2008-12-06

Mick loves football, and this is a Saturday at the height of the football season, so our main activity for the day was to watch lots and lots of football! The air was filled with commentators’ debates on which Heisman Trophy candidate was most deserving and how the BCS choices would pan out on December 8th, as well as the roar of the crowds in the many games of which we saw at least a part. The glorious glut did not end until Oklahoma finished soundly thwacking its opponent around eleven p.m., making it later than Sooner!

However, the games did not start early, so after Morning Offering, Mick and I decided to go downtown and have some authentic Mexican food, having espied a sign announcing the Esperanza Café. We entered the place to find it mostly bare, with half a dozen round tables along the sides of the store, and a wide open expanse of bare floor in the middle. Off to the right and perhaps 30 feet away from the front door stood a man of color tending to a series of chafing dishes on a table. There were some Spanish-looking decorations, dusty and tatty, here and there along the walls, and wonderful music was playing on a CD player – not Hispanic but African.

We found out that these men – and there were only men in the place – I supposed that I was fortunate to be served – were Somalis. Somehow, perhaps through a church group, these men had been brought over to America, to Grand Island, Nebraska, a town halfway between here and Lincoln, Nebraska to the east, expecting to find employment waiting. However the employment was not forthcoming, so the men were sent to Lexington to work here at the meat-packing plant.

A very pleasant man came to us almost wringing his hands, concerned that we might not enjoy their food. We said we’d like to try it – could we see a menu? No, there were no menus. Instead he gave us a sample of some nicely spiced chicken with every fresh vegetable in the grocery stewed with it. We assured the man that we liked it just fine, and proceeded to have an adventurous hour eating chicken stew with herbed rice, listening to the wonderful music and dropping in on a completely different culture, where people ate with their hands from a common bowl and had lively conversations – in Somali, I imagine - amid much laughter.

While I was out and about, I called Gary to let him know that I cannot get e-mail here, so when the book cover for 101 is finalized, to have Ian call me, not e-mail me, with the news, and for Gary to do likewise if anything comes up. The Bean Man reported that all was quiet on the home front, but that we have great news – our www.bring4th.org webmaster, Steve E, is now counting down to launching the site on Christmas Day!

Finally! Steve and his wife had their fifth – and last – child recently and is sleep-deprived as well as working two jobs, so we are fortunate indeed that he has managed somehow to get the site up and ready. Steve told Gary that he got a vasectomy last month in order to stop him and his wife from “going forth and multiplying” any more.

The features of our spiritual activism site are many and include live chat as well as forums. There is a calendar and I will post to it the times when I can answer questions live, something I’ve wanted to offer for years.

I spent the forepart of my work day readying the session which Mick had chosen for the winter 2008 Light/Lines Newsletter for publication and then writing the Comments section we always put at the end of the channeled session. It took me until mid-afternoon. It is a very interesting discussion of the dynamics of the priestly or initiatory self and the everyday self, stemming from one of Gary’s excellent questions. I think it will make a good newsletter.

Then I started in on the backlog of e-mail. I have not been able to receive any e-mail since we arrived in Nebraska. I suppose that the available dial-up is too slow to allow the mail to come through in the time I am willing to keep Mom’s telephone line hooked into the computer. She has no “minutes” plan, so Romi gave me a dial-up number that charges eight cents a minute, hopefully a better rate than she would get otherwise – but that cost mounts up, and apparently I’d have to leave the connection running all day in order to receive my new mail.

But that’s OK, since I have a big backlog from before November 30th, when we left Louisville. I wrote

• Rick in Maine, to thank him for his minestrone recipe, which included some potato and pasta, both ingredients which seen to me like good additions to the recipe I have. He also included some interesting spices, which I also added to our recipe. I sympathized with him over his grape harvest, which was entirely eaten by deer. And I sent him in return the recipe for the breakfast casserole we had served on Thanksgiving Friday, as it was very good. Rick is an inveterate cook and makes wonderful food!

• Barbara B in Michigan, to send her a reference from The Law of One which she needs for the book on healing which she is writing.

• Elihu E, to respond to his request for an evaluation of channeling from a group called Cosmic Paradigm (http://www.cosmicparadigm.com/Mark's_Corner/). I told him that I found the channeling quite mixed in polarity and did not recommend that he give it serious consideration. When a channeling source promises to appear in our skies and fix our troubles, it is happily interfering with our free will, which is not a mark of Confederation sources.

• Frank O, to thank him for his new e-mail address and to talk about the Kirking of the Tartan service which St. Luke’s has annually on November 30th, St. Andrew’s Day. Frank was reminiscing about his years as a bagpiper for the police force of which he was a part for many years.

I offered the closing prayer at the Gaia Meditation tonight.