2006-12-11

It was wonderful to be back in my bower office and working on the good stuff! After Morning Offering, Jim went out to pick up sticks and other storm debris for his customers and I came upstairs to check my e-mail for possible urgent needs. Sure enough, Ian had questions about the Book of Days as we get up some speed on finishing this sweet, sweet project.

He had a PDF of the book ready for us to see, and I printed out the Preface since Jim had not yet vetted it. My only anxiety about the Preface is that I switch tenses in it. However I am not sure there is a way out of that, for some of the time I am speaking of what I learned in the past and other times I am speaking about principles. I also dug up the ISBN number to verify Ian’s version of it.

I then went hunting for some creative work I had done for Bruce P when he was at L/L Research. Don started a book on Law of One principles in 1984, but he never got past a few excellent pages, to all of our loss. Ian had come across that, wished to add it to our site, and wanted to be sure that this was the entire text. It was. I could not find my biographical introduction to that writing of Don’s up here on Traveller, which makes sense, since Bruce left us before I had gotten into this upstairs office. So I asked Gary to hunt for it on Maggie, his computer now but mine last year before I came up here. I also asked him to check the B4 CD sent by Jeremy when he closed that site for us. I hope we can find it. I imagine we’ll recover the text all right, since I never delete anything I have written, to Romi’s complaint as I stay on a computer for a while and really fill up the memory.

Why do I do that? It is because I know that my writing may help people. So even if it is a private letter, I keep copies of everything because someday, God willing, I may live long enough to become less busy. If that happens, I will go through my work to find the correspondence that contains discussion of spiritual principles and get that “out there” – with the IDs deleted of course. I know I carry gifts. They are wonderful gifts which I can only hope to use well. So I feel like a steward of my gifts, which are not “mine” at all but pure endowments from my Creator.

My first job for the day, on my agenda anyway, was to finish finding all the quotes in the database for The Choice which pertained to the newly organized 101 volume. I finally got to that and had just assigned the last database code to the last outline point when Jim came in for lunch.

I will not hope to start writing on Chapter Three tomorrow, because there is a huge backlog of mail which I must see to before moving forward and a similar unwieldy load of e-mail. There is this week’s UPI article tow rite. I also have a couple of jobs which need to be done before Christmas on behalf of MacDuffie, where I am class captain for the class of 1961 – a letter for the alumni paper and a letter to my classmates. And I am determined to catch up on my editing of recent sessions, and to finish with the third weekend’s worth of the Aaron/Q’uo Dialogues.

I had a great letter from Frank D, an editor with Hampton Roads. He agreed to take the A/Q Dialogues manuscript as soon as I finish the editing! This heartens me greatly. I want above all things not to get involved again with the Schiffer/Donning company, which has treated us so shabbily with their owning the rights to the Law of One series.

In the afternoon I tackled the bulging Inbox on Traveller. First I wrote a couple of notes to Gary, as I wanted him to keep a watch as Christmas cards come in, so that we correct any addresses we have incorrectly entered in our database and also so that we send cards to those who send us a card for the first time. We have a lot of that each year, as new people read our material and wish to express thanks. Gary was dubious at first but then went through the eleven cards he had in his current pile and found four newbies and two address changes

My other note to the Bean man was about our house plans. Jim and I are working on plans for our Avalon house. Gary Watrous, our passive solar architect, asked us to create schematics on graph paper for the rooms we have now at Camelot. Gary had crafted the drawings from Jim’s measurements and improved them with further details he thought Watrous might find useful, like how many feet of books we had in the library, how much storage for clothes and inventory and so forth. I wanted to make sure Gary drew a schematic of his own room, or created a schematic of his ideal room, one or the other, as we do intend to move Gary with us and want him to be entirely comfortable. He is a truly valuable L/L community member with several years’ experience here now.

