your graphics and writing on graph paper is for some reason very pleasing to the eye. I suppose it’s just the eye’s love of a straight line. Life is so seldom in a straight line.

Loved hearing about your workplace and I can really see how it would be incredibly conducive to meditation and contemplation because what you have to do is push buttons at certain times, right? Pay attention to make sure everything’s going correctly? You’re pumping so you have to make sure the pressure is right and all that sort of stuff and maybe open and close values. It sounds like you can sort of commit that to muscle memory and then just float, which is great.

I did that with a couple of jobs when I was just getting started working. Especially I remember a zeroxing job. I was the “reproduction lady” who got a lot of comments, this was back when I was (almost) entirely able to do whatever needed to be done. My hands and back and neck were somewhat weak but not disabling. So I would do the Xeroxing for all of the University of Louisville which is a fairly large university for Kentucky for a teachers or for a graduate students who had the right to use the reproduction possibilities. I also reproduced catalog cards and so forth.

It was very repetitive type work but I found it to be a wonderful place because I would get into the rhythms of whatever I was doing and I would just be outta there in my head. There was a lot of bliss in that, just a real peace. I was doing what I was supposed to be doing to earn the money to feed my family which at that point was one dysfunctional husband who loved me so much, poor guy, that it took him a good three years to admit that he absolutely hated being married and that was why he couldn’t work, couldn’t go to school, couldn’t do anything.

I was the bread winner during that time and people always ask me if I was a hippie when they find out the date of my birth (1943) which put me at the right age to be a hippie but actually, I supported a hippy and I think that probably counts. I didn’t do it with any aggravation whatsoever. I was feeling sad that my husband had such terrible difficulties and passed up so much.

He was the guy that I put so much time with and just really enjoyed it so much. He found out after he met me that I had been working with folk songs since I was 14 and oddly enough he had earned money while still in high school singing in a Kingston Trio type group that he had formed and actually opened in front of 20,000 people a couple of times for big named folk singers who would come through town. So he was real tickled to get ahold of me and we sounded real good together, better than I ever sounded alone.

So for about three years I had lots of old Irish poems and things that I’d written down, ballads, mostly poetry, some I’d written myself but at that time I was pretty much interested in old border ballads, 17th and 18th Century and interested in seeing how they came to America and how they had changed.

So I think in those three years we created about 60 original songs, quite a repertoire and a guy who was managing Peter, Paul and Mary saw us on local TV and said he would like us to open for Peter Paul and Mary on the road and that was a big deal, but Jim wouldn’t do that unless we got married. So after a good deal of attempting to persuade him that it was not a necessary thing (Baptists are very hard to persuade—I would say impossible) we married and I would say it hit Jim (my first husband) so hard about being married that he just hung up his guitar. He wouldn’t work, he wouldn’t tour, he had one semester left in a five-year program in engineering school and he wouldn’t finish the semester. He tried for three years at his parent’s urging and their support for the tuition and books but he simply couldn’t. Marriage was too much of a blow.

And I really felt for the guy. He was such a nice guy and we laughed all the way through the disaster because of his incredible sense of humor and because I’d just as soon have a good time as a bad time, it was okay with me. But during that period I was earning about $1 an hour.

But at any rate, I truly can see that Pump Station 64 would indeed be helpful as a job and my guess is that you probably do not have to go and smell the stuff. You are probably sitting in front of a space of information offering equipment of some kind or another, dials or whatever, and you just have to make sure everything is copasetic.

I, too, see absolutely no way to look down on the excretions of our bodies any more than I would look down on the food that goes into them—it’s all a very holy and blessed cycle and just because life is often messy and smells funny is no reason to look down on it. It would be like looking down on the smell of a woman or the smell of a man having to do with sexuality, both of which are quite pungent odors and you have to kind of train yourself to liking those odors because of their association with pleasure, otherwise you lose a whole lot of the joy of lovemaking.

So shit stinks, that’s basically it. I think a license plate that said it better was “Doodoo occurs,” but I’m not one to call shit doodoo, caca is okay, that’s a specific Yiddish word and I like words. Doodoo on the other hand is a euphemism and I don’t see any reason for that. We don’t have to make everything pretty, some things just are.

