2006-09-29

After Morning Offering, Jim set out to accomplish a Friday mowing schedule reduced by three lawns which do not need cutting in this fall spate of rain and coolness. I came upstairs to work on Chapter Two of the Choice 101 project. By lunchtime I felt that I had done as good a job talking about the service-to-self path as I could. What a good feeling!

After lunch with Jim and some stretching, I worked the snail mail from our mailbox, filing everything and recycling the growing piles of catalogs – you can gauge how far away Christmas is by measuring the rise in inches per day of catalogs - before coming back up to the office. My mouse has been ailing and today it was so cranky that it was nearly unusable. I went up to the office supply store and purchased a new mouse. However when I got it home, it had this little statement – that it was fine to install this mouse if I did not already have a mouse. Did the instructions go on to say what to do if you DO have a mouse already installed? Yes, even if it is almost a dead duck? Heck, no! I quietly piled up the mouse, the CD, the “How To Get Started” booklet and my double-A battery and decided I needed to wait for Romi.

Back at the desk, I fielded a request from Larry at UPI to send him a 100-page blurb. They are revamping the Religion & Spirituality department’s look at their UPI.com site. Soon everyone will have a photo and this blurb, plus people will be able to send comments about the articles. It took a while to get the 100 words that really wanted to be there. It is interesting to see what stays and what goes when you have to say it all about yourself in 100 words. The cats did not make my 100 words, but I made sure Don Elkins and Jim McCarty did, plus our web site address and a few other tidbits.

I answered all mail from my web guy next, that being a top priority as he accomplishes so much on our behalf and does need the communication more than anyone except Gary. Which reminds me – I have quite a bit of mail from Gary, generated before he left. I shall need to answer that tomorrow, as he will be rolling in sometime around dusk tomorrow. I have missed Gary! It will be good to be with him again and hear his saga of New York City, the Omega Institute and Stanislav Grof’s workshop.

There have been lots of changes in our on-line order form – not the full treatment yet, as we eventually will install a PayPal feature so people can use their charge cards on-line with us, something they presently cannot safely do as we do not have a secure site. The new tee shirts are all listed now – and we have such nice new ones, so that’s just great. We changed all the prices; a long overdue change as our costs of acquiring the books has skyrocketed.

We also talked about the Aaron/Q’uo sessions I have begun to edit. He was a participant in many of those A/Q weekends here, back in the nineties, and is tickled to see my progress. He asked me if Barbara wanted to see these edits before he got started producing them for a book and I wrote to tell him that our arrangement was that I would send her any passages where I felt she and Aaron, her channeling source and inner guide, might want to look at them with an eye to reducing the number of examples given by Aaron, or any other concern I saw there. Barbara and Aaron agreed totally. This is because Barbara, in addition to being profoundly deaf since an accident in her youth, is now struggling with her eyesight as well and finding it fiendishly difficult to read. So far, I have had no passages where I wanted Aaron to slim them down, so I gave him the go-ahead to start producing what we already have, which is the first two groups of sessions out of a total of nine. He is right to be excited, as it is wonderful material and I am also very glad to be getting to the editing of it after all these years. Back when I had the bookkeeping and admin duties, I never, ever got any time free for this kind of good work.

I wrote Melissa to offer her an update on the bookkeeping situation. I promised to have a good talk with Carmen tomorrow, as if she does not want the job, I shall need to hire someone else as soon as possible.

This work took me to 5 PM and I went downstairs to Growler, our financials computer, and spent the rest of the work day reconciling our household charge card statement. It has taken me two days to do that, but it is very satisfying to have it accomplished so that when Lynn arrives tomorrow, she will NOT have that ahead of her, but only the Jim’s Lawn Service monthly statements, which in itself is a really substantive job. I’ve been pleased to see that my work at the end of the day does cut down on what Lynn must do. I shall persevere with this plan until we’re settled with a new and competent bookkeeper!

It had been glorious, cool but sunny and dry, when I went out for my mouse, but around six it started sprinkling and soon we were again awash. I was sorry to see that indeed, as the Rolling Stones were singing tonight at Churchill Downs. This is an outdoor venue, being the place where the Kentucky Derby is run. I personally know four people who got really soaked! However the concert went on regardless of the raindrops falling on their heads. I know it was worth getting wet, though. I have watched the Stones in concert both live and on Imax and it’s a treat to hear them play, period.

Jim came in with our groceries for next week, full of good Friday Night energy, and we went upstairs to cuddle with Sedgie and have a good coze while we listened to World Music. Like the old fogies we are, we both fell asleep and had to rouse ourselves to go downstairs and enjoy a small dinner and then the Gaia Meditation. I offered the ending prayer. We had a world-class snuggle with all the kitties and said a most fond good night around midnight.

2006-09-28

The autumn is advancing, with leaves beginning to turn and drop and the weather cooling significantly. It was supposed to rain hard all day but in the event, Jim had a nice day of it. In the morning he did a host of errands after Morning Offering. I worked on Chapter Two, snugging up the section on service to others and writing on service to self for the first time.

Jim and I got together for lunch and our stretching session. Then he went up to Avalon to mow the place. We will take a solar architect up there next week and Jim wanted to have everything looking its best. He had to saw up two good sized trees which the storms had toppled across our access road just to get to our beautiful Avalon. He reports that he mowed all around the Sugar Shack and on the house site.

However he was unable to mow the meadow. Previous attempts at construction there have salted the earth with a host of items inimical to brush and lawn mowers. Jim walked about and picked up a lot of debris before concluding that he would not be able to mow the meadow until winter has caused the grasses to die back. Then we can do a thorough walkabout and pick up the machine-destroying debris completely.

Meanwhile back at Camelot I worked through the snail mail, which contained a number of packages, as Christmas presents I have ordered come in. Then I came upstairs and collected some quotes from Eckhart Tolle’s book, A New Earth. I have enjoyed reading that, and he makes many points which I also wish to examine, so I caught some of his bon mots for possible use in the Choice book, as well as a very pithy quote on the function of The Choice in our Density of Choice which I want to use later in this chapter from Book IV of the Law of One, which we are reading currently at Morning Offering.

A dear person, who is also a loving psychic healer, has sent me two CDs now which contain medical advice. He’s about the 137th person to figure that he has the magic cure for my various supposed ills. It is sweet and good of him to care and to try to help. However, I doubt that I am the only person in the world whose illness fails to be cured by whatever means. My own take on my condition is that I set some limits on my activities before incarnation, knowing that I was easily seduced into acting instead of doing inner work. Whenever I get too caught up in outer doings, illness limits me. When I focus on the inner work sufficiently, my body comes into balance and I feel better.

Bless his heart! He was focusing on my lupus. Now I do have that diagnosis. However other than having cyclical problems with “lupus spots” showing up on my eyelids, I do not have any symptoms. Now if he only had a good idea about chronic Montezuma’s Revenge! Speaking of which, I see the gastro-enterologist Dr. Aboud recommended on October fifth. She reported that facility’s very keen doctors helping her with an equally discomfiting problem to mine last year. I hope they find something which yields either to medicine or to other techniques.

I brought the kind reader’s CD up to the office so I can send him a thank you note, and yes, I am just as grateful to him as if he had been able to help me out. It is definitely the thought that counts! I squared things away, taking the Morning Offering books from which I had pilfered the quotes back downstairs and went to an appointment with Lil H for a colonic cleansing. I like to do that once every couple of months to avoid having anything stuck in the plumbing. The technique cleanses the pipe all the way up to the stomach and is very gentle.

Arriving back home, I decided to make good my threat to do bookkeeping work instead of gardening at the end of my work day and hopped on the books. Until bath time I added charge card entries to the household books and worked on reconciling our household credit card. My hope is that I can sort of hold things together while we go through the process of finding a permanent bookkeeper.

I was unaccountably weary and drowsed my way through Amy Goodman’s news and World Music after Jim’s and my bath. Jim slept too! We’re such a dynamic couple! We awoke to go downstairs and offer the Gaia Meditation at 9 PM and eat a bite of supper, and we got the box-mail orders ready to go before coming upstairs for a bedtime snuggle with the kitties and a good night around 11 PM.

2006-09-27

I awoke deliciously late for me, almost 6:30, and had to hustle to finish my Camelot Journal entry and get it posted. Now my poor mouse is ailing, so work on the computer has suddenly become a challenge, as the mouse skips and slides without moving anything on the desktop. I have taken it apart and cleaned it thoroughly, which does not help. My first request of Romi when he arrives home from abroad is for him to go shopping with me for a new mouse! However both kittens were in the office early to make me smile and share their purrs. That helped!

Chloe is about half-grown now, a shiny black halfling who loves to perch on my left-hand chair arm, put her little paws around my neck and stick her nose behind my ear. Then she purrs up a storm. It is the dearest little quirk, and I must say she is the first cat that has ever figured out a way to have body contact with me, yet not be in my way as I am working on the computer. Chloe Saraswati the Fearless is a smart pussycat.

It was the morning to write my UPI column for the week and I targeted QuickBooks for some comments. I had a good time musing on the topic of just where those monster databases come from and ended by wishing them all into the Recycle Bin. On the way there I wandered through negative polarity and Wanderers overbalanced on the side of wisdom over love.

I came down for lunch by myself, as Jim was once again mowing extra lawns today, preparing for a rain day tomorrow. I found Lynn there, which was a surprise! I knew she had planned to come over but I thought it would be after her regular work day was through. It turned out that she had taken a day off her regular work so that she could finish up here. Lynn’s ethical integrity is wonderful. She got things almost solved by the time she said farewell, around bath time.

