spiritflight.co.nz

15th Dec 2004 Honesty is so important. Self honesty first. Its impossible to be honest with others until we are able to be honest with ourselves. A wise man told me recently that he could only deal to what he could see. What we cannot see in the past we cannot hold ourselves accountable for making different choices around. Its the truth. How can we? We see much in hindsight. The trick is to gain enough awareness to see it when it is there with us. But life is a journey of a thousand twists and turns. What is not visible from one perspective, becomes clear as crystal from another vantage point. I reach for higher ground, where the air is clear and I can see for miles. I am not there yet, but that’s my journey. Forgiveness is the process of letting go of the expectations we hold on ourselves and others. That’s what we call it in the Psychosynthesis tradition. Its seems that it is the rope that ties us to the low-ground. We cannot scale the heights until we can see and cut that tie which binds us. My journey is taking me through my expectations and how they are obscuring my vision. How they are making me work harder to climb the next step up the path. How they tire me out and zap my energy. Its amazing how easy love is once expectations have been removed. It just flows back in once the circulation is no longer cut off by the rope of expectation. So simple….when you see it!!! 28th Nov 2004 What pain we cause each other in the course of relationship. We all of us carry such hurt around in our hearts related to the beliefs we hold about the way we must be together. As we go about innocently damaging others with those beliefs and being damaged, so we learn to recoil from each other, flinch away from the pain-causing-love, which isn’t love at all but possession. We want to possess that which we lack and we believe that others can fill the void, should fill the void. But they don’t and they can’t and we hurt. And we hurt them. And so the circle goes around and around until we die of broken hearts.

Sometimes I wonder if it will ever end, this cycle of destruction. One goes through ones daily life with the illusion that it’s sorted, or at least good enough, only to be confronted yet again with that which we deny, hide, bury, until eventually we have the courage to face it, let go of it, heal it and move on to a new way. But it takes, oh such a long time. It is oh such a long journey. Will I have the courage it takes? Will I be honest enough, clear enough, respectful enough? Can I find a win/win or will I be left with yet more pain to deal with in some other Now, some other day, some other lifetime? All I can do, all any of us can do, is have the Will to move forward into the face of what must be, knowing that, when all is counted, good will counts. In the end, growth brings its own relief…..until next time. 11th Nov 2004 Yesterday several things happened that I see as important for me. I went to the library and found footage on the Maori Land March. The power of it was huge. The fact that old people walked with sticks all the way from the top down to Wellington was amazing in itself, but what hit me most was the spiritual power of the people. What they portrayed was the connection to the spirit of the land: the afterbirth buried in the land to denote ‘home’ for that being, the fact that the name for land, ‘whenua’, is the same as the name for the afterbirth. The significance that that holds was not lost on me: that which nurtures! Since I have been here in New Zealand, I have heard a lot about Maori rights. I have followed the struggle between the indigenous people and the ‘Pakeha’ that feel so threatened by any mention of land rights as do all white settlers in any colonial countries.

The fear that we will be forced off the land as they were, lives deep inside. It’s real too, when we see what has happened when African nationals have taken back their land. The fear’s real at least. What struck me watching this film was how little we are able to understand what indigenous people are on about. The spiritual is so far from our minds that all issues are seen in shades of ownership . Who owns which bit of land now, and how little can we get away with compensating the First Peoples for their trouble (which includes broken faith, destroyed lives, death and disease, and a dilution of their culture). All we see as a race is land value in terms of money, and we are angry, now that we have taught the Tangata Whenua to think that way too. I don’t see it as any great benefit, that in order to deal with us, they have had to ditch spirit as a value, and adopt money. But that’s the currency we speak. Stalemate. What I saw in that old 1975 film was ‘fire in the belly’. That fire lit the one in mine. I left feeling that I would rather deal with people in the currency of spirit than deal with the current world government/corporations that have no soul in them at all. I would rather deal with the Tangata Whenua than our current ‘representative of the people’ who sell us down the river every day. Another thing that interested me is how many Kiwi’s follow, and are interested in, Native American spirituality but know nothing of the spirituality of the indigenous people of this land, and care less. Does that mean its safe to look at the culture of people who are not likely to want compensation for their pains from our tax money? Its like the old saying they used to have in England when I was growing up: “Black people are fine as long as my daughter doesn’t want to marry one.” I think we need to look carefully at what our own indigenous people have to teach us rather than what we are erroneously teaching them. Later that night I watched ‘Whale Rider’ again at the birthday request of a friend.