And as you said, there is in the release of all that, the things that we do not need, that we’ve taken the good out of—when I say grace when I eat food, people understand that, but I tell very few people that I say grace when it leaves because I want to thank whatever is left, that it has given up the vital energy that it offered to my consciousness in a very sacrificial way. So there you are, there’s a mystic again seeing something holy in absolutely everything, including caca.

I’m glad I’m easy to talk to, I truly am. You said that you had learned certain things—how to get along with homeboys. Well, everybody comes from some ‘hood or another so basically if you respected the people in your own neighborhood then you have it already. There’s no real problem with dealing with them because it’s all about respect, I think. It’s all about respecting people, not because of what they look like but just because they’re people. They’re part of the Creation of the Father and God doesn’t make junk as the somewhat overused motto goes.

(Reading) “How to survive in a situation of almost total procedural chaos.” Now that would be hard for me. I would probably attempt to create a system and when I had it finished, completely, I would probably put it anonymously on somebody’s desk that I thought might have an IQ in the triple digits and let them take the credit for it. Or if I wanted to get credit for it, I’d put my name on it. But I think I grasp a feeling that you do not particularly want the responsibility for straightening out the chaos, you simply want to survive.

Now working under a supervisor that is a knuckle dragger, I consider that one of the hardest things to do. You just keep trying to remind yourself that this too is a person and this too is yourself. But at the same time, there are spontaneously arising negative feelings that I at least could do nothing about. I’ve had a couple of employers that I disliked and in so many jobs as I’ve ever had I think a couple is pretty good. I didn’t have actual problems except with this one, who just fired me for using my own good sense instead of following the directions given me that actually would have impaired someone’s health.

The other boss that I had difficulty with was a woman that anyone would have had difficulty with. She had never married and was the old-fashioned kind of spinster—stiff and rigid. She did not like men; she was afraid of men. She had run the Engineering School Library since 1941 at U of L. I was about 22 when I came to that job. She was a bundle of neuroses and it was impossible to make sense of her orders which basically had to do with the fact that she did not want to have anything to do with men, even though everybody at the engineering school at that time was a man.

She did a wonderful job of teaching me how to be a librarian. I learned more in one year with her than I learned belatedly going through library school altogether. There is no question in my mind that the apprentice system works much better than the schooling method—they should at least be combined. There were some old-fashioned things she taught me that were the best way of doing things.

However, she was terrified that I was going to usurp her authority so was completely closed to any new way of doing things and at that time microfilm and computers were just starting to be used to organize such libraries and data bases. We had three rooms full of old magazines and engineering publications that had been retired and rendered into bound volumes going back to 1905. Of course nobody ever used them so I suggested we put things on microfilm in order to preserve space and she was horrified and totally resistant to anything having to do with multimedia solutions.

The Dean, who was a tobacco-spitting type who usually had tobacco stains on his shirt, a rough kind of guy and a good judge of character, said to me “If you can get her to quit, I will pay you her salary and send you to library school,” which was a deal because she had a big salary. She had rank as a tenured professor and she was making a fortune and I was making $250 per month.

It was a temptation; it would have been so easy because all I would have had to do was tell the truth about everything that I did. My thinking was idiosyncratic enough that her orthodox mind would be perfectly horrified and if I continually defied her I’m sure she would have gone past hysteria and left. On the few occasions in which I questioned something, she would go into her office and cry. This was not a well woman.

But I continued to be fond of the person that she wanted to be—the person who had done an excellent job of making a library. She had no personal life, she was a lonely woman. But I loved the young woman in her that had started a library from scratch and had had such a good time doing it.

So I just kept that in mind. I always called her “Chief” because she and I watched “Get Smart” and she liked the fact that I gave her authority.

Other than that every other boss I’ve had has been just a great person and I would look at other people having trouble with this person and wonder why. You have to get used to people disagreeing with you. But when you have a knuckle dragger I think that is harder to take for the intelligent person because the intelligent person not only sees the error that the knuckle dragger is making but he feels it in a spiritual way almost as if it were himself, being crude, insensitive, or stupid and making a lot of work out of nothing or making light out of something that should be taken care of.