We talked more about replacing her. I am waiting for Carmen to decide if she wants to learn QuickBooks. If she does not, I believe I will take Lynn’s advice and put an ad in the paper for a bookkeeper who is already an expert at QuickBooks. I truly feel it would be an error to press anyone to do the books. It is not a fun job for most people. We need to find someone who likes this job! That could be a challenge!

Meanwhile I have decided that instead of going out to garden at 5 PM, I will come down and enter data into QuickBooks. I was the bookkeeper here for years. I can do this! However the truth is that I do not do it well. I do not have good instincts for accounting. I have gifts, all right, but accounting is not one of them. So I look forward to the day when this need is met with a competent bookkeeper who is able to stick around. We’ve lost a succession of short-timers in this job.

I got the snail mail in and worked it, then did a bit of e-mail, writing my thanks to Larry at UPI for his kind words about my column, letting Fr. Joe at St. Luke’s know I would help with their photo directory project, and thanking Jean-Claude for his kind comments.

I have been trying to work an hour a day at editing older creative work and today I did that, editing the second session from the second weekend of Aaron and Q’uo’s co-channeling here at Camelot back in April of 1992. That is truly magical material. Whenever I am working on the Aaron/Q’uo Dialogues, the concerns about which people are writing me turn up immediately in the material. It is uncanny. I sent off parts of that session to Marcelo G and Jean-Claude K because the coincidences of discussing precisely the same issue were too great to ignore. That finishes the second weekend’s worth of sessions out of nine total weekends during which Barbara B. and I channeled together over the span of about a decade.

Finishing my editing, I sent the rough draft on to our web guy and also to Judy R, who transcribed and pre-edited these sessions. Jim called bath time and we whirlpooled together and then came up and snuggled with Sedgie before I went off to choir practice. After the rehearsal was over, Jim and I offered the Gaia Meditation in the car as we ploughed slowly through more heavy rain on our way to enjoying a set of cool jazz with Walker and Kays at Clifton’s.

Clifton’s Pizza is a great joint. The lower level is pure pizza parlor. One walks right through that and up a ramp into a nice-sized room overlooking the street. The tables are covered with oilcloth but the silverware is metal rather than plastic. You get your drinks in those huge pebbled plastic glasses that you hardly ever see any more. The decorations are a raffish collection of old wall clocks, none of which works, and a motley selection of ancient license plates. Christmas lighting of the white, tiny-bulbed variety winds its way around the various decorations.

The food is pasta and pizza and the company is the best – fellow jazz fans. Walker and Kays are a Louisville institution. My dad and Jeannette Kays founded the Louisville Jazz Society together back in the sixties. My dad was a drummer who worked his way through college drumming for Freddy Schlott’s band, which played all over Iowa and Illinois back in the thirties and forties. He always allowed that he would have stayed on the road with the big bands if it had not been for the arrival of World War II and me, in close succession. He was drafted and then a dad! In such ways does every life have its transitions. Often we do not choose what happens next. It just happens next!

Jim and I picked up the L/L Research P. O. Box mail on the way home, as well as a cup of coffee for me as I was freezing in the steady downpour through which we walked to the car. The colors of the storm and the traffic lights and other lighting on the way home were just breathtaking! There is beauty all around us!

Jim and I said good night about midnight after a most pleasant snuggle with all the pussycats.

2006-09-26

After Morning Offering I was able to go back to the Choice 101, writing on Chapter Two. I spent a happy morning, when I wasn’t being hijacked to the bathroom, working on the flow of the first part of the chapter. I added substantially to the thoughts on each concept and now the work has that flow to it which tells me it is happy to be there.

For a while – sometimes for days, when I am working on a new section, things will seem loose and plastic and I can make big changes. What I wait for and look for is that moment when it feels as though the material wants to lock down and take that shape. Then I know I am telling my story as well as I can.

Jim sees more rain coming near the end of the week, and so he was set today to mow all today’s lawns and some of tomorrow’s. His aim is to be in such good shape by Wednesday night that he will not have to worry about the rain on Thursday. Today and tomorrow, therefore, will be heavy work, but with a good result – a rain day for Mick, where he can relax a bit. Although he always makes good use of his time. For over twenty years Jim worked only here at Camelot, pursuing L/L Research service. In all of that time I never have known Jim voluntarily to take a day off or even an hour off. He is a very hard worker and my hat is permanently off to him. These pages are intended to talk about what our little L/L Research family is up to, but you will permit me to say how much I admire and adore my husband. He is a prince on this earth.

After a solitary lunch – Mick was mowing steadily through the lunch hour – I cleared my desk and processed the mail. I spent some time with our paper ledgers, since I found that they were not balanced after all. I was able to balance all but the household account. There is a mystery entry there. I left a note for Lynn asking her to solve that mystery. However she apparently was not able to do so, although she was here for a couple of hours working at it. So that remains my last concern for the books, this week.

I am glad I have spent the time looking into the tangle in the financials. I have a far better idea now of whassup! Basically, we need one person at the books who will stick with the job for more than a couple of months! If Carmen does not feel she can do the work, we shall need to recruit from the business schools. I would rather have Carmen at the financials helm, if she wishes for that job, as she loves the Law of One and the Confederation teachings and therefore is way more motivated to help us out than a person coming in off the street not knowing us.

Our web guy wrote to say that the new issue of Light/Lines is up on site. Gary normally sends the hard copies to those who do not have computer access and still want the newsletter, so that shall need to wait until the weekend when Gary returns from his Stanislav Grof workshop. Tim M, who has just moved house from Australia to Britain, will send out the e-edition to our distribution list. It is a far cry from the days when we sent the newsletter out by snail mail with all the attendant fiddling with special mailing rules. And the rubber bands! That bulk mailing took hundreds of the little blighters.

For the rest of the afternoon I settled in to editing a session of the Aaron/Q’uo Dialogues, finishing it just as Jim called bath time. It was striking to me, how much of the material in that session – dated April 9, 1992, I believe – coincided with Marcelo’s question to the Q’uo group earlier this week, so I sent the rough edit of that session to him before shutting down for the night.

Our evening was uneventful and most pleasant. We were both really weary and dozed as much as we took in Amy Goodman’s news and Link TV’s World Music show. Sedgie remained on either my lap or Jim’s for the entire evening, purring and playful in spite of his obvious emaciation. We have never seen him in any pain or even being stiff. However he is weakened by the lack of food, and tottery now. His loving nature has totally taken over – Sedge used to be very mischievous and you had to watch your limbs! Now he just purrs and enjoys the patting.

We ate a late dinner and offered the Gaia Meditation, with Jim praying at the end, before coming upstairs for a sweet snuggle with all the cats and an early good-night.

2006-09-25

This was a different day at L/L Research! After Morning Offering, instead of working on the Choice 101 book, I dealt with the difficulties at hand in the downstairs office and also up here. The first difficulty was my internet access up here in the bower office. For a while during the drenching downpour that gave us almost ten inches of rain last week, all the computers lost access to the DSL, which does happen when the wires get wet enough. However the rest of the house came back on line when it dried out. Traveler, my computer up here, was still locked out.

I called our web guy, who walked me through enough procedures by telephone to convince us both that I needed a tech guy to come repair things. After our most enjoyable conversation I called Service Solutions, a company which has helped us in the past when Romi was not available, and by mid-afternoon I was back on line.

Talking to him, I discussed an interesting situation a friend of his experiences, as she is clairvoyant. I have known and worked with a couple of clairvoyants. It is not a comfortable gift, usually, as you are aware of what is heading towards manifestation in the inner planes. Things occur first there and only come into manifestation in the outer world after several weeks of development towards manifestation. And the way this gift works, you tend to become aware first of those things which have an emotional charge, like an impending death. Over and over, she has had this experience of knowing about a coming passage, like death or severe illness, for a soul. What does she do with the information?

He was stumped and so shared the story with me. I offered my opinion, based on the fact that she is also a gifted healer, that her job was not at all to tell anyone this sort of shocking news. Rather, her job was to be alerted to these coming transitions and do her healing work at the level of absent Reiki healing without saying a thing to anyone. A tremendous amount of good can be done energetically, working with the energy body only, clearing out confusion on the subtler levels.

To tell someone he will die in two weeks is not helpful unless that person is intimately connected with you and able to bear the weight of the knowledge. It is very seldom that such a disclosure would be ethically appropriate in my opinion. It does bring to mind the message of the song, “Live Like You’re Dying”, a very good song, by the way, which I recommend.

When the technician had come and gone, and I had internet access back, I spent some time putting the entries for the Camelot Journal up and sending our web guy the Light/Lines material for him to put together and edit for the final PDF format. It felt great to be caught back up with those details.

The second difficulty meeting my eye was the state of our financial records. Things had gotten somewhat disheveled. None of the three ledgers – house, L/L Research and Jim’s Lawn service – was up to date so we did not know for sure what our balances were. There were bills to pay and deposits to make. And there was a large stack of papers to file, use or toss out. I worked until lunch on the largest of the mare’s nests, glad for Jim’s return from his happy, carefree morning of mowing in dry weather! We had a good conversation over lunch and did our enhanced stretching routine before Jim headed out again to finish his day.

I got back to the books and by quitting time, the charge card slips were logged, the deposits were made and the several bills were paid. Further, I had gone through each and every remaining piece of paper in our to-do pile. If I could, I filed it, tossed it or used it. if I could not figure it out, I put a sticky note on it, reporting to Lynn the source of my confusion. By quitting time, the surface details had been smoothed away. What remained was to get a solid balance in the three accounts.

Jim called bath time a bit late, to allow me to finish my work at the financials desk, and we enjoyed a whirlpool together and Amy Goodman’s news. Lynn came over after her full work day at her regular job to continue working on the books, and I went over what I had done with her. We set our intention for her working on the ledgers next. She grinned and thanked me for the help and by the end of her stint at the desk, she had found the answers to “how much do we have in that account?” for all three accounts.

