2007-04-15

My Mom, a fan of San Francisco, said that she loved the city, among many other things, because it was always suit weather there. She would have loved this day, blustery and climbing slowly to 50 F amid uncertain sunshine. There was no official choir today, so I could take my time with the Sunday puzzles. I attended the service while Jim attended to the housecleaning, our usual Sunday morning division of activities. I was able to do a favorite thing – wear a hat to church! It is useless to wear one when singing in the choir, as it resides in the dressing room throughout.

We had a quiet lunch and I began the editing on Terry H’s channeling session from Thursday evening, which Gary had transcribed. Then Mick and I had a bath before welcoming Carmen and Romi. Romi busied himself with computer maintenance while Carmen and I conversed until it was time for our silent meditation.

Tom F attended today, after being gone for the last few weeks for various reasons, mostly his taking his grandson by marriage to swim meets near and far. We were delighted to see our Tom, who has been a campaigner with our group since 1974, surely our oldest continuously attending member. Now “old Tom” is my age, so of course I think we’re both just kids!

We had a good talk around the circle before offering a silent meditation. It was a sweet and powerful time, but there was a flaw in the ointment! The tuning song we chose had the word “sleep” in it numerous times, and two of our number quickly obeyed the prompt and struggled mightily to keep from dozing off for the whole time. We’ll have to avoid playing that particular Donovan song before a silent meditation in future! I finally closed the meditation a bit early, when I found that I, too, was starting to nod. That’s quite unusual for me. I am usually an alert meditator. So I do think it was the hypnotic, “Sleep, beloved, sleep” in Donovan’s song that got us all.

Romi served a delicious Love Tea with shortbread, my favorite, after the meditation. We conversed until time for the dinner feast, all of which Gary had cooked. After the meal, Romi checked his e-mail from one of our computers and found a note from Moab. Dana Redfield died yesterday evening after a series of bouts with cancer. The first two bouts, with lung cancer and cancer in an organ, she survived. However this last cancer was in her spine and had metastasized to every place in her body which they checked. She had only a few months to live after that diagnosis.

Dana filled her time by completing a brilliant project, her Alphabet Mosaics. Because her publisher, Hampton Roads, has refused her project for their publication, she has asked L/L Research to publish her work. She sent me careful instructions and I will enjoy doing this for her.

Dana was a remarkably eloquent writer and a UFO experiencer of great range. She was visited in her lifetime by all sorts of beings, some ETs and some angels. Sane and grounded, she observed and wrote about these experiences in ways which offer ways to help seekers discover the truths which her life has held, and those pithy truths have been many.

We talked about death for a while when we got the news. I was ecstatic for Dana, thrilled for her that she’d got through the difficult part of dying so rapidly. Having died at age 13, briefly, I can assert with confidence that dying is easy. It is the part before you pass through the gates to larger life that’s the fiddly bit. Romi was very sad and said that he was glad he was with me when he got the news, as he was considerably cheered by my perspective.

There is no use in fearing death. We might as well fear our birth. Both are markers in a long journey and constitute the beginning and end of a mysterious side trip into heavier illusion than the main road of consciousness. We wrap the veil of forgetting about us and set sail in our ship of faith, blinded to the oneness in which we abide. And what a journey we blind sailors make! Side trips do end, though, so that we can get back to the main journey. That is all that death is – a transition from the by-lane of an incarnation to the larger road in our soul’s journey, from which this incarnation is a diversion, a learning experience and another way to learn to love and be loved.

Jim and I talked with his Mom on the telephone and then Icame back downstairs to enjoy episodes of Planet Earth and converse with the gathering. We offered the Gaia Meditation, with me praying at the end, and said good night to our guests before coming upstairs for our kitty snuggle and our own bedtime at 11 PM.