There’s no way to get through to a person like this and it can build up a lot of frustration. I would say that this is definitely a spiritual challenge. But all I can think of in those conditions is a continuing effort to see the Creator in him and a convenient deafness. Good Luck.

But people are people and we’re always going to come across strange people that affect your life. I think there’s almost always a way to insulate yourself from a hopeless situation or to effect change that would make it easier for you. In any either case you can make peace with the situation. Either you’ve decided that you can’t change it and you’ve accepted it as a fact of life or you move on.

One good thing that’s always helped me when I see somebody getting mad at me is to picture them in their underwear. It sort of takes the edge off of what they’re saying.

(Reading) “What a blessing to see caca for what it is. Can’t be much longer now; I’m ready for the next class and the next lesson. I smell graduation day among other things.”

Never assume that you have finally become enlightened and are through with this density. Assumptions like that can land you with 75,000 more years of McDonalds. Just pay attention and be happy that you’re having a smooth patch. Be joyful and praise the Creator.

But realize that when you solve one situation of one kind or another and you feel that that lesson has been learned, if you really are through with that lesson, you won’t get it again, but you will get another lesson. There’s no period to enlightenment, there are only commas. Learning lasts for a kind of a parenthesis. Some truths are shorter in duration, some truths are so long in duration they seem to support you throughout an entire life experience.

But we, as the Creator’s children are very busy people before we get here and we can see how easy it is if we just stay on the ball. We can’t imagine not being on the ball. There we are with our lesson plan; we’re in harmony, everything’s fine, this will be great, we get down here on Earth and we discover that basically we’ve given ourselves the kind of schooling that we didn’t like as a kid—year round, and we seem to take 21 hours a semester and we wonder “Why, God?” The truth is, we thought we could do it.

And the second truth of it is, so did the Creator, or we wouldn’t have gotten away with this particular lesson plan, so rejoice that you have learned this great, beautiful lesson and do not wail or despair if life deals you a hand now that involves a new puzzle, a new riddle, a new disturbance that creates catalyst that you have to deal with.

Just figure, well, this is the ballgame, it’s not in nine innings, it’s a lifetime of ballgames, and there is no World’s Series, we’ll just have a ten minute quiz after the lifetime. It’s sometimes hard to stay sharp when you’re in the middle of the effluvia and you really hope that you’re over now, but think of it as a smooth patch in the road and be grateful for it and don’t get disappointed or feel that you’ve failed when the next lesson comes along, that’s what this life is for, making skillful choices, and I know that your eyes will remain open. I’m very convinced of that. I’ve seen you put yourself down but you never put down love or the spiritual path or complain about the difficulties of that path, at least not overmuch.

The self-denigrating comments which are basically those of a humble person are really about the only things I see and the reason that I keep telling you, “This is really important, don’t do this to yourself,” is because, as I’ve said to you before, unless you are in love with yourself it’s going to be hard to love other people without expecting anything in return or without judging them or without having to withhold some part of approval. Maybe you can love that person but you hate his behavior.

Well, if you experience yourself in your various spiritual failures and see that you can go beyond your limit and that circumstances do have quite a bit to do with that and you forgive yourself for that then you are so much more able to be truly compassionate in a limitless way to people who may be prisoners (I’ve had that experience a lot with prisoners), with people who don’t agree with you, violently, let’s say, or those that seem to be unethical or something like that.

To have true compassion on that it is necessary to have true compassion with yourself.

(Reading) You smell graduation day. You know, I have to say I have long puzzled over why people that are supposedly so spiritual are so concerned with keeping this body and staying in this life, surviving in the face of the “times that are to come.” In the first place, we’re going to live until we die and all we’re supposed to do is pay attention. Nobody promised us that all the times were going to be good. We’re just supposed to pay attention. Catalyst is catalyst, you can’t say, well, this is good catalyst and this is bad catalyst because usually the catalyst that is the most painful is the most productive of understanding.

But I do sense also that when I leave this incarnative experience that I will probably not come back here because there will not be people who are calling in third density for me to come back to. Whatever I do next it will probably be something else, and I sense that also, so I know what you mean.