There is still a challenge ahead for Lynn, me and, if she decides to take the job, Carmen. Anyone can do the basic work in QuickBooks, filing the information on charge card slips, entering the bills and so forth. However, our situation is complicated by our having three entities – Jim’s and my household account, the lawn service accounts and the L/L Research account. It is very easy to report an expense in the wrong account. There are many ways it is easy to make errors. When one has a paper ledger, one can see everything at once and I think it is much harder to make errors. In QuickBooks, you only see one little window at a time. You never see the overall picture. In talking with Lynn, I found that this is what she finds most difficult. She loses her way.

Jim came home, seeing me at the downstairs computer working on the paperwork. His response was very validating, as he said how good it was to feel the energy of our paperwork turning around to being positive again. And that is the truth of work in general. One attempts to create good energy as one does the work. It does not matter what the work is. Yes, it will be good to get back to working on my book, to thinking about how to talk about service to self and the path of that which is not. However it is also good to honor and respect the small details of an earthly life, including paying the bills and getting the paperwork up to date.

It did make me think about our whole postmodern culture, though, as I remember when bookkeeping consisted of keeping my checkbook register balanced with the bank statements. I need to get more of a handle on why that is not enough any more!

At 7:30, Jim went downstairs to set up for a session, as we had scheduled a personal channeling session for Marcelo G, who called in from Mexico. I spent the half hour tuning and came down to join Jim and Sedgie at 8 PM for the session itself. Marcelo’s question was on how to use the challenging events of losing his job and not being able to find work in order to progress spiritually. It was a really well thought-out question and he seemed to feel the session’s information would be helpful for him. I was involved mostly in producing the material and did not get a good sense of whether the session was a good one, but Jim and Marcelo both seemed to feel it had been useful. Marcelo will transcribe the session for me, which is a great blessing.

We offered the Gaia Meditation immediately after the session’s end, with me offering the closing prayer. Then we supped and enjoyed the pussycats until our bedtime.

2006-09-24

The Sabbath dawned with no raindrops falling – a signal blessing after the flooding of the past two days. Kentucky lost eight people to the water. I suppose there is just not enough concern for what water can do on the part of the general public. In each sad story, the people were simply crossing a familiar creek or putting their car through what looked to be a shallow puddle.

Jim’s last two customers from last week both declared their yards underwater, so Jim finally had a free day and could relax!

We do not have Morning Offering on Sundays when there is a public meeting, so after our Krispy Kreme donut treat and the puzzles from the Sunday paper I set off to sing the service at St. Luke’s while Jim cleaned the house, vacuuming and dusting to complement his work in the kitchen last night. I brought back some fast food to complete our Sunday special food treat from Taco Bell.

I came upstairs to work on e-mail but I found that I was still off line up here in my office. I have no internet access. The rest of the house has internet, so I assume it must be my network connection which has gone south. I do not know how to proceed. Tomorrow I will call Ian and ask for his advice. It is unfortunate that with Romi gone, I have no one to ask about this, here in the Louisville area. In the meanwhile I am keeping up with the journal entries and will post them as soon as I can. It is also awkward not to be able to write e-mail letters.

Lynn, our bookkeeper, and I had a talk after lunch. She has gotten full-time work. She wants to quit this job, now, so that she can have her weekends free. I am all for that but we do need a bookkeeper. Lynn agreed to keep doing the books while she trains a replacement.

Carmen, who just moved to Louisville so that she could attend meetings and volunteer here, had come over to work on transcribing my poetry into a digital record, a project she and I had agreed on previously. I asked her if we could chat, and Lynn, Carmen and I sat down to discuss the possibility of Carmen’s learning the books. Fortunately we have a 6-CD tutorial which both Melissa and Vara have used to get up to speed. Carmen took that home with her and will let me know soon if she thinks she can do the job.

We had our meeting at 4 PM, with Tom F joining Lynn, Carmen, Jim and me. It was a silent meditation today, which I love. The session was most refreshing.

After the session was over, Jim brought Sedgie downstairs and throughout the rest of the evening, Sedge lay on my lap, happy as he could be, all curled upside down, sprawling and showing his belly fur. As he gets more and more skeletal, being unable to eat much at all, he expresses more and more clearly his devoted nature. It is as if he is more and more transparent and the light shines through his little being more and more clearly. I hope that when I come upon the season of my own death, I shall shine like that. I recall the story of William Blake on his deathbed, singing his alleluias and conversing with the angels he saw.

Jim placed some support brackets up at the top of the wall in his bedroom, over the long bookshelf on his inside wall, and hung up his vaulting pole. He’ll start training, going very slowly this time instead of starting off with sprints, aiming for next year’s qualifying games. I am sure it was a heartbreak for him that he could not compete this year, but as usual my cowboy kept that to himself. I imagine spring will find him creating a regimen for strengthening his legs to match the great strength in his upper body. We have added to the stretching routine both in length of time for doing certain key stretches and in working more with stretching out the ankles during the routine.

Tom F stayed after the meditation to watch Kill Bill with us. It is a most unusual movie which was on the tube. We also shared some supper. After the Gaia Meditation, Tom left and Jim and I talked to his Mom in Nebraska by telephone and then came upstairs for a last snuggle with the kitties before saying good night around 11 PM.

2006-09-23

Jim and I awoke to a steady rain, still coming down from yesterday and continuing all day today. It felt peculiar outside, like tornado weather, and the light was “off” as well, rather greenish-yellow outside. Jim had hoped that there might be a break so he could get his two lawns still outstanding from the week mowed, but there was no way. After Morning Offering, he and I repaired to the kitchen to make me some soup and get the other food we planned for the week ready to go. Soon Jim went out to complete a long list of errands and I finished the soup and cleaned the kitchen.

I feel good about making that soup. We always stew any chicken or turkey bones we have left over and make our own homemade broth. Then we use fresh vegetables and the homemade broth to make soup. When nothing else will go down, the soup works for me and I generally have it for supper.

I had been unable to post my Camelot Journal entry yesterday and it appears our DSL is still offline. These are the days when non-technically oriented people like me miss folks like Romi! I had thought that perhaps the line was simply wet. This has happened before. When it dries off outside, the line comes back on. However it still seems to be off. Of course, it is still streaming rain. If it does not come back on by Monday – by then it is supposed to be dry again at last - I shall have to call Bell South and see if a civilian can repair matters talking to a technical helper over the telephone.

Lynn spent the day working on our books. She says she’s getting better but is still not where she wants to be as far as doing things quickly. She will come back tomorrow, she says, and finish up with the week’s bookkeeping. Thanks heavens for Melissa! She has been coaching Lynn by telephone.

I got back to the editing for the newsletter and finished polishing the text of the session we recorded during our Homecoming, on September 3rd. I also wrote the notes for that issue, which is our 99th! We really ought to do something special for the next issue, as it will be our century edition! We put out four issues a year, so this next issue, the winter issue coming up in January, will mark 25 years of putting out our little newsletter. I could not send the work to our web guy – for the same reason: no internet access today.

Jim and I spent the early afternoon watching football and patting Sedgie. Then I went down to the basement to wrap some gifts. Jim called bath time before I got too far with that, and we spent the rest of the evening relaxing and enjoying the sensation of “time off” which Saturdays offer. We offered the Gaia Meditation, with me praying at the end, and sought our beds early after a good snuggle with the kitties.

2006-09-22

When I awoke I heard the rain. Rain on the roof, when you’re snuggled cozily in your bed, is a sweet, soothing sound. Jim realized he had a rain day on his hands and decided to enjoy sleeping late. I joined him for a nice doze before getting up to face the day a full hour late! It felt delicious.

There was no way Jim could mow, as the rain continued all day and on into the evening. So he sharpened blades, did errands and in a most kind effort, re-hung some art work in the living room that did not quite match up. When Vara moved out last winter, naturally I gave her back her pictures and photos. This left our walls with lots of holes where her art work had hung. Gradually I have replaced a lot of the empty spaces with other pictures we have. However, she had arranged an ensemble of art on our living room walls which, with her deletions, did not line up at all well. So Jim took the time to work with me until the arrangement made sense once again to the aesthete’s eye.

I worked on the topic of service-to-others polarity all morning, writing on the Choice book in Chapter Two. Jim came home from errand-doing and we had lunch and stretched; then it was back to work on Chapter Two for me. I got the first rough draft done on the service-to-others portion.

I took some time to work with Mick on his pole vaulting. He got all set up for me to gauge his “step”, an all-important measurement for a pole vaulter. I was to watch where his left foot came down, and how near his mark it was exactly. However he never made it down the runway for his test. He pulled up lame and had to stop halfway. So we cancelled the motel in Lexington for this weekend’s qualifying trials. Jim shall start training for next year instead. I know it was a disappointment to him, but he does have time on his side. He will be a senior for a long time, and now that he has his intention set to enter the Senior Games, he can train all year and qualify next year.

I know he can do it. Jim is in top shape. He works with weights almost every day as it helps his arthritis to lift light weights with many repetitions. Naturally, working as a gardener, his overall musculature is in fine tone. Our stretching routine is great for warm-up or cool-down. And he is a naturally excellent athlete. What knocked him out of the running for this year was that he had not trained gradually towards strengthening his legs for running. Consequently he pulled several muscles and tendons doing sprints, including wiping out the Achilles tendon, which was the stopper for this round of trials.

I spent a brief time at my upstairs desk, writing a couple of thank you notes and a sympathy card for JoAn, a friend who continues to recover from illness. I miss her!

Then I started the final edit on our next Light/Lines newsletter. Jim has picked the channeling session we did at the Homecoming on September 3rd for this next issue. I got part way through but will have to finish up tomorrow.

