2006-10-25

A hard freeze greeted me this morning as I retrieved the paper. Actually, this weather is out of time for Kentucky. We should be in Indian Summer, and the freeze is due sometime in the middle of November. However here it is betimes! The only annuals in our yard this year, the impatiens in our two porch urns, turned up their leafy toes and said bye-bye for the winter.

Jim rolled out his leaf-chopping mower to cut, cut and cut some more as he works to get ahead of the incoming weather. Supposedly we will be rained out both tomorrow and Friday. Needless to say, Jim’s working hard today.

This was UPI column day, so I turned to a story I had read last week about Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus that really opened my heart. I did a bit of research to flesh the story out. I also Google-searched our site and found a good selection from a Confederation channeling to underline the spiritual point I was making. By lunchtime I had the column cobbled together and off to my editor, Larry.

I took the time to call Pam M and invite her to join our staff as bookkeeper. Jim and I still felt confident this morning that she was the right choice. She was delighted and we are as well. She agreed to start next Wednesday. She would have come over today or tomorrow, but I had done too good a job keeping things up! Other than a few stray charge card receipts, the books were up to date. I promised to stop doing book work immediately so that by next Wednesday we will have a goodly load of transactions to perform, and I can train her easily. In fact, as I told her, we will start off by running the monthly statements for Jim’s Lawn Service, as next Wednesday is November 1st

Whee!

After lunch I placed a relay call to Barbara Brodsky, my co-channel on the Aaron/Q’uo Dialogues and a deaf person. It was mostly a girlfriend call, lasting over two hours! Barbara was concerned about my health and I was concerned about hers – we are both in our sixties and enjoying the challenges of uncertain health this way and that – and we are very old and dear friends who are concerned, so of course we had to move through the updates, me on my tummy and bladder woes and she with her eyes and ears, legs and back troubles. We are both coping well, I think, and better than we were. Barbara will go again to South America to see John of God this winter. He is a psychic healer and she has been extremely impressed with his group’s work. She is writing about that, and reports being on her book at about the same point I am in mine – well into the first half, but a bit stymied currently doing other things. Both of us are aiming at steady work writing through the cold weather.

Then we took on the challenge of talking about our spiritual process. We are both dealing with the continuing challenge of staying real and not fake, fresh and not masked. When people tend to rely on you to be a spiritual mentor, of course it is a lovely opportunity to serve. The downside is that one can believe the flattery loving people offer and take other people’s good opinion too seriously. We have both pulled back here and there lately to get real with ourselves.

Oddly enough, both of us had thought to fast as a way of retreating from the world temporarily, and both concluded that we could not do so due to the medicine we are taking, which does not go well on an empty stomach. So we are working with the bareness of silence to rinse away the outward images of self and come to our hearts empty of pretense or concept of self.

There was not much time left for working when we hung up the telephone after a very good conversation, but it was wonderful to catch up with Barbara, who is one of the best people in this world, and a joy to know. We cannot do this very often, both because we’re busy and because of the relay set-up which she needs.

It is a nice service of the phone company. If you dial 711, you get a relay operator. You give him/her the number and s/he secures a line into Barbara’s computer. Whatever I say, s/he types and it shows up on her view screen. Then she talks normally into the telephone to talk to me, as I can hear. So I have to remember to speak really slowly as the operator is typing away at what I am saying. I never remember very long to talk slowly, and am constantly being brought up short by the poor operator, who has to get me to repeat and slow down. It is not the most fun in the world to talk this way! However it is the easiest way for Ba and I to talk. In person, someone has to sign for me, which is more awkward.

Tommy had written to ask me to secure the news about the Louisville Marathon from the sports section of the Sunday paper, as he wanted to see his time and so forth, but I am ashamed for my city! They did not cover the event. This is an old race, and one which qualifies people for running the Boston Marathon, so it is significant in the sports world. I went on line and found the records that did exist and forwarded them all to him.

Gary and I had conversed a couple of times about how much he had enjoyed the silence, meditating for considerable periods of time at the Omega Institute during his week-long study time there earlier this month. Barbara is a wonderful vipassana meditation teacher, and she and I had discussed which of her workshops I should recommend to Gary. We settled on just the one – a week with Barbara, Aaron, her channeling source, and John Orr, a grand teacher in his own right, and one who loves Ba so much that he makes the time to co-teach with her each year. They will teach together next June 22nd through 30th, in Ann Arbor, in an event put on by Barbara’s non-profit group, Deep Springs. I followed up after the telephone call by writing an e-mail to Gary passing on the suggestion and giving the details.

I looked through Steve M’s suggestions for The Choice’s Preface, accepted them all – Steve is sparing with his offerings, and when he has a point to make it generally is pretty obvious and good – and wrote to thank him for the work. I also put a bug in his ear – now that’s an odd idiom! – about something I have been thinking about for a while – creating a video game called The Game of Life, which uses the principles of the Confederation teachings. It would be fun to have a game to go along with The Choice book when that comes out.

Even though Tommy was here over the weekend to run the marathon, we had not discussed Christmas plans, leaving that to e-mail, and I answered his e-mail about that. It looks as though the clan will descend the day after Christmas and stay through the New Year. Fortune is smiling on the Rueckert-McCarty’s, however, for Tommy has decided to put his tribe of wife, Mary, and three kids, Rosie, E J and Ted, in a B and B or Microtel-type suite rather than gang up here.

His decision makes it possible to give all remaining relatives – my brother Jim and his wife, Kai and child and my cousin Carlos and his wife, Flora and child – their own rooms here at Camelot. The public spaces of kitchen, office and living room will be un-slept-in!

This will make things nicer for us all during our time together as a clan. We are a loving and happy clan with no feuds, thankfully. My brother Jim is somewhat deaf, so he will talk a lot, in order not to have to hear. The TV will be on, with games and crowd noise for background a lot, and music will be everywhere, as the whole family loves to sing and also to listen to music.

It is a time for the kids, mostly, and we will all enjoy seeing how they have come along. I have not seen Carlos’s daughter, Naira yet, and she is almost three! Carlos and his family live in California, not an easy commute. And I have not met Kai’s son, Fluke (pronounced Folk) as his bride of one year, Kai, and he just brought him over at last from Thailand, whence Kai hails. They had a dickens of a time with the immigration service but finally all was done for Fluke just recently.

My last correspondence for the day was with Judy R, my pre-editor on the Aaron/Q’uo material. I wanted to let her know that Ba and I had talked, and to pass on the news, as Judy adores Barbara and has been present at many of the co-channeling weekends whose sessions I am now editing. As it happened, Judy also had a request in for some clarification on a couple of editing choices, and I responded to those also.

Jim came in full of sparkly energy from his hard work, his good vibrations bouncing all over, as he was most pleased to have gotten a goodly amount done. He will still be challenged for the remainder of the week, but he is way ahead of his normal schedule.

We had a bath together and then I was off to choir practice. It was a long one, as the Bishop is coming to confirm new members next Sunday and we will sing more than usual, including a piece in which I inadvertently have picked up a very exposed solo. I do not like solos. However, I shall do my best! I even missed the Gaia Meditation, as I had to stay late and go over the solo portion of the piece with the solo ensemble. It is a very interesting version of Psalm 8, written by St. Luke’s choir member Brench Boden. It mixes lovely shimmering textures with jazzy chording for modern but pretty effects. The problem for me is all those blasted accidentals. I can’t read music well enough to grok them by eye, and so must plunk them out on the piano until they are in my ear.

Jim and I relaxed together over a late supper and had a sweet romantic tryst before saying good night around 11 PM.