Once again, the power of what’s offered if we can but see it, hit me. What came through for me was that the indigenous people, all over the world, Maori, Native American, Meso-American, have the spirit we have lost still intact in their genes if we can get to it before our corporate colonial culture destroys what’s left of it. It’s the only thing that is going to spark the indigenous nature that attaches to our own nurture, inside our own gene’s. They still have the path back to connection with ALL. Now. Not for much longer. We need a new way to negotiate. We need a currency of spirit. If we are not too arrogant to turn to the Tangata Whenua of all lands with our heart rather than our pocket, I have a feeling wonderful things can happen on this small blue planet. At the end of the movie, a neighbour rang to tell us an Aurora was happening in the Western Sky. What a spectacle from up on the top of High Cliff! It looked like spirit flooding the sky. It felt that way too. I stopped analyzing the phenomena in terms of ’solar flares’. For me it was an omen. Just like Paikia in the movie, we women need to lead our men away from the power-over world of their creation. We are the holders of spirit. The womb/doorway through which spirit enters this world . Spirit is the power of our own freedom…..and theirs. We need to be the ones that show the way into these peaceful spirit-filled negotiations with Spirit Peoples of the world………..before they lose any more of their way too. And before we are totally stranded. Hidden deep in the mythology of the Celtic/Anglo people there is a story that tells us how to do it. The Holy Grail story of the Arthurian Legend has a central theme which, when ‘unchristianized’, shows us how the world can be saved. The Grail, or cup, is a symbol for the Female Principle, which all indigenous people honoured at their centre (despite later changes to that, brought about by contact with Europeans). The story goes that lands in Arthur’s kingdom were wracked with drought and war. Arthur himself was dying in spirit from the control of Mordred, his evil son, from turning from the Goddess to patriarchal Christian religion. The scared object, the Grail, had been stolen. The Female/Spiritual essence had been lost. Later the Grail became the cup of Christ as the Christian power brokers attempted to control the pagan beliefs of the people. This obscured the message.

It was meant to. It became a pilgrimage for Christ rather than a search for the lost connection to spirit. They are not the same. Religion is the patriarchal compensation for spirit. There is seldom any found in them. If we strip that off, we can see stark similarities between what’s happening in the world today as what was predicted in the legend. The land laid waste. Crops dying in the fields. War everywhere. Evil men powerful and good men powerless. The end not far away. Contained within this story is the way out of this mess. It is also strongly paralleled in Witi Ihimaera wonderful story which inspired the film ‘Whale Rider’. The way is for the men to find again the female principle of unconditional love and connection to all inside of them. Then the land will blossom again. The Earth will regenerate with the creative life force. We will live again and the death force will take again its natural balanced place in the scheme of things. This is from our own indigenous roots. Let’s listen to that as well as the way shown by other indigenous peoples that we started to destroy after we finished destroying our own.

9th Oct 2004 Well so much for weekly updates. Still I’m here. Right now there is the most glorious sunset out of my caravan window, the weather is balmy, which is unusual for Dunedin but beautiful when it turns it on. Mum’s still hanging in there. In fact she recovered. That’s amazing for someone heading for 94 in a wheel chair. She has done this time and again since she was about 78. Deaths door opens and she decides that there needs to be a bit more to hang on for. It brings up in me the question of when is enough enough? Like my own moving away from the course that was my life’s work. I could have carried on. I could have scaled down, taken on help, had a year off. But it was only prolonging what I knew needed to happen. I knew it was time to pass the baton to someone else if they wanted it. And if they didn’t, it was still time for my journey to take another road. God, I hope I can be that clear when the time comes to exit the body. I’m not saying it was easy. It still isn’t, although I am beginning to get a sense of what the next stage of life is about for me. Living in a body that wants out won’t be easy for any of us. Leaving it could well be equally as fraught with confusion. We don’t live in a world that prepare us for oldness.