After our bath, Jim and I enjoyed an end-of-week snooze while pretending to watch TV! We awoke to have supper and offer the Gaia Meditation, with Jim praying at the end. Then it was time for the new episodes of Stargate and Stargate Atlantis, which we enjoyed until bidding each other a fond good night at 11 PM.

2006-09-21

The autumnal equinox is not until September 23rd, officially, this year, two days away, but this day was a poster for it anyway, chilly, crisp and with that quality of sunshine that comes in fall, bringing a crystal clarity to the light. I had a check-up with Dr. Aboud after Morning Offering. I believe my little world has decided to repair every street in my area! I went another route than my usual one, to avoid repair on Breckenridge Lane, only to discover that they had chosen this exact moment to repair Whipps Mill Road as well. I spent the remainder of my commute trying to figure a different way still to come home but short of going downtown and potting back home for a half hour on I71, definitely the long way around, I was without further options. So I enjoyed the slow ride!

The news from the doctor was nil. She wanted to catch up on the work she had asked for from specialists, and only one of the three has prescribed or diagnosed anything. We set another appointment for after all the other tests have been collected.

Gary bade me a fond farewell as I took off for the doctor’s. He is driving to New York City and will spend the next week or so taking Stanislav Grof’s seminar at the Omega Institute.

I collected the L/L and home mail from our mailbox at the road on my way in from the appointment with Aboud, realizing how much I will miss Gary’s help. He usually does the mail and I only see the items with which he cannot deal. How easily I have become spoiled by having an admin!

Until lunch I pondered the service-to-others section, just resting with the entire range of details I have in my head on that topic. I was looking for the heart of the topic, and that takes the ability to pull back for a larger view. For all the time spent contemplating this question, I did not produce new words. My mind felt really fuzzy! I suppose sometimes we all have days like this.

After lunch I found myself almost too weary to move, and lay down for a while for a rest. I awoke to my alarm. It was time to go get a haircut. The remainder of the day was spent driving over to Images for that and wandering home via a wildly imaginative route that actually did keep me away from all repairs, in Stanley Outback. I managed to do almost no useful work for L/L Research today. Hmpf! As I headed towards bath time and Jim, who had mowed every lawn on his schedule and done some work at building a stone wall as well for Jim’s Lawn Service today, I vowed to do better tomorrow.

I continued to doze through Democracy Now and World Music. Jim woke me for a late supper and the Gaia Meditation, with me offering the closing prayer. Jim and I came upstairs for a bedtime snuggle with the kitties and said good night about 11 PM.

2006-09-20

Wednesday mornings are given over to writing my UPI column and after Morning Offering, and bidding Jim goodbye for the morning, I devoted myself to that project. I had decided that some comments by Monica L on homeschooling which she had sent me by e-mail in response to my first two articles, were interesting enough to share in a further article on the indigo Children, so I followed through with reading in the suggested web sites in her very informative letter and developed a piece about homeschooling and teach/learning in general.

Jim came home for lunch just as I finished up the column, and we enjoyed a most pleasant lunch together and did our stretching routine. Jim’s still intent on seeing if he can do the run up to the pole-set, despite continuing problems with an inflamed Achilles tendon, and will do that test tomorrow. We continue stretching extra-long so as to help him with flexibility. It helps me too, even though I am NOT competing in the Senior Games. I believe he will make the final determination as to whether he will try out in the pole vault event tomorrow.

After lunch I went to get my teeth cleaned, which for me is an hour of minor torture. When I was a child, I went to a dentist whose pain control measures were extremely inadequate. Consequently when I get near the smell of a dentist’s office my whole body contracts. That was one slow hour, sitting in the dentist’s chair and having motors whirring in my ear and in my mouth. I was thankful to live through it once again!

Gary had some questions for me when I got home, as he was trying to wind up all details before his trip to the Omega Institute. We worked out several details on various threads with various people. We also talked about the possibility of his putting up lists of what all he does at the admin desk at L/L Research from day to day. I told him that it was my perception that people enjoy seeing what we are doing here. He said that when he returned from this conference, he will take a look at our blog and see what he can do to append his list of things done at L/L Research by him to my journal entry for that day.

I like the idea. For one thing, it communicates the nitty gritty of everyday business here at Camelot. For another it constitutes a record which IRS auditors might find helpful in determining whether in fact we are doing the business of a non-profit charity or not. It is a very practical idea and if Gary keeps it to a list it will not be time-consuming for him. Of course I would be pleased indeed if he started writing his thoughts down as well as keeping that list, as his thoughts are interesting.

We also chewed over details of various projects we have on-going. Gary is ascertaining a good weekend to hold the Midwinter Gathering on the archetypes as well as starting to find a good date for the beginning of my channeling circle in 2007.

After the impromptu planning session, I came upstairs and tackled the editing of the opening channeling of our season, which was also the end of the Homecoming 2006 Gathering. Gary had gotten that session transcribed. I got that edited session off to our web guy for further editing.

I looked on line before quitting for the day and found some errors in the article as it presented on the UPI.com site, about which I wrote to Larry with a request for them to be corrected.

Also I called Medicare and Anthem, my two health insurance carriers, to see if the hormone saliva test given me by Dr. Johnson is covered by my policies. They determined that it was – probably – so that I can go ahead and use it, rather than taking a cheaper test that does not yield as much information. The Hubbard Clinic people felt that I needed adjustments in my hormone replacement prescription. It’s wild to think that my body is still playing with hormones some 14 years after menopause. How inconvenient!

Jim called bath time as I was winding up those calls and I gratefully went to enjoy a whirlpool with my sweet Mick. We hung out with Sedge for Amy Goodman’s news program, Democracy Now and part of Link TV’s World Music and then I went to choir practice for the first time in a while. I am not precisely doing better physically. However I have gotten inured to the discomfort of this condition and feel that keeping as much of my routine going as I can is very good for my emotional and mental health, even if it pushes the body complex a bit.

I got back from singing at St. Luke’s just in time for the Gaia Meditation. Jim offered the closing prayer. We finished up the household chores and snuggled with the kitties before saying good night around 11 PM.

2006-09-19

Autumn has crept into Kentucky! The day warmed, gradually, into the seventies and went from a morning of gray light to a radiant afternoon. Leaves are beginning to whisper to the ground of the coming winter’s sleep. Jim says he will attach his mulching plates in a couple of weeks. Here come the leaves! I welcome the cooler weather with open arms. I love with an intense passion the turning of the cycles of life. How beautiful they are, stately and round, always rolling onward.

Jim had a supposedly easy day today because of dry weather, but in mowing rough ground his equipment snagged on a small but stubborn branch and a connection was lost that Jim could not fix. So he had to push his heavy mower out of the brush and onto the trailer somehow. The resulting 90 minutes of domino disasters damaged both of his mowers, his trailer and his trimmer traps. Sometimes the cost of doing business is both physical and emotional!

I knew something was up when he failed to keep an appointment with me for stretching in mid-afternoon. He did finally succeed in getting the mower to the repair shop and banged out the dings in his trailer. I believe he shall need to replace the trimmer trap.

He was still muttering about branches as evening fell!

I had a morning of working on Chapter Two of The Choice 101 book. I am still working in the service-to-others section, talking about making that first choice and then building on that. It is very synchronistic that we are reading the new Ekhart Tolle book, New Earth, in Morning Offering. The material is quite complementary to my own book’s material.

Work on the book ended early as I had made an appointment with Images Salon for a styling and make-up. I wanted to look my best for the publicity photos. I need a color shot of myself for the UPI column and a black and white photo for the author picture in both the Book of Days, when it comes out, and the 2005 Annual of our channeling sessions. I do not know what the production status of those projects is. They could be a while in maturing. However they are out of my hands now, until the time comes to write an introduction to each of them.

From the salon to the photographer, I went while imagining myself wrapped in plastic so as to preserve the “do”! The photographer was very quick to see what was needed and took a total of 150 shots, both in and around his studio and a block away at Camelot, where he took lots of shots in our back yard. I feel confident that we shall find good publicity shots for me from all of that. And it is good to have that in the works. My UPI editor, Larry, is gently wondering where that shot is. Soon, Larry, soon!

I spent a bit of time with both Gary and Lynn, agreeing to a time for a special session of channeling with Gary and signing a couple of checks for Lynn. One of the checks was to Gary, a bit early as he is going to New York City to the Omega Institute’s workshop by Grof tomorrow and needs the cash for the journey. Grof’s web site address is http://www.holotropic.com/, if you’d like to check up on his interest.

Then I came upstairs to my bower office to work on the suggestions scientific expert Steve M had made concerning Chapter One. He’s a dandy! He made excellent suggestions. It feels really good to know that my language is accurate when talking about scientific matters. It is really easy for a writer untrained in science to use words incorrectly.

Just as Jim called bath time I let my choirmistress, Lisa, at St. Luke’s know that I will attend choir practice tomorrow. I have gotten enough used to this uncomfortable situation – chronic Montezuma’s Revenge, to put it succinctly – that I think I can sing OK. I look forward to being in the middle of the music again.

Jim got a huge box of books packed and ready to ship to Amazon. I would guess that someone has talked about the Ra Material on a national show, as orders spike when that happens. It is very satisfying to see the Law of One series go out our doors. I know that material is as helpful as words on paper get.

Jim and I had a most pleasant evening taking in Democracy Now before descending to supper and conversation. Gary offered the prayer at the Gaia Meditation. Jim and I said good night around 11 PM.

2006-09-18

It was still fair weather when we awakened this morning. After Morning Offering, Jim scooted off to mow like a madman, as heavy rain was forecast for sometime today. In the event, he triumphantly got every lawn mowed and also his other handyman chores done for that day before coming home in mid-afternoon.

I had a pleasurable morning working on Chapter Two, which talks about polarity. I am beginning to be happy with that section. After working it through again I started on the discussion of the service-to-others path.