(Reading) “Dare I accuse you of bringing out the best in me?” Sure, why not? You don’t have to promise no more crazy letters. I like crazy letters, I just don’t want you to feel bad about yourself because I think that it’s good to analyze a situation and say, “Well, I think I see a spiritual principle here that I didn’t see while I was doing it, and this was an error, and next time I’ll recognize that this is the same situation or type of situation and I’ll try to invoke that principle.”

It’s a matter of making mistakes and learning and sometimes that does come out real crazy, but I encourage you not to bad mouth yourself because those things have power within you and you don’t want this negative voice commenting on the things that you do, at least I don’t. Surely you don’t. Not that I don’t have an observer and not that the observer goes, “Think about this!”

I’m sorry that my situation makes you sad. I’ve had a lot of time now to adjust to it. I had a pretty rough time until I knew where this all was going and especially after it stopped going. I will admit that I had hit bottom at that point and was pretty dysfunctional as far as using my hands, but that doesn’t in any way shape or form mean that I can’t have positive options and make, if not a great doer, at least a good person to be around. There’s nothing wrong with the inside of me in terms of my field of consciousness, it’s just that this dear body of mine, which I kind of see as something in between a pet and an employee just has to spend a lot of time in the shop. It isn’t making me sad, it’s catalyst and catalyst is catalyst. You have to respect it, I think, wherever it shows up.

And I feel that I have. I don’t harbor hope except the faith that there are always miracles that could always happen. That would be fine. My guess is that the constant diminishing of my physical powers is part of a spiritual path that is the result of my having looked at this incarnational experience before incarnation and planned it in such a way that I really did put a lot in my schedule. I thought it would be really easy because it looks like that until you get into the illusion. And I thought, well, that’s not going to fool me, but it does fool people, and it’s pretty effective.

So I had a really hard time trying to do too much and constantly getting myself into very bad shape which set Jim off on all kind of overprotective riffs which in turn made my very independent spirit kind of get up and growl. We had to talk a lot, we had to work hard with that one, and it was wonderful to collaborate on that because Jim and I are so different in the way we think. He’s very linear, he’s very grounded, he’s a man that likes to use his big muscles.

He does a lot of small muscle work too, he does a lot of typing, things like that, he answers 98%-99% of all the letters that come into L&L that need an answer, and it’s either the ones that are addressed just to me and they have cropped up more and more since the Channeling Handbook came out, or letters that he really doesn’t think he can handle and usually that’s from some egghead at some university with a PhD, and while he could do it he’s more comfortable giving those to me and I’m fine with people that are eggheads.

I have fun with people who are eggheads because I’m extremely intelligent but I’m not an intellectual, and so I enjoy knocking the pins out from under people who feel that they can depend on their brains to tell them what’s going on. That ain’t the way, Jack, our wisdom lies in our hearts and our intuition. All we can do with our brains is analyze situations as they appear, which is very valuable but not primary. It’s good to get that data and think all you want but then let’s take a look at the thing from a wider perspective that this biocomputer is capable of.

So we have moved passed sad, which I don’t think was the situation with either of us, I think Jim feels a true sorrow that I have to be going through this and I in return feel a great deal of sorrow that he has to go through his end of it because people who are physically in pain and show it in some kind of way like getting around in wheelchairs, always get a lot of sympathy, but the people that are doing all the work and whose lives basically revolve around the ill person in the relationship, do not get the credit for the incredible changes that they have to make in their way of doing things, because they have to start taking up the slack.

Luckily for me, because of the fact that I am a very determined person by nature the taking up of slack is gradual. I gave up one thing at a time: “Well, I can do everything but this …” I did give up about twelve different things about a year or two ago, but still I was doing some things and I’d given up one thing then another thing—household accounts because they have to be perfect for the IRS.

That sort of thing, things that he has to learn that are new, that are difficult. People are perfectly willing to change on the spiritual path but they don’t realize how painful that is and I do, so I think that we’ve done really well for the situation that we were in because there definitely were going to be some experiencing of the ragged edges of the emotions that go along with change, but we’ve supported each other all the way through it and we’ve gotten some very good information on it from Q’uo and actually I think you probably have the same information because F picked the two channelings on that question, of what’s going on here, how can we best use this relationship and the situation of change.

