2007-02-05

It is interesting to me that as I awoke today I could feel the presence of the Gathering’s remaining people in the house. We had Ed, Michelle and Maya and Ryan and Tiffani still present. I had not thought for a while about the difference between the energy in the house when it is only Jim, Gary and me here and when there are more people present. The energy is quite different eve though they were all in the lowest level and I was on the second floor.

I was dazed and moving at a snail’s pace all of today, still exhausted from the energy expenditures I had made at the Archetypes Gathering. I think some of that is due to the questing energy of attendees who feel that perhaps I can give them some good advice or otherwise help them. This expectation pulls at my own vital store of energy. It is inevitable at a Gathering that this will happen. And that is OK. I just need to recover.

In the morning I pondered the situation as regards the Aaron/Q’uo Dialogues. There were letters from both Ian and Judy. Judy R’s and my original plan was moving along OK previously, but our web guy, Ian, made the point that it might well take me a long time to get the editing done on the remaining sessions, and meanwhile they were in good shape to put up on our site and Barbara’s Deep Springs site as sessions, so people could search them for key words. He went ahead and posted the sessions with a caveat, warning that I had not yet vetted the sessions.

The only trouble with this solution is that Judy has made comments in her versions of the transcripts which she wished me to see. You have to understand here that Judy is no ordinary volunteer who does one good job and lets it go. Our angelic Judy R is a steady, sturdy server of others and as an editor, she constantly works to improve the interface between her and me, so that when she delivers to me a session, she has incorporated into it the changes she sees that I have made in previous sessions.

Her plan has worked perfectly. In each session I have received under this plan, I have fewer edits before being finished with my work on it.

This plan is now obsolete, since I am no longer getting sessions to edit from Judy but from Ian, who has created them as PDFs and removed the comments she made, so I no longer see them when I edit. So I wrote Judy to ask her to send me her comments separately. Then I can look at them as I do each session, and send her the results so that she can go ahead with her editing improvement.

Meanwhile Ian is freed up to do the massive amounts of work he is doing on other projects, both for L/L Research’s Book of Days and for highly deserving sources such as Bub Hill, whose channeling Ian says is a good deal like that of our group. He is creating a web site for Bub.

I think we have found a good solution. And Judy has already written to agree and to move ahead in our new pattern. So all is well.

Jim and I received the Bub Hill material in printed book form from Ian as a Christmas present and will take it up to read through at Morning Offering as soon as we finish our present readings of Evelyn Underhill’s beautiful writing in her little Readings for Advent book. We are excited to see the material as Ian loves it – and his taste is good.

Jim had the firm intention of taking the last load of wood from St. Luke’s job up to Avalon this morning but ran into a big problem. Gary and Ed had hitched Jim’s trailer back up to his truck but they had placed the hook-up in the wrong place and Jim did not notice it until he started to haul the wood. Immediately he could tell that something was off and stopped the truck, but unfortunately the pulling had seated the hitch in the oh-so-wrong place and the trailer was totally stuck.

Jim worked with it for a while, until lunch time, and had no joy, so very sensibly stopped and we had a good lunch and stretching together. Then he went back to the hitch and got it to let go, finally. We both cheered extensively, as failure to do so would have left Jim with no option but to take the truck-plus-trailer to the repair shop and leave both of them there to be adjusted. So Jim took off, late, for Avalon as planned.

And this is SUCH a good thing! It starts snowing here tomorrow and continues through Wednesday night, with some accumulation expected. And this is over the ice we now have on the roadways. I am most grateful this project was completed in dry weather. The high today was 16F, too chilly to let the ice melt. Jim reported that he had a tough time getting up the access road after he stacked the firewood and placed it under a tarp to season until we need it next year, even with no load on the trailer. There’s lots of ice on the road.

In the afternoon, I worked again on Chapter 4 of The Choice 101, tinkering with the red ray section more. It is still not there, but I can feel it coming as I patiently go over the material asking for guidance. I am praying without ceasing on this job!

Gary, Tiffani, Ryan, Ed, Michelle and Maya all went to lunch at a nearby Thai restaurant before Ed and family left to drive back to Tennessee and the rest of the crew went to see Volver at the cinemas. It got mixed reviews from them. Tiff and Ryan got on a plane soon after that, and the house was again down to its normal complement.

Gary spent the rest of his afternoon changing guest beds and putting everything back in the living room, my office and my bedroom, where we had switched things around for the conference. By nightfall, we were pretty much back to our usual configuration.

We did well this time with gauging how much food was needed for the group and had very few leftovers. Three cheers! Buying too much has been a problem in the past. Our only overage was on sweets – we have way too many of them left. It is tough duty to finish those up! But we shall persevere!

Jim and I enjoyed a good bath and said good night to Gary before coming upstairs for a romantic tryst and a nap. We descended to the first floor for dinner and the Gaia Meditation and enjoyed a block of Star Trek Enterprise while we rested for the evening with the kitties. We called it a night around 11 PM.