After lunch I cleared my desk and got my prescriptions list updated to reflect the two new medications I am now taking for interstitial cystitis. I printed out a copy of the list for my visit with Dr. Johnson this afternoon. Then I came up and checked my e-mail. There were Steve M’s suggestions for correction of scientific terms in Chapter One. After taking a little time to make a date with Sandie for lunch and to let Gary know my MS Photo Manager is not working and ask him to check and see if he could adjust it, I started working with Steve’s suggestions for Chapter One.

By the time I needed to leave I was a fan of Steve’s editing style. He will be an excellent replacement for Bruce P, who used to be my science checker. I am most fortunate to have Steve to call on for this second eye on my words. It really needs to happen, since as a non-scientist I can use words poorly when it comes to scientific applications. Steve’s suggested changes are just what the text needed – changes like altering the word, weight, to the word, mass, in the text. Clearly that distinction means something to a scientist which eludes me! But it is good to get it right regardless.

Jim had finished for the day by the time I went to see Dr. Johnson, so he very kindly escorted me across the river to Indiana, as Dr. Johnson’s practice has moved from Fox Hollow to 21st Century Medicine in Clarksville, just about as close to get to as downtown from out east in the county where we live. Dr. Johnson gave me the materials for my hormone evaluation. He is in Integrative Medicine, which uses mainstream as well as naturopathic and other alternative resources for wellness. I must call my insurance before taking this take-home saliva test, as it is expensive and I need to find out if my insurance will pay for it.

Dr Johnson also prescribed a liver cleansing tea. He feels my transformational work in the last year or so has caused me to release a lot of toxins. This is great! However, processing all those toxins can slow down the liver, and he feels that, overall, this is my fundamental imbalance. I will enjoy drinking this herbal tea and bringing things more into balance in the liver. I was relieved to hear from him that drinking alcohol a couple of times a week, which I enjoy doing, will not place more stress on the liver. Drinking every day would, but as a child of an alcoholic I am not likely to allow myself to have a daily drinking habit. I like the taste of various alcoholic beverages like white wine and vodka, so I am pleased that I shall not have to give that up, in moderation of course.

The drive home from Indiana was breathtaking. The rains had descended at last. There was little wind but a saturation of humidity and, as we slowly inched across the bridge across the Ohio River’s half-mile of width, a mist lay on the water and gently thinned as it rose, so that the tops of the high-rise buildings of downtown Louisville could barely be seen, a delicate tracery of gray architecture against the gray sky. The river was streaming with rain and very flat, a supernally pure sheet of gray beneath us.

This trip takes forever in rush hour because there is only one lane on the bridge which will give people access to the expressways going east on the Kentucky side. It is a wholly inadequate amount of space for the traffic and the county is planning to build two new bridges across the Ohio River, both to the east of the city. That will eventually ameliorate the traffic crunch a good bit. Meanwhile, one lets the car’s engine idle its way forward across that span and seldom has to use the accelerator!

The beauty of this moment was saturated with the charm of old and worn-out things; what the Japanese call wabi sabi, I believe. It was a wabi sabi day! As we approached land, the beauty and mood turned more active and raffish. We could begin to see some colors amidst the heavily-falling rain as we drove through the unredeemed ashes of commercial failure at downtown Louisville’s edges.

Gary was busy at the L/L desk for part of the day, catching up on the always burgeoning Inbox for L/L Research.

Jim and I had a whirlpool bath and then spent the evening with the kitties. Valerie and Gary showed up for the Gaia Meditation, and I offered the closing prayer for peace. Jim and I had a lovely snuggle and sought our beds around 11 PM.

2006-09-17

The Sabbath dawned clear and sweet as I got the big newspaper in from the road. It was housekeeping morning for Jim and after we enjoyed the paper together – we do not do Morning Offerings when there will be a meditation meeting – Jim spent the morning spiffing up the house with vacuum cleaner and duster. Dan D., our gray-striped tabby kitten, dearly loves the fluffy dusting wand and darts along, playing with it, between dusting targets, with Jim cooperating and playing right back.

After I finished the Sunday puzzles I came upstairs to clear my desk. About the time I had the paperwork cleared, it was lunch time and we enjoyed a fast food treat. Then Jim was off to get the last of his yard work done before time for the meeting. I came back up to do e-mail.

I had heard from Sandie and wrote her concerning some girlfriend time in October. I dearly love time with Sandie as she shares my enjoyment of consignment store shopping. I stick to the clearance racks and love to snag garments that are of excellent quality, that fit and that I like. The low, low price is also a factor! She and I have the best time fishing through such stores together. I shall also enjoy catching up with Sandie. She’s had a real siege of time and attention needed by her family, as her stepfather went through his last illness and death recently.

I also wrote Steve F. a thoughtful letter concerning the three broadcasts we did under the aegis of Romi and Bruce last May. Many people had let us know they enjoyed those. However, Romi missed the meditations a lot and we decided that it would not be good for him to give up being a participant in the circle of seeking in order to man the equipment needed to keep a broadcast going.

Steve is a fan of the channeling also, but he tends to sleep through the actual sessions. He is extremely savvy about computers, being the creative force behind his own business, which is a software management firm. I thought that if he liked the idea, he would be a good fit for taking on the volunteer position.

I got word back from my UPI editor that I could not append a footnote to the Indigo article on home-schooling. Monica L had written in with a good deal of further information on that angle which I wanted to share with readers. However the editor, Larry, suggested that I make another article on Indigos from this new information. I decided that was a good idea, and saw the angle I want to take, which is that we are all teaching each other. So I wrote Monica again, asking for stories from her wide experience. People relate better to an article, I think, if there is a story! Just the facts, ma’am, is for cop shows!

Tim M had written in to say that he would not connect with us by telephone from Britain for this session, as he had planned, but would hope to call in for our next channeling session on October first. I congratulated him on getting all moved in and sent him all good wishes as he hunts for work. He and his wife moved from Australia to England in order to be available for caretaking of their elderly parents, all of whose health is failing. Now they are in the right place, and all that needs to be completed is the right livelihood that can pay their bills! It is an all too common challenge. Fiona has found work, but Tim, educated as a tech guy with engineering degrees and also as a clinical psychologist, has yet to find his niche. Whoever does hire him will have a wonderful worker! I sent him a job angel!

Carmen, Connie and Ed joined us for the talk around the circle, with Lynn coming in to join the actual meditation session from the office, where she had been working on the books. The question had to do with how the energies of the new age affect those who are trying to open their hearts, and also how it affects those who are not trying to do so. We also fielded a couple of questions from those who had written in with them over the summer. We still are backed up on those questions but we will eventually get them all asked, I am sure.

Connie offered me a Reiki session after the channeling which really took down the level of discomfort I was experiencing. It was wonderful to see Connie after a whole summer apart. Connie lives about an hour and a half from here, too far for casual visiting, and so during the summer when we don’t have sessions we really miss her!

Ed bade farewell to everyone after the session and headed for his Tennessee home. I had a short session with Lynn over some details which had gone awry and then shared a pleasant supper with Mick and Gary, who came in from Cracker Barrel after a hard day’s work. After the Gaia Meditation we went up to snuggle with Sedgie and the other kitties and said good night around 11 PM.

2006-09-16

After Morning Offering Jim went to our yard to weed it and weed-eat the verges of our walks and plantings. I made a chocolate pudding which was interlaced, parfait style, with a strawberries and whipped cream mixture. This was in anticipation of Jim’s friend, Smut, arriving in the evening.

I put in a call to Carmen, who had called yesterday to volunteer for help here at Camelot. Talking with Gary, we decided that it would be wonderful to have some help in rearranging current pictures in our stairwell to free up the space so that we could hang the chakra drawings along the stairs. Carmen was glad to help and spent the afternoon planning, plotting, measuring and nailing. We still have to get the drawings backed with poster board of some kind, but the preliminary work is done. Later in the afternoon, when her work was done on the pictures, I walked around the yard with her, as she is interested in volunteering in the garden and with the compost. As always, there is work aplenty to do there!

When Mick was finished polishing the yard, we went into St, Matthews, which, as they say in these parts, was working alive with people. Jim’s DR repairman has a shop there, and our brush mower won’t shift into neutral, so we cannot use it. They will call us when they have healed it!

We stopped at the Whole Foods grocery to get some Dr. Hauschka products for my skin – that brand is the only one which works on my sensitive skin, of all the holistic and organic products I have tried. I am so grateful to Dr. Hauschka, whoever he is! We dropped off cleaning and came home in the streaming sunshine. This time of year is splendid in Louisville. The sun grows gentler and more golden while the leaves begin their wonderfully subtle process of coloring up, firing and dropping. We rolled the windows down in Jim’s ancient truck and enjoyed the day.

Once home, Jim went back into the yard for special projects. Ed was also in the yard taking down some played-out berry bushes at the back of the yard, plus some fence posts and chicken wire that had at one time been placed across that line of bushes, presumably to hold grape vines. The vines have died to the point where there are no leaves left. Having weeded grapevine leaves constantly ever since moving here, I would have guessed that those vines NEVER die. By the end of the afternoon, our little acre was looking very spiffy.

Meanwhile I came upstairs and worked on e-mail, whittling the Inbox down to only four letters by game time. Jim got Sedgie and we settled in to watch Louisville beat Miami, a most enjoyable exercise, despite the sad sight of Brian Brohm tearing a tendon in his right hand. Coach Petrino is to be congratulated on fielding such good men for the home team – I graduated from U of L in 1966 – because Brohm was a replacement! Now Cantwell is replacing the replacement, and doing a wonderful job as well.