We discuss some really inspirational and helpful and very down-to-earth advice on, okay, let’s look at this, let’s look at that, let’s look at what’s going on in a cocoon, let’s look at what’s happening here, let’s look at the spiritual principles, and it really helped us both a lot and I hope it helps other people too. I don’t know, but Jim said he may put one or other of those channelings in Light/Lines.

We still have huge archives of work that I did before Jim started putting out Light/Lines. I would say there is probably a four to five inch stack of channelings that he definitely wants to put in sometime but he keeps getting caught by something that’s recent that’s very good. He just works on inspiration as far as I can tell and his inspiration is always right on because people always write back after every issue and say, “That’s just what I needed, guys, thank you.”

Let me give you some data that might help you not to be sad. Ra said that these choices were pre-incarnative, that I had chosen to limit myself and that it was necessary because I was the kind of person, which if healthy, would spend all of my time doing things for people. I treasure people, I always have, I think they are the real treasures of this life, and admittedly I love jewelry, I love lingerie, I love clothing, not so much makeup and hair things, gooey stuff. But I love all the pretty things; I’m very female in that way. Too much is not even enough. I have an endless hunger for pretty things.

But for that that relatively common characteristic of women, my only interest in life is in helping people. I really feel good when I’m helping people and I would be baking things for my friends and inviting people over and cooking them wonderful meals—I love to cook though I can’t cook now. I love ironing. I love the way it smells. I love the way a fresh wash smells. I love the way a clean house just beams back at you and thanks you.

So that the things that I did, any of the mundane things I would do, the volunteer work before I started to become disabled—I worked with mentally ill people and I was teaching kids how to read, volunteering at church camp as a counselor, I was one busy little girl. Even though my energy was low enough so that I would be wiped out at the end of the day, it was an extremely satisfying life to live. It expressed what I wanted to express—that I treasured people. Nobody ever got a gift from me that wasn’t handmade or handwritten or a poem or something like that.

So gradually, through the years, beginning when I started this spiritual work with Don in 1968, not just as an observer but actively working in the field, and especially after 1974, but I was already pretty far along in being disabled by the time I started channeling. I would never have spent the sheer time, the volume of time, looking inward, contemplating, thinking, and since I have a multi-track mind I can have amazing conversations.

But, you see, I more or less had programmed that I was going to become immobile so that I could do the work that I have done and that I still am doing. I think probably the quality will never get better than the Ra contact, but I also think what I’m doing now also has a good deal to offer simply in the conscious state I do express things more in my own kind of language which is a lot easier to understand that Ra’s so it’s hitting a whole different kind of person, or its hitting a person who can know and understand the Ra material in a way that is even easier to understand and is much more straight out in saying what it has to say.

It still does seem to me to have a good bit of substance to it which I often see lacking in what I call “bottom line channeling,” all is one, one is all, but no way to get there from here. It’s like saying Chicago is a great town and you say, “Well, which way is it?” and they say “Chicago is a great town.” That doesn’t work.

So I am where I am supposed to be. Ra also said “If I ever learn to accept my limitations I do not have to have the pain.” B, I do not have any expectation of being able completely to accept my limitations. They’re talking about no more letters, no more cards, no more doing. They’re talking about learning how to be, purely to be. That’s a wonderful thing to see and to look at and to realize as an ideal.

But I don’t kid others and I don’t kid myself. I can’t do it. My impulses are faster than my wisdom. I will always be the one that takes pity on this or that or wants to do this or that because I think I might be able to help, or simply wants to express an ongoing attitude for notes from the road from somebody else and enjoys the company to the point where I don’t think I’ll ever be able, fully, to embrace beingness, to the exclusion of being.

Consequently, I more or less need to face the fact that these are my choices, this is what I think is realistically possible, and it’s silly to make a choice you can’t back up with action and I don’t think I can back up living a life of nothing but TV and books and not expressing to other people—probably not even channeling, but I don’t know. But it gets tougher and tougher and I do less and less.

I hope and pray that I have more or less hit bottom, but I don’t know. But whatever happens to me you have to see that it has been a conscious, considered (carefully considered) option for me. I have always known if I started an absolute rigid regime of doing nothing I would not hurt, or at least I would not hurt any more than anyone else does, with allergies and various bodily ailments that come with advancing years. (I’ll be 48 this next birthday, which I believe sounds pretty young to you—you said you were in your 60’s).

