2007-07-21

It was a lovely Saturday! After Morning Offering I came up to the office and Mick did chores in the house while I cleared my desk. After our fast-food lunch, always a Saturday treat, Mick snoozed while I read for about an hour.

Then he went over to St. Luke’s to finish a job he had started but could not finish yesterday, as he ran out of Dumpster space there, breaking down boxes during the church's office move to a different part of the campus. So he carried the remaining cardboard on his trailer over to the city recycling center on Whipps Mill Road. When he arrived back home, he worked in the yard until bath time, filling two huge garden garbage bags with weeds.

Meanwhile I got a call, as arranged, from Ian, our web guy. We talked about all manner of things having to do with the Brown Notebook, which is the document in which the Elk found information concerning founding a group which could receive channeled Confederation messages. he used that information to start the group which Jim and I carry on.

A volunteer, DC, has been scanning and OCR-ing the Brown Notebook – and in some cases typing it over, as the original typewritten pages are too faint with age for good OCR-ing – and is apparently at the ending stage where Ian can soon put this forerunner of our own work up on our site. I am glad we could do this. Until recently the Trepaniers, Clyde and his wife Helen, maintained a web site for this work. They must have had to retire from doing that. So now this material will be available again. I promised Ian to write an introduction for that upcoming e-book explaining the connection it has to our work.

Then we began talking about his being my literary executor. He was looking at just what projects I had of which he had no knowledge. I do have numerous old projects which do not need to see the light of day, ever, but one book which I compiled in 1974 is a selection of our early messages, received while I was being trained as a channel by Don. I did good work there and it definitely deserves a place on the site. I promised to find and send him a copy of the manuscript to scan and OCR. We have a wonderful web guy! And the web site of our archives is close to complete now. That’s amazing!

Gary needed my ear after that, as we had decisions to make concerning both upcoming gatherings, the Mackinac Island event over the weekend of the 10th of August and our own Homecoming over Labor Day weekend. We also had a good talk.

That done, I did a rare stint of cooking, of the simplest kind. I have been craving devilled eggs, so I made some – yum! This was followed by a long whirlpool and a time of more napping for us. We roused after a time and came downstairs to enjoy a film I deeply enjoyed; probably the single best movie I have seen all year. It was such a gem!

Nick Nolte was a main character and what an actor he is. Mick and I had just seen him in a tour de force, mumbling and scratching his way through a brilliantly curmudgeonly role last week. In this week's film his voice was measured, nuanced, clear and gentle, but he played another kind of curmudgeon. It was a role that reminded me of Pat Morita’s role in The Karate Kid in that he mentored an athlete and showed him how to be better at what he did. The film’s title was “The Peaceful Warrior".

Nolte told his protégé that most people do not live at all. They never come into the present moment and begin to pay attention. He had devoted his life to a higher purpose and service to others, he told his student. “But you work at a gas station-grocery,” the boy objected. Nolte said, “Yes – a *service* station!”

His best line came when the student was feeling unlovable. “The ones that are hardest to love are the ones that need it the most,” he said.

In the midst of watching the film, we had dinner and offered the Gaia Meditation, with Jim praying at the end. We turned out the lights a bit after 11 PM.