The game ended, Jim and I took our whirlpool. Jim cleaned the kitchen while I continued to sit with Sedgie, who is barely there, but as always is positively vibrating with devotion and the desire to be with us and hear our voices. He spent the rest of the evening in my lap, all sprawled out and turned so his belly fur shows. It is good to see that this slow death process has not made him particularly uncomfortable. He just cannot eat. We feel privileged to be able to spend this time with him in gratitude for the best kitty ever.

Smut arrived just in time for the Nebraska game. Their old home team did not particularly distinguish itself, but the old friends – Smut reckons they started playing sports together in seventh grade and gradually became best friends throughout the remainder of their high school years – had a good time anyway. Jim was the shortstop and captain of their state-champion baseball team and the quarterback and captain of their football team – at 5’ 7” in height, such a position indicates that the coach values the player’s judgment highly – and Smut played right alongside him in both endeavors, plus track and field. Such teamwork makes for solid friendship, and they enjoy each other a lot. It’s grand to see Smut. Like Jim, he looks nowhere near his age and bursts with good health and good humor.

Smut is a great example of the positive values of our so-called hippie generation. When Jim went “back to the land” here in Kentucky in the seventies, Smut came out to visit, loved the lay of this sweet land of foothills and creeks and decided to bring his bride, Fox, here. (Yes, Fox is also a nickname, a very complimentary one, stemming from her name being Roxanne.) They bought land, built their own dwelling and lived simply. Both Fox and Smut had trained as social workers and they have worked for many years now helping our state’s people.

About ten years ago now, they saved up to buy a good sized piece of farm land. They went to work building their own house again and this time, the place was extraordinary. Smut and Fox never stop. They now have an incredibly well kitted-out farm, with a good equipment and tool shed, a root cellar and a greenhouse in addition to a large pond and carefully prepared and protected kitchen garden space, which they made by digging down several feet, placing rocks there for drainage and then filling the beds with improved soil. The fences around the garden go down two feet into the ground – to the rock layer – to keep critters out.

Fox weaves at her loom these days, having retired from full-time social work in order to have some fun being grandma to her five grandchildren. She home-schooled both of her kids. Gifts from Fox can be wonderful canned goods or beautiful weaving – knocking the socks off of mere store-bought things.

Jim and I came upstairs after we said good night to Smut, leaving Ed in the living room to watch the end of another game he was following, and snuggled until bedtime at 11 PM.

The final photographer sent in his pictures of the 2006 Homecoming Gathering and they have been added to L/L's Flickr albums. Many of these pictures will shortly be appearing in the magazine "National Geographic" as this was one of the most photographically documented human social events on record.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/llresearch/sets

2006-09-15

After our Morning Offering, Jim and Gary headed off to do their Super-Friday’s work. Many of Jim’s customers want their lawns cut near the weekend, so Friday is always a large day for Jim’s Lawn Service. I came upstairs and tried to work on the Choice project but for the most part was stuck in the bathroom all morning. I did read over and work with what I had done yesterday but did not make further progress.

At 11:30 I heard the doorbell ring and it was my friend, Dianne S, whom I had agreed to meet for lunch. We went to the Captain’s Quarters restaurant, on the Ohio River, and sat outside to watch the barges go by. There was a wonderful breeze on-shore and that half-mile-wide view of water and the distant shore to seduce and pleasure the eye as well as good food and excellent company.

Dianne has some tough challenges right now, as her husband, who has epilepsy, has a gradually worsening condition. His seizures are more frequent as time goes on and his mind is deteriorating to the point where he acts inappropriately, usually quite unexpectedly and sometimes violently. This is the normal progression of his type of illness, and it is not a worry from Milt’s standpoint, as his episodes do not constitute a danger to him, but they do put Dianne at risk.

She will sit down with his doctor soon, for unless the situation can be controlled via medication, she will not be able to care for him in the home. We stayed on that topic for most of our time together, as she has no support or open communication going with Milt’s mother, though not for lack of trying on Dianne’s part. On the contrary, the mother is actively attempting to clear Milt and Dianne’s things out of the home Dianne always thought was theirs, a wedding gift from Milt’s wealthy parents. It turns out that the deed was never put in Milt’s name. Now the mother wants to install a cousin in that house. She would like, I think, not to have to think about her son. Milt and Dianne built a county cabin near Avalon and have spent lots of time there lately. Milt’s mom wants them to stay there permanently and have no pied a terre in the city. To me, it seems a cruel and petty thing to do to her son.

I had really good luck in daring to leave the bathroom for a time out with Dianne! My body cooperated and I had such a good visit with her. There is nothing in this world like girlfriend time to make one feel supported, encouraged and cherished. I felt most blessed, watching the sun slanting through the sweet, heavy harvest of ripening leaves from the surrounding old trees onto our little table and seeing the sparkling water flow by in the near distance.

The heavy exhaustion of yesterday was still with me today, and although I firmly intended to work in the afternoon after I said farewell to Dianne, when I sat down to work I dozed off. Jim’s call to bath time awoke me. I drowsed again through Amy Goodman’s news show and an episode of CSI and Mick had to awaken me for supper at 8 PM.

Gary and Ed were cooking when we came downstairs, getting the food for next week prepared. Ed was kind enough to do Jim’s part of the cooking, which frees Jim up for a really good day of watching football on the tube tomorrow. They joined Jim and me for the Gaia Meditation, with Gary offering the ending prayer.

We watched the new Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis – or rather Jim watched while I again dozed! I cannot imagine why I am sleeping so much! Perhaps my body is adjusting to two new medications for the interstitial cystitis I just started taking. Hopefully the adjustment will balance out soon, if so! Before, I was calling this odd condition I am experiencing the “stupid flu”, because I feel less swift of brain than usual. If the dozing factor keeps up, I shall change its name to the “sleepy and stupid flu”!

I got the sleepy, stupid flu,
But my heart is true!
Oh yeah!

It is so good when Friday rolls around! Jim’s joy at completing another week of his mowing season without incident is always wonderful to behold and share, and the weekend looms, full of different things to do. I doubt I shall be able to do the more active things I usually reserve for Saturdays, but nevertheless the change in the routine is refreshing. And we will see Jim’s Nebraska friend, Steve H, whom we affectionately call Smut, an old childhood nickname, for the Nebraska game tomorrow night. That is always a treat! And no, as far as I know, Mick never picked up a childhood nickname, except for the usual “Jimmy”, which went away naturally as he matured.

2006-09-14

It was a blessing to awaken to a clear and promising day! That autumn feeling is suddenly pervading our area. For the first time I can feel the earth getting drowsy, making itself a cup of cocoa and preparing for its winter sleep. I love this change of seasons! Cooler weather means sweaters, which are my favorite apparel of all.

Jim rock and rolled out after Morning Offering and set out to mow two estate lawns and then spread mulch for another customer. Meanwhile I worked until lunchtime on Chapter Two of The Choice, just starting the chapter on polarity. I am not sure I like what I have done yet! I will have to review it on the morrow.

After a lunch break with Mick, I started on the editing for the second Aaron/Q’uo weekend, getting into the fourth page before moving on to e-mail. Somehow that Inbox stacks up, no matter how many matters Gary handles in the downstairs office! Before Jim called bath time I
- Wrote a memo to Gary to remind him to check up with known participants of the upcoming Midwinter Gathering in order to find a good weekend for the event. We need to fix that date before I write the next Gatherings Newsletter.
- Finished collecting recipes from a cookbook Sandie S had donated to us and sent them on to Gary to put into our recipes database.
- Confirmed with Dianne S our date for tomorrow at lunch.
- Caught up with our web guy on several small matters, mostly personal. His wife has some health problems and he and Jim have both dealt with fairly helpless ladies, physically speaking, from time to time. Right now, she is getting ready for hip replacement surgery, a big step for her and crunch time for the helper as well.
- Wrote Judy R on a couple of editing points interesting only to lovers of the language. However I’ll tell you anyway! It seems that nowadays it is common usage to put only one space between sentences. Back when Judy and I were in the salad days of our lives, one inserted two spaces between sentences. And also, these days, it is not necessary to put a comma before the “and” in a series. These two issues had kept my spellchecker very busy for a while, earlier
- Responded to Sarah B at MacDuffie, who asked me to call my classmates and urge them to attend the reunion this October. I explained to her that there was no use in such efforts. I promised her, however, that I would indeed go all out for the 50th reunion, which is in five years.
- Thanked Pupie for her news of the British study group.
- Let Melissa know that we needed her snail mail address so we could send her an information packet from our 2006 Homecoming. Jim and I both had one, so Jim donated his copy to Melissa. It’s ready to mail except for that all-important detail – the address.
- Wrote Gary to let him know the results of my conversation with our web guy. He will put up a link to the Homecoming photos on our home page. He also suggested to Gary that perhaps it would be good to include that information packet as well, and so I asked Gary to send him that document, over which Gary labored before the Homecoming, getting all my UPI articles on the chakras together and also spiffing up my collections of Ra quotes on each chakra.
- Wrote Dan (Dan [tantranews@yahoo.com]) to thank him for a quite insightful article on immunity. He seems to have a mailing list for these articles, so I include his address in case you’d like to see what sort of insight he comes up with. I enjoy his very positive energy.
- Wrote Judy C to thank her for her good wishes and her intention to find me some rare books about which I had written her. I have an ongoing wish list on Amazon.com, but the software will not let me put on the list items which are not available new. So I sent a supplementary out-of-print list to her, as her business is finding and selling second-hand books via the internet. She comes across all manner of good items at Goodwill stores and yard sales. As a librarian, I know she’s a very good source. Especially when someone dies who has a very special library collection, often the heirs have no idea of its value and they simply donate the books to charity or sell them off for pennies at a yard sale.
- Let Gary know I have called the Falk Audio people again to ask them to send our masters for the tapes we offer to Rick C in Maine. Rick will remaster them on to CDs.
- Thanked Monica L for her insightful comments on home-schooling for Indigo Children.
- Wrote Larry M at UPI to find out how to append Monica’s comments to the original article for others to see.
- Thanked Jean-Claude K for his kind remarks concerning this week’s UPI article and complimenting him on his own columns. He also writes for UPI’s Religion and Spirituality section and his column is called “Shooting Dead Horses”.

