2007-02-22

Being home and sleeping in my own bed was wonderful! And tonight will be my last night in my own bed for a while, as Mick and I are heading for Nebraska tomorrow. Still feeling rocky, I moved slowly today, much cheered by being ale to work at all.

Larry M had suggested I wait until next Wednesday to write my next column, just to give me a rest, which was very thoughtful of him. So after Morning Offering, while Jim cooked the food Gary will eat next week, I spent the morning on e-mail.

Things came together today for the resolution of a tangle the solution to which had been puzzling us for some time: the disposition of Tobey W’s database. He took on the volunteer task of re-listening to the original Ra session tapes and he is quite a ways through the sessions now. It is a good scholarly resource for those who want to check version against version. Some people’s seeking processes work like that.

However, it is currently up on a web site that will be discontinued at the end of this month. And we do not want to lose his work. After much discussion, it was agreed that Tobey himself would host the database of TLOO on his own web site, and we will link to that from the llresearch site.

As to our two other domain names, which are www.bring4th.org and www.lawof1.org, we will keep the names on hand to use when spirit brings us loving and capable webmasters who love the LOO and who wish to create features we currently do not offer on our archive site, such as an L/L forum and an on-line store. The two sites, B4 and lo1, will disappear completely by the end of March, and this is the way it needs to be. There has been some negative energy connected with the work of the people who ran those sites previously, and our goal at L/L Research – and it is a firm and steadfastly held goal – is to create offerings in service to others as a pure labor of love. So the previous sites will come down. This is true progress. Sometimes you have to raze an old structure to make way for a better one.

What delighted me the most about this whole decision cluster was the kindness between the four people involved – Ian, Tobey, Gary and me. The discussion was lengthy and the points quite complex at times, yet all the folks involved kept their hearts open. Now that is living the Law of One!

Gary had sent copies of two of our videos to Ian so he could see them. One is a good interview of Don and me done in 1978 in Atlanta, on Bill Tush’s “Open Up” show on the Turner station there. The other is my speech at the International UFO Convention in 2001. Ian thinks that both videos would interest our seekers and suggested that we pursue the project of creating them as DVDs for sale. So I sent Gary a note asking him to look into the particulars of this, especially the costs, while Mick and I are visiting Mom McCarty.

Gary and I have been talking for a while about the project of digitizing the “Brown Notebook” and “Man, Consciousness and Understanding” channeling material from the Detroit Group. It was the Brown Notebook wherein the Elk originally read the instructions on how to create an ET channeling circle. Following their instructions, we did just that starting in January of 1962. So these Detroit Group materials are our forebears. The material is pure Confederation in terms of its thoughts and themes. I think it will be a good addition to the resources on our archive site.

Gary wrote to say that he was not able to field a large enough group of volunteers to scan and OCR these many hundreds of pages quickly. He wanted to put up a special notice on the home page, replacing the thank you for contributors to the Matching Funds Campaign.

However I thought it would be better to do it a bit differently, so I wrote him outlining my idea, which is to replace the current thank-you plus “donation” button with a button which says, “If you would like to help L/L Research”. When a seeker clicked on that button, the whole range of our volunteer projects would come up, so that whether people wanted to donate the “green energy” of money, the skills and talents they have in getting material ready for the site, or the time to do various projects for L/L, they will be able to see the full spectrum of our needs in one chart. And I like the idea of this having its own page, just to unclutter the Home Page.

Gary liked my idea, so he is now tasked with creating a proposed rough draft for a new volunteers’ to-do chart while Mick and I are in Nebraska.

A reader caught my error in attributing a saying to Thales which is credited to Heraclitus. I had a good time reading back to find how I had made such an error. The reader was quite correct in saying that the phrase was Heraclitus’s. However, Thales stated that the universe was unitary and made of one thing. He thought that this one thing was water. He further said, roughly, that part of truth inheres and does not change while the other part of truth is in constant change. So the implication is that you can’t step in the same water twice. I think what threw my memory off was that Heraclitus was also of the belief that the creation was made up of one thing. However he named that fundamental element fire, not water.

Aaron T wrote in with a request for information on “spiritual democracy”, a phrase I have used for decades and which she has come across in transcribing my old letter tapes. I will do an article on that very thing soon. She also asked about the polarity of anger, and I think that is a great topic for our next channeling Sunday, which will be the first Sunday in March.

Romi wrote in, quite concerned about me because of the hospital stay, and I wrote him a reassurance – the doctors had not actually made anything worse, even if they did not make anything better either. All in all, good stats for a hospital experience! Hospitals are wretched places! However the care offered there to me by the people on staff was loving and kind all the way through.

I managed to get some personal e-mail in before lunch, and then went down to enjoy the last of my leftover steak from our Valentine’s Day dinner out. Jim and I had a good meal and did our stretching, and we sat for quite some time and talked about L/L matters. He, Gary and I are chewing over the idea of enlarging our Board of Directors, in order to place our organization in a good position to survive our personal demises. We all must die sometime, and Jim and I are older now. A larger Board, and one far more sophisticated in terms of business, will be more able to keep our material available than our present 6-person Board.

Between the three of us, we have come up with four more people who we feel would round out the Board. While Mick and I are in Nebraska, we’ll write these four candidates and discover whether they are willing to serve on L/L’s Board. Mick and I worked through thoughts about this change in a really good discussion.

Jim also pointed out that it has been at least five years since we updated our “in case we croak” instructions to the Board, so we will take that document with us to NE also and update it there.

In the afternoon Mick put on his cleaning hat and cleaned the house, so that Gary would not have to clean this weekend at all except, as he usually does, cleaning the bathroom and his bedroom in the basement.

I spent the afternoon choosing items to take with me on this trip. I kept running out of steam and having to rest. However I persevered, and ultimately got all my items together except this computer, which I needed to save out so I could journal before we leave tomorrow, and my big bundle of snail mail, plus a few odds and ends like hotpads, extension cords, travel clocks and flashlights, which we’ll pack up tomorrow morning

We enjoyed a Democracy Now program and World Music before coming downstairs for supper and turning on a two-hour Gray’s Anatomy, a hospital drama series we enjoy. Jim offered the ending prayer at the Gaia Meditation tonight.

Mick and I snuggled with the kitties, enjoying our last bedtime snuggle with them for a week or so! We miss those cats so much when we are gone! When we see a cat in Nebraska on the street, we just want to pat it and get a purr fix! That’s the second hardest thing about travel for us. The first hardest, of course, is just being away from our comfort zone, where we have our beds and chairs set up just the way they are the most comfortable for us. However, we have an honor/duty to perform. Jim’s Mom is not getting any younger and her one wish is to visit with us in person. So off we are going!

We’ll be praying for better luck with the weather than our last journey west, where we were stranded in Columbia, MO, for over a day with ice and snow conditions tanking and the interstates closed. Things look good so far.