Ian had gotten the Winter issue of Light/Lines ready while we were traveling back to Kentucky. It is our centennial edition, Issue 100! I sent notice to Tim M and Gary B that it was ready to send. Tim has the send list for the electronic version of the newsletter while Gary mans the send list for hard copies. The few who ask for those hard copies are usually either prisoners who are denied computer access or older people who have never understood the use of the computer and so cannot receive the electronic version.

A Gatherings attendee and friend, Ken B, had sent news to me of an egregious mis-vote in Florida, where some 18,000 ballots cast electronically in a local election had been lost, not just misplaced but deleted, gone, nada. This is in a close race. And we have seen election irregularities several times in Florida now. I added my humble name to a petition MoveOn.org was passing around, and sent the news on to activist friends of mine.

I had a fun exchange with Penny Kelly, whose books, The Evolving Human and Consciousness and Energy, were just donated to our L/L Research Library by an old L/L friend, Dave Gillis. In an astounding coincidence, she had just come across my UPI article from last week, loved it and wanted to comment. She is also a channel, she says, and has exactly the same frustration with some folks’ questions, which seem to focus on what’s wrong and how to fix it, when the channeling sources themselves would far rather talk about what’s right and how to expand it.

Gina E. Jones had written some time ago to ask permission to use the Law of One in writing a book. She has now finished it! It is titled Flying Between Heaven and Earth. It is now in the publishing process and she will send us a couple of copies for the Library soon. She wrote to say that she had written a screenplay based on her book which had caught the interest of Jim Carrey’s production company. They have asked her for a rewrite. It would be so nifty to see a movie treating some of these ideas out there.

I heard from some friends who are under the weather. My roomie at MacDuffie, Ann B, is married to a wonderfully distinguished and romantically spoken Italian poet, Rafael, whose eyes have developed cataracts. He just had a successful surgery and I wrote to cheer him on.

Ken B’s wife, Vera B, just had surgery for cancer and I wrote them both. Cancer, even when the doctors say you are clear of cancer cells, lingers in the mind because one always must go back for endless check-ups. It is a difficult illness to bear gracefully, but clearly she, as well as m friend, Dana R, is doing splendidly. It is ironic that Ken is retiring just when this is occurring. As Winston Churchill once said of life, it consists of “one damn thing after another!”

Both Brother Tommy and Cousin Carlos Rueckert wrote about Christmas plans, as Jim and I will host the Rueckert horde this year, and I caught up with them.

Carol C had written to say that her efforts to find grants for us have been waylaid by illness and I wrote to encourage her to take care of herself with great love and get back to volunteering her aid to us when she felt way, way better.

The rest of my e-mail for the day was written to Dana R, who wrote to say that she will not take more treatment for her cancer but accept what life brings. This is her third bout and I quite agree with her that there is no sense in compromising the quality of the remainder of her life when even the doctors say there is no real hope the treatment will remove the cancers. Everywhere they looked in their last surgery on her, they found cancer cells. It is too late for mortal solutions. We talked about the gift of the present moment. How she lifts me up! I am so fortunate to know so many wonderful, courageous and excellent people.

I had a short session with Gary about various office projects, especially working on getting just the right Print-On-Demand printer for A Book of Days. Ian has asked for an astronomical amount of detail on items about which neither Gary nor I know anything. I told him not to panic, just do the research for him. I went through this bewildering stage with Ian when we did A Wanderer’s Handbook in 2001. We don’t have to know anything except what Ian needs to know. So I assured Gary that playing detective was the beginning and end of his responsibility there, which much relieved his mind.

Jim called bath time at that point and our working day came to an end. Jim had found an enormous amount of clearing to do at all his customers’ homes, as this last week was rough weather with high winds and in our heavily wooded village, winds bring down lots of storm debris from the many mature trees. Jim and I settled into a most pleasant evening full of nothing more businesslike than Jim’s reading over my Preface, which he had not seen before.

Gary sailed off to enjoy some time with his girlfriend and Jim and I had a good supper and offered the Gaia Meditation before coming upstairs for a snuggle and bedtime around 11 PM.