I was exhausted this evening, far more weary than is logical for one who is at present eschewing even the gardening that constitutes my only outdoor exercise in deference to my present poor physical condition. I rolled over on to Jim’s broad shoulder and snoozed away the TV time until supper. It felt so good! Mick roused me for suppertime and the Gaia Meditation. I offered the prayer. Instead of speaking the prayer I sang a song on to tape for Ed, who is visiting Gary until Sunday’s meeting. The song is called “Beulah Land”. I love that hymn, as it talks about the safe place we all have in our own minds and hearts, where the sun is always shining, the fountain of life runs sparkling clear and the manna is ever bountiful. We all need a high country spot in our hearts to shelter us when things get tough.

Jim and I spent the remainder of the evening patting Sedgie, who somehow continues on, shaky and barely here but utterly devoted, purring and kneading himself silly and attending most carefully to the voices of his humans. We said good night at 11 PM.

2006-09-13

A light rain was falling when morning dawned. After Morning Offering Jim set out to mow anyway. He reported good luck, as the ground had become quite dry previous to this week and so it was soaking up all the rain and the ground remained un-soggy. Jim mowed all day, got completely caught up with his schedule and ended the work-day a happy man.

On Wednesday mornings I generally write my weekly UPI article and send it in, and so I did today. Like a jillion other people this week, I wrote about 9/11. I told my editor, “I bet this is the only 9/11 article with ETs and spirit Indians in it!”

Having gotten that finished, I came down for lunch and a lot of small details, as we had gotten a box of Christmas presents I had ordered and also a box of books returned by Amazon as damaged. And I wanted to Xerox off a song for Ed to take with him. Jim came home at lunch’s end and we did our stretching exercises together. It is good to do these always but right now, while he is training for the Senior Games, Jim feels it is crucial and we are doing all the exercises half again as long.

In the afternoon I started by going to old editing, a discipline I am trying to encourage in myself, and finished the editing of the expanded version of the May 28th channeling. Our equipment had failed during that session and we had gotten only a partial transcript of that session here at Camelot. However, Romi and Bruce had done an internet e-casting of that session and one of the listeners had recorded it off the internet. When he found that we had lost our record of the session, he transcribed his recording and sent it to Gary! It was the first session we had lost in recent years, and so it is especially good to recover it. I sent that off to Ian, the editing done.

Then I spent the rest of my old-editing time digging up the second Aaron/Q’uo weekend’s worth of sessions, which Judy R. had sent me some time ago. I believe there are nine groups of sessions altogether – nine weekends where Barbara Brodsky and I got together and co-channeled. These are wonderful sessions and eventually I will go through all of that material and get it ready to publish. That, however, will be a long job! Aaron is a voluble inner guide and the sessions are wordy. Aaron makes the Q’uo group seem very Zen; short and poetic. They are, in comparison to the chatty Aaron. But not one word of Aaron’s is wasted. He is most charming as well as offering good insights.

Finishing up work on Chapter One of The Choice, I sent the chapter off to Steve M for him to check me on scientific details. This work needs to be accurate! Bruce used to do this for me, but these days he is not able to do so, although I hear from Gary that his health is much improved. His internet situation is difficult, so he cannot correspond well at all. Steve, fortunately, is also trained as a scientist and is a Ra scholar, so I am in good hands. I am most fortunate to have the help. I certainly need it! In describing the unitary nature of creation, I want to get the scientific details right, and I am not trained as a scientist!

Then I took all the information which had come to me about the Homecoming 2006. Many of the participants had written in to thank us for the weekend gathering. I compiled all the responses into one source and then edited the thirteen pages of comments down to about four, from which I will take quotes. It is time for another Gatherings Newsletter, as soon as Gary finishes checking with all known participants of next winter’s Midwinter Gathering as to which of five weekends will be the best time to have it. The last two weekends in January and the first three weekends in February are being checked.

The rest of the afternoon was spent cleaning up details. I
- wrote to thank Jeremy for sending material to Aaron concerning our web site
- Wrote Ian and Pupie in Britain to ask whether their study group had met. In fact it had not, Ian responded immediately. However he has a question to ask the Q’uo next Sunday.
- Wrote Rick in Maine, congratulating him on his bountiful harvest of beans, corn and carrots. Rick is a wonderful country cook and I know that “mess of beans” tasted grand!
- Wrote Judy R, who has prepared the Aaron/Q’uo sessions for me to edit, working on our protocol. You cannot imagine what Judy has gone through in order to come up with these transcripts! And she still wants to make my job easier, so we devised a feedback for her, using the “track change” feature of Word so she can see what I generally change. Then for the next group of sessions she sends me, she will use that knowledge to do a cleaner pre-edit for me. Have I mentioned that Judy feels like, looks like and IS an angel wrapped lightly in flesh?
- OK’d two explanatory notes which Larry, my UPI editor, wanted to insert into my article, explaining who the Q’uo is and what sort of entity L/L Research is.
- Sent Gary a reminder to get copies of all our channeling sessions together so that Jim can select a session for our next light/lines newsletter. It is time for a new issue of Light/Lines by October.

Jim called bath time and we had a lovely whirlpool together. He reported that the leaves are rapidly starting to change color and in some cases fall. He also said that for the first time since last winter, he wore his “sleeves”, thinsulate-lined gaiters that cover the wrist and up to the elbow. They are designed for protection when trimming up thorny bushes but they also work for warmth, and Jim was chilly on his riding mower in late afternoon. So the season changes right under our noses! Clever Gaia!

After spending some time with Amy Goodman’s news and Sedgie, Jim and I went to Clifton’s to take in a set of Walker and Kays, who were having a very good night. I was unable to eat anything, and we did not stay as long as usual, since I was under the weather, but we really did enjoy the outing. We offered the Gaia Meditation on the way home, with Jim offering the closing prayer.

Home for the night, we spoke briefly to Lynn, who is still camping here while she looks for an apartment, and then came upstairs for a final snuggle with all the cats and an early bedtime.

2006-09-12

Rain was softly falling as I arose to write the Camelot Journal entry for yesterday and it continued almost all of the day. After Morning Offering Jim somehow mowed all except one of Monday’s lawns and managed to trim the quite large Hoge House, from today’s line-up, before the deluge hit completely. He will be creating mowing opportunities for the rest of the week for himself, catching up his schedule with all the raindrops somewhat in the way.

I came upstairs to ponder Chapter Two of The Choice 101. It came as no surprise to me that I found that I wanted to alter my plan, as I always do change everything as I am doing it, in order to make it feel right. No recipe gets to the table unaltered. A right-brained, artistic thing happens to me as I create anything. I know more than I can explain about my process. So I follow my intuition rather than my logic. Then I work out the logic. But first, things have to feel right.

I cannot explain it precisely, but my outlined arrangement did not feel right with what I had written so far. So I switched things around in my mind until I liked the story I was telling. Since I first had to study the first arrangement, read the quotations I had selected as choices for use and decide against going forward with that, and then I had to do the exact same thing for my second choice of new topics, it took me the morning to make my new plan. As I told Mick at lunch, you cannot see the progress today, but I did a lot of good work! Mick and I enjoyed the luxury of doing our stretching routine together before we went back to work for the afternoon.

Paperwork had come in the snail mail for me to do before next week’s appointment with Dr. Johnson, an osteopath who has been extremely helpful to me in the past and who will look at my situation from the standpoint of hormone replacements and integrative medicine. The hormone replacement therapies I have been taking for years are prescribed by him. Dr. Aboud and he both feel it is time for a re-test on them.

As well, Dr. Johnson is an excellent diagnostician whose medical know-how is supplemented by genuine psychic ability and a long term of experience with naturopathic medicine. He has moved his practice to a new clinic, since Fox Hollow closed.

This new clinic, 21t Century Medicine, is a most thoroughgoing paper palace. I copied Powers of Attorney and Living Wills, my prescription list and list of all my doctors who see me for whatever specialty, wondering why it is that each and every medical office has to have this voluminous paperwork filled out. In a database world, surely this information is available already to anyone who knows where to look!

After the paperwork was done, and all the new appointments I have accumulated in this drive to find solutions to my health problems were put in my calendar, I took up the channeling session from May 28, 2006, and continued editing that. I almost finished before it was time for me to drive up to Middletown in Stanley Outback and have a mammogram. The woman-squish was slightly easier to take this year as their new mammography machine is a little less like a fridge door, having soft plastic on both sides to soften the squeezes. One thing about which I have no worries is breast cancer – knock wood! No one on either my mother’s or my father’s side of the family for three generations – as far back as my knowledge goes – ever had any sort of cancer. However In order to stay sweet with my family doctor, I get a mammogram yearly.

Jim had spent the latter part of the afternoon sending out all of the book orders we picked up from our run to the P. O. Box and had the bath running when I returned from the doctor’s. We enjoyed a most pleasant whirlpool and Amy Goodman’s news and World Music before joining Ed and Gary for supper at 8 PM. Ed has asked Jim and me for some counseling time and we had a good conversation until about 9:30, when Gary and Ed headed off to the movies. We took time in the middle of the counseling session for the Gaia Meditation, for which Lynn joined us. I offered the ending prayer tonight.

After everyone left, Jim and I came upstairs for a snuggle and some relaxing television, saying good-night around 11 PM.