Anyway, Mum reluctantly continues to choose to battle the inevitable. I suspect she will do that until there is no other choice but crisis. So often that’s what we do. We hold on and on in the hope that the inevitable changes that are due will never get here. But they always do. No matter what they are. So my time to move out of full time facilitation and therapy work came. I’m not sure how I did it but I honoured it. I left of my own free will and choice. I left with my power intact. A victim of nothing. Gracefully even. Not bad for a change. I didn’t have to crack up, burn out (totally) or get any sicker than I got, to get the message. We are strange beings, humans. Anyway, things are happening. People are reading this website and contacting me from all over the world. (Thank you). My book is now 9.5 chapters long and growing. Watch this space. And the radio programme that Carolyn Vincent of Hills AM and I started this year, talking about Psychosynthesis Principles seems to be going down well. Along with the sunset, Mum’s and the Sun’s, life ain’t too bad for me. 21st Sept 2004 My mothers dying. She has reached a stage where she can no longer get to the toilet by herself and they have to strap her into her wheelchair because she keeps pitching forward. She has no interest in anything else except her bowels and bladder and getting someone to get her to the toilet before she ‘embarrasses’ herself. She is 93years and 4 months old. Probably she will die in a few weeks as she and dad had a pact that she would go 15 minutes after him so that they wouldn’t be apart. She didn’t, but I have a feeling that she will die close to the age that he died at 93 and 5 months. That will be her way of honoring the deal. Some people might think that’s sweet. I think its sad… for many reasons least of which being that they didn’t get on that well and were together for 70 odd years. Chalk and cheese. Neither got what they wanted out of life in the act of compromising themselves to fulfill deals done. We die as we live.

I was so angry when dad died that it changed my life. I began the road I am on now. I got rid of commitments and am trying my best to make sure that the only deals I make in the future are between me and my Higher Self. To honour my own life I must not live for others. With, but not for. That has been huge. I am somewhat intrepidly awaiting the internal changes that must be my lessons from Mums passing. I haven’t even finished with Dad’s teachings to me yet. Maybe I never will. We can never tell the way the death of a family member or close friend is going to affect us. I had done so much work on my relationship with Dad, I was sure that grieving him would not bring too many surprises. Was I wrong! I felt compete with my relationship with him but he was the passive parent. Mum is another matter. There seems still a lot of unfinished business there between us. No doubt ‘what’ and ‘how much’ will come in her leaving. In her youth she was a ’stunner’ for her day with a Marilyn Munroe figure. How did she get to be the way she is today? That’s the other thing that comes up in me. Where she is, I will be going if I live that long. However long we live there must come a time when the wheels fall of the trolley and we have to live with a broken axle for awhile. Not much fun. I don’t envy her, her 93 years. Which brings up for me, am I willing to live my life to the end with dignity and growth, no matter how it unfolds? God, I hope so. I want the learning. I don’t want the pain. What’s new? Then there is the other side. Am I willing to leave when the time is right and not hang on for just another breath of this life no matter what the quality or the consequences? Once again I can only hope that I will have been able to live wisely enough to die that way too. A good death that fulfils the potential of the life it served in its completion. Don’t hold on My Darling. Let go. There is always more somewhere and if our business is not finished, we will meet again. You can count on it!

13th Sept 2004 Three years and 2 days after Sept 11th. 2001. The world changed on that day, or so it seems to me. My world certainly did. For years I have been working away at the concept that if enough of us do our own internal work, regain our own personal power, then the *hundredth monkey principle will kick in and critical mass will occur changing things for the better. 9/11 felt like critical mass in the wrong direction for me. I immediately began direct action, maybe even a bit frenetically. I had to do something more than what I had been doing even though that had been not insignificant. The Peace marches and the GE marches were fabulous. People came out of their complacence en masse world-wide. It was the best turnout since the Vietnam war moratorium. But nobody listened. Bush didn’t listen. Blair didn’t listen. Helen would like not to have listened. But many people were listening. ***Michael More was listening. **Starhawk was listening. I was listening. So I do believe 9/11 was critical mass. It polarized the people between good and worst. It was a Big Wakeup. Back in the 60’s we hippies were busy preparing for today, but no one was listening then either. Not many people today would say that the world was fine and progressing as so many believed when we were heading for the hills and designing alternative power systems. They would have to be blind or blind drunk. Now the corporate bosses who run the world want to privatize the water. What next will they want to take over and make money out of? Air? It seems that a lot of people felt like I did/do after 9/11. Time to get up of the couch. Time to make it count for the Planet and the generations to come. Last ditch stand. Change or perish. Its so hard. I am so tired. But its not over yet. Strange thing is that I have always felt that I would be alive in this body to see that change take place for the better, no matter what it took to get us there. Am I right? Is the ****Great Turning just around the corner and this is the ‘darkest hour before the dawn’? Or is that just the wishful thinking of a tired activist-since-birth? I hope not!