But it’s interesting to me to creep up on the half century mark and be able to say, yes, I’ve had enough experience for a half century, I really have.

But I hope that eases your mind. I don’t feel sorry for myself at all. I think it’s a little bit funny that I would choose the pain. But I know that I get a hundred, a thousand, a million times more pleasure because I’m able to talk to people. Every letter that I write is company to me. I have the kind of mind that is so abstract that not knowing your features, or for a long time much about you at all, your age, I was perfectly content to picture you, nevertheless, sitting in the chair at the bottom of this bed couch and talking with you.

You were right here as far as I was concerned in my head. And you are at this moment. It’s company for me. It’s really a joy and hopefully sometimes it helps and certainly I learn—I learn a tremendous amount and I love to learn things. It’s just a passion of mine. I’ll watch how to do anything, anything from whaling to paleontology. I’ll listen, I’ll learn. I think everything is pretty fascinating. I’m very enthusiastic about all the wonders of this illusion. I think it’s a great great illusion.

Sister pain is a friend of mine. I’ve tried to be a hospitable hostess; I’ve tried to give her the respect that she needs and to make her as comfortable as possible in the house of my body and love her, and in return, she has given me a lot of peace about the situation, so in a way, I’m past the difficult part. I have come to a peace. If I feel well enough to do things, I do them and I do them as well possible, but I’ve arranged at last a situation in which nobody expects anything from me except that I’m going to channel on Sunday.

I think that’s probably the heart of my service so I feel, regardless of how I feel, if I am conscious and in my right mind I should be able to do that and that has for me been true so far.

So I think life has a lot of joys, just as much as it used to except they are smaller, because my universe is smaller since I spend most of my time in one place. That’s how the dance goes this time around so I just learned to dance that way. It doesn’t mean that it’s an ugly dance, it’s just different.

Jim has taken the tax return money and got a new seating arrangement for the cab of the truck, we’ve got one of those Dodge Dakotas so rather than get a different kind of vehicle since this one is exactly what he wanted, we just switched the seats and he ordered the biggest, most comfortable, softest sports car like seats with the tallest back and with the most cushioning he could find and then got the guy to put it in tilted all the way back to the absolute extent that it would go back and hit the back of the cab, and he has also helped me with a Medicare situation.

He got all my Medicare papers in order so that the Medicare people basically gave me a wheelchair for as long as I needed it that will go back to the Home Care Partners. It hasn’t cost me a penny, any more than this bed has cost me a penny. Medicare may have a lot wrong with it but nobody wants to hear what I have to say about Medicare, least of all myself. I’ve been dealing with it an awfully long time now

I tend to get back money because I have various expenses like huge amounts of pills from the pharmacy that I try not to take but have to or I freeze up; the expenses of somebody handling the trust for me because I have absolutely no idea what to do with money and don’t want to learn. I read about nine books on it and understood them all and kept getting more and more appalled with that particular kind of learning because it was day in and day out concentration on something that I’d pay somebody else to do. Thank you very much, it’s not my field. I don’t want to be clever—I want to be a mystic and I’ll pay someone to be clever for me.

So I am attempting to make the most loving and skillful choices that I can, but it is important for me to feel that I am helping people. I don’t care how, as long as I can help people, that I’m unwilling to give up that mode of helping people no matter how grand and true it might be that it is the essence of one’s consciousness that is the true helper of the planet, doing planetary work, that if I focused all my energy on that perhaps I would be of more help than any other way. I see that, but my nature is quite against it because of my love of people.

I love to engage in the society and the people that are around me and to enjoy a wider universe where I really feel my riches are. It would be an awfully lonely life for me if I stopped doing the things that I could do when I could do them, so I think I will probably be fighting tooth and nail to remain, to some degree, functional in the ways that I can be functional as long as I can be functional. I have the reality in my being to say to myself, “This is no longer an option,” but I won’t make that judgment without just cause.