If any of you who wish to view our photos from the 2006 Homecoming have not yet figured out how to see the captions provided for the photos with people in them in our house set, here’s the procedure as shown me by Gary: You click on the link to the photos and then click on “sets”. Then click on any photo and it will show up, enlarged and with the caption beneath it. Ta da! Keep hitting “next” and the whole set can be viewed like this.

2006-09-11

The anniversary of 9-11-2001 dawned rainy and gray and did not depart from that mood all day. After Morning Offering Jim watched the raindrops fall and went to sharpen his blades! By doing what he could do, he had a productive day. However there was no mowing! He pronounced himself ready to be a magician for the rest of the week, as the rain is supposed to intensify tomorrow and even continue the next day.

I finished up the first chapter of The Choice 101 and when I had done what I could to polish it, I sent it off to the Hays. They had just sent another contribution which enables me to go on working on this project, as their donation pays for an L/L Research admin, Gary – who does a spectacular job – and a bookkeeper, Lynn, who is working hard and getting more experienced each day. Good news from Lynn: she found a job! And perhaps she has also found a roommate, which enables her to afford a nicer place to live by far. I hope that is a good sign for Carmen and Travis, who are also looking for jobs that will enable them to stay in Louisville and attend our meditation meetings.

In the afternoon I had an appointment with bladder specialists, as Dr. Aboud felt I might have a condition involving the bladder wall. According to tests done today, I probably do have something called interstitial cystitis. I congratulate Aboud for being an excellent diagnostician while regretting this diagnosis. If it is so, it means that I have managed to acquire another chronic diagnosis of something doctors cannot treat. They can throw medicine at the symptoms but the condition has no cure. The one bright spot is that treating this condition may ameliorate symptoms that I thought were strictly gastro-intestinal.

I will persevere. I do not care what challenges face me in health as I work on this project. If necessary I will dictate the book onto tape, which I can do lying down. Now that I have figured out how to focus through these symptoms, I believe I can carry on regardless, as the British say. And as my buddy, Helen, says – Yer dern tootin!

I came home to greet Ed A, who has been at several Gatherings and is a good friend of Gary’s. He has come up from Tennessee for a visit with Gary and soon was off to have a bite to eat and meet Valerie, Gary’s girlfriend.

After getting all my new prescriptions handled and new appointments recorded, I edited on an expanded version of our last channeling of last season, the May 28, 2006 session. A listener who had heard the channeling via our podcasting of it had recorded it. Our own equipment had broken down and we had lost most of the session. This new transcript gives us a shot at preserving the entire session. Since we have never before lost a session like that, we are most grateful for the save!

I had not gotten far with that editing when Jim called bath time. After a most refreshing whirlpool, we watched Amy Goodman’s 9/11-related news broadcast. She had the makers of Loose Change (http://www.question911.com/), a documentary on 9/11 which raises all kinds of questions dear to the hearts of conspiracy buffs about the disaster, and the editors of Popular Mechanics on as well. They have just put out a book called 9/11: Debunking the Myths. The address where you can see more about that book is (http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html). It was a fascinating show, watching them debate the issues. Goodman does not know all the answers, and neither does anyone else, although both the movie group and the debunking group rather thought they had the answers down pat.

I think this tangle is worth a UPI article from me and I’ll work on that Wednesday morning. Conspiracy buffs in general have tremendously good things to offer. They poke and probe at difficult material and some of what they find is very persuasive in revealing a secret agenda known only to those in power, and quite other than the official version of what happened. On the other hand, the faults of these conspiracy experts showed up clearly in the show. The mavericks creating Loose Change were brash, youthful and possessed of a rudeness which made no sense and hurt their case as they presented it. They seemed impulsive and shallow in their research. One does not call a careful, cautious, savvy editor like David Dunbar a liar without incurring a loss of respect from the audience. Clearly Dunbar was not lying one little bit. He may have mistaken the inference of his facts, but the hallmark of this gentleman was his careful research.

Were we deceived about 9/11? We all rather feel we were. Much that has happened since then can be regretted. Our role since then, as Americans capable of terroristic acts aplenty ourselves, can further be regretted. The entire situation can be regretted. And yet here we are. The great challenge to us all is how to love each other through this tangle as we patiently undo the knots.

Mick and I had a late supper and the Gaia Meditation and ended the evening doing book orders and then snuggling with Sedgie.

2006-09-10

Kentucky had its prettiest autumn face on today, making the Sabbath a visual blessing. Jim had his typical cleaning and errands morning while I enjoyed a restful time reading Papa’s letters, doing the Sunday puzzles and drowsing. I am impressed with how much the little work I have done in the midst of this discomfort has exhausted me. Hopefully I have now caught back up on rest and am ready to hit the writing of the Choice book again on Monday.

It is interesting to see the exhaustion factor. Except for the extreme weight loss during the Ra sessions, it mimics the distress I had then, and the unusual fatigue. In that odd way that spiritual endeavor has of turning things on their nose, it is in its way a good sign. If I am drawing this kind of fairly intensive psychic greeting for attempting, though slowly and poorly, to do this work, then I may well be on the right track in terms of polarizing in effective service to others. This is most encouraging.

After a fast-food lunch, our Sunday treat, Jim and I came upstairs where we selected a hotel for Jim’s trip to Lexington to participate in the 2006 Kentucky Senior Games. He and I will go to Lexington Friday, September 22nd, and register for him to pole vault in the qualification trials, held Saturday the 23rd, for the 2007 Senior Games, which happen to be held here in Louisville.

Needless to say, as a wife I would prefer the man was a shuffleboard expert, but no! Jim was state champion for the pole vault event in Nebraska in his high school days and held the record for some years there before someone overtook his height. So he will try out later this month in the pole vault event while I sit in the stands and practice having faith and knowing that all is well. Gulp!

Then I tackled a job I had been putting off – writing to my brother, Tommy, concerning Christmas. My sister in law has a dislike of this house and yet my cousin, Carlos, has asked for the family to meet here in Louisville for the family reunion over Christmastide. I wrote to encourage my brother to throw some money at this tangle. If he leases some bed-and-breakfast or hotel space for his wife and kids, then my sister in law will have a place to bolt when she needs space and privacy. I really feel it’s the only way she will be OK with the effort and lack of comfort involved in traveling here. I found some B & B addresses for him and hopefully gave him some good alternatives about which to think.

I came downstairs for the meditation meeting wondering if we would have anyone besides Jim and me. Gary was working at Cracker Barrel and could not attend and Romi, the one person attending our meetings locally who really loves silent meditation, is traveling to Cheska, as natives call the Czech Republic, to see his parents, especially his Mom, whose health is not so good. He is considering moving there to take care of his Mom, bless his heart. He will visit our mutual friends, Pupie and Peter, in Britain on his way home. He will be gone all of September.

However, we had a brand new member come to the meeting! Carmen had attended the Ranger Gathering on Avalon last summer and had a profound response to the atmosphere here. She already was a real fan of the Law of One material. She decided to move to Louisville, find a job and a place to live and attend the Sunday meetings here at L/L Research. She and Romi have been talking via e-mail for some time about this and Romi has offered her the use of his apartment while he is in Cheska. So Carmen is now in Romi’s place and plans to start job hunting tomorrow.

Travis, who came to the 2006 Homecoming last weekend, is also in correspondence with Romi and Gary, intending to move to Louisville. Fortunately, Carmen is skilled at office work and Travis is skilled at technical work, so both people should have a fairly easy time finding work. Louisville is the biggest corporate center around these parts, with a good many regional offices here locally and lots of paperwork of all kinds to get done. Lynn, who met Carmen after the meeting as she came in to use our computer, is also looking for work. Our little L/L Research family needs jobs! I hereby offer a sincere prayer to the Job Angel!

We had a lovely silent meditation with Carmen, Jim and I attending. We three sat and conversed for some time afterwards, chewing over many things that have happened in the last year. We talked a bit about Avalon and the future. Jim and I have not given up the hope of community on Avalon, and we personally continue to plan to build our retirement home there on Avalon – whether we ever retire or not, it is intended to be our final home –sometime within the next five years. However for the present, Avalon is not set up for winter habitation, as there is no water supply and no way to bathe. The power we have available from the solar panels will run a microwave, a small fridge and a laptop. It does not afford one a lot of options regarding heat. We do have a wood stove in Sugar Shack. However it is a primitive and forbidding environment at this point.

Carmen agreed that going to Avalon in the winter would not be possible for her. She will find an apartment here in the city after she locates a good job and knows what she can afford.

Both she and Travis have such a beautiful desire to help. Jim, Gary and I will create the most complete array of volunteer possibilities we can to offer both of them, as they both wish to volunteer for L/L Research as well as to attend the weekly meditation meetings. I have a lot of creative work that has never been digitized; mostly poems and songs. There are many physical maintenance projects to do around Camelot, both inside and outside. There are several clerical tasks going begging in the office and Library as no one has the time here. So we will be able to offer both volunteers some good choices, all of which will be helpful to us if they choose to do them.

Sedge tried repeatedly to sit on Jim and me as we relaxed after the meeting, but his little body is starting to stiffen as he nears death, so he would sit and purr for just a minute and then go over to a place where he can sit perfectly flat. He neither eats nor drinks any more, so he is living on love now. Bless his dear kitty-cat heart – I believe his transition is at hand. Jim and I have helped no less than eight cats through this transition in the last two years, as we were given several older cats by the families of folks who had died, some years back, and all of those cats reached the end of their lives in the same time period. It is tough to lose Sedgie though, as he is only nine years old – too young to die, except that he has this cancer. Our other losses were all of cats aged seventeen to nineteen, a ripe old age for pussycats.

Gary came back from work just in time to join us for the Gaia Meditation. I offered the ending prayer. Jim and I came up for a romantic snuggling episode and sought our beds fairly early after a late and leisurely supper.