So we live until we die and once you’ve made your peace with that the point is to pay attention to what’s happening right now and deliver yourself into the present moment because there are always options that are positive if you’re just looking at the present moment. You can drive yourself crazy thinking about, “How can I do this for the rest of my life?”

When I have people write to me and say that to me I just tell them to go to AA or Alanon because that is probably the best practical program I have ever seen that is spiritually based, generically spiritually based, but that is its strength, and you just have to wrap yourself around the fact that you can turn this problem over to a higher power because you’re helpless, you don’t have any power over that situation right now.

When people get that under their belt, the situation seems so much clearer and it’s so much easier to see the positive options. I have never had as keen a delight in the yard, for instance, as I have this spring. Jim does a tremendous amount of outside work; he loves working in the garden. He doesn’t even hire a tractor to come in and plow the garden, he digs it himself. He digs it at least twice during the winter, at the beginning and then when it’s softening for spring to get it ready for planting.

He then harrows it with a rake and grows that whole huge garden for the homeless and the hungry in Louisville because even though I’m out in the boonies now compared to where I used to live, church is downtown, in the battle zone and we have at least 20 hungry people, most of them have families, knock on the church doors every single day of the week of the year and they get from our congregation a sack of food and the vegetables Jim grows supplement these bags of food.

So if my continuing engagement with people hurts from time to time, well then Sister Pain is acceptable to me and it really isn’t difficult except when I start whining. There isn’t any answer there. “To those to whom much is given, much will be expected,” is basically the answer to it. Not an answer that calls upon any particular healing, it’s just a fact. Healing comes in the acceptance and forgiveness of the whole situation which I find very easy to do because I think I’m very lucky.

I look at anybody else that’s in this kind of situation and I find there’s lot going on with resentment of the well spouse and that kind of thing. I don’t have any of that to deal with. I don’t give myself a hard time. If I’m not well I just conk out. If I can watch a movie, great, if not I lie there and I think.

I hope all of this kind of helps you to see things from my point of view. I really appreciate your sympathy and what people call “pity” that they sort of thrust away, but I think that that’s a valid emotion and I can see, okay, how it looks as though my universe has gotten so much smaller, but it’s all inside me anyway. So it’s just life. Life just happens to us.

So I hope this helps you out because I know we have established a friendship and we’re fond of each other and we want to help each other and my situation is naturally distressing, why wouldn’t it be distressing. It’s basically the pits in terms of mundane thinking.

But, you know, we don’t have to live in the mundane world. We don’t have to have the opinions of the mundane world. You don’t have mundane opinions about your own life. You can see your blessings, and I can see mine and as colleagues we just have to say “well, good on you,” and what a blessing that we can encourage each other and sympathize with each other and be there for each other, whether as an advocate saying, “I’m right with you,” or saying “Why are you doing this, I see this as not a skillful choice.”

In other words, we are mirrors to each other and we help each other out on the spiritual path and you can’t have better luck than to have spiritual colleagues. So I’m very grateful not just to be here but to be talking with you and people that are unique in their own way. I just really consider it company. Who do I get to talk to today? If it all stacks up for a while, it stacks up. But actually, there aren’t that many people who want to hear what I have to say more than once. So I generally do not have that much repeat mail. People come to me with a problem, I answer it, and that’s it.

That’s fine too, but I do treasure the colleagues that kind of stick with me after some question or another has been solved, or maybe they didn’t have any questions, they just wanted to get to know me. That’s my treasure on this earth. There and nowhere else.

I really do not expect to get past any of this, but I am having a ball. I would agree with you that I certainly bit off too much for one incarnation. I’ve always been that way. When I was in college I would take between 18 and 21 hours each semester; 12 is considered full time so I almost doubled it. I had a ball. I really like thinking about lots of things, learning things, and being engaged with this life. I love that.

You’re certainly welcome to pray for me, I do feel uplifted in my spirits by an incredible strength of what I’m sure is the combined prayer of many people and that really humbles me and makes me extremely grateful and tells me again, “Yes, Carla, your treasure is in the field of consciousness that you have come into harmony with, not in anything else whatsoever.”

Thank you for liking my poetry but it’s not poetry. I know poetry—it’s lyrics and it’s not even finished lyrics and I was indeed surprised to find it showing up in the newsletter …

[Tape ends.]