* Ken Keyes

** Starhawk-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.

*** “Fahrenheit 911″

**** Joanna Macy

4th Sept 2004 So I guess that is what it is doing with this website. It’s amazing really. I started looking at the FrontPage Software days ago and found it all really confusing. That was when I was energetically blocked up more. Then something started to shift. “Maybe the Sun came out” the Cynic in me says with a sly grin. I Continued ‘being with’ it more likely. Anyway, one day there I started to look at it during the daytime when I wasn’t half dead and “Lo”, it was so simple that the pages literally fell into place. That’s the difference between ‘trying’ to do something through the morass of psychological junk and doing something from a clear space of creative flow. One works and the other one is just a struggle. It occurred to me that when we concentrate on struggling (and it has almost become politically correct to be a “battler”) then all our energy goes into struggle and nothing else. We only see the struggle. There may be all kinds of easy things happening around us that we could click into but we won’t see them for the struggle we have made our main viewing platform. The belief that we are “lazy” if we “take the easy way out” is all to prevalent. And of course there is a social spin-off for that. If we traded in our belief in the desirableness of “hard done by” we might just decide we preferred our life simple and free rather than loaded up with the obligation to buy back at double the cost the things that we have just produced for our employers. We might just decide to do it the easy way and have it for ourselves instead. It would certainly spoil someone’s party. Not ours though. Our fun would just begin. But there’s a catch. Making such independent choices requires us to be personally responsible for ourselves rather than following leads. And how scary is that! Very, let me tell you! But I’m sick of the same old same old. I’m sick of all the work going into making problems rather than creating solutions. “If we always do what we’ve always done, then we always get what we’ve always got”. But between “what we’ve done” and “what we’re going to do” requires us to stop doing what we have been doing, if you see what I mean. Getting off the treadmill. Even a car has to stop before it can turn around.

One way to make sure we never change directions is to make sure we are too busy to “stop”. Then we just go where the road goes, even though it may be miles away from where we originally dreamed we wanted to end up. Once I stopped struggling with the idea that right at this moment I needed to do nothing, and did it, then something new had the space to fall into place: This website for a start. And doing nothing turned into doing something that my Higher Self wanted me to do rather than what Society’s Achiever thought I aught to do. The good thing about a pause, is that it’s time to take a breath (a good thing for an asthmatic to do ).The time to look around and take stock of where I am and how I got to be here. I’m well pleased with what I see in my own personal life, hard as it has been to stop the momentum my life had generated. What I see in the Global situation however, terrifies me and sent me into depression for a while. The thing that blocked me up was my “Atlas” sub. It takes it all on it’s own shoulders rather than waiting to be shown what my souls journey is through this labyrinth. I guess the point of change came when I realized that I had let it take over. I could stop feeling responsible for the whole world and just see what HS wanted me to do. What a relief! So far so good. I’ll keep you posted………..

1 Sept 2004 First day of Spring! I have begun. Until now it hasn’t felt right to do anything, but now things may be shifting. Or maybe I am forcing it because of boredom. Time will tell. This new burst of energy will grow if it is real. If it is just a subpersonality, then it will wane again. I will then know I need more time. It’s only by trying things on can I ever find out if it’s right or not for me. Whether it’s the path my Higher Self wants me to travel down. Its strange to find myself living in a small space after a huge house. It took me so long to reach the stage where I had what most people see as security. To me it became an albatross around my neck. An emotional albatross. Ownership requires energy. Once you have, you have to maintain and defend, clean and enlarge, beautify. It consumes the creative energy. It felt that there were more important things to do. Now I can’t find them. The most important thing for me to do seems to be nothing….and it’s so hard to do. Society has got our Achievers by the nose. Getting them to listen to whatever it wants. I know that the only way I can thrive is to have the direction of my Achiever subpersonality connected to my Higher Self. That way I know that it will follow the group good, not the desires of a Society that sees growth as an addiction and counts the consequences as nothing. It seems that the way it does that is by encouraging us all to believe that the more we own the happier we will be. The problem is that it doesn’t work. The more I own, the harder I have to work and the less satisfied I become. Then I have to work harder to buy more in the search for happiness and in the end I am too old to enjoy it, if I could. But I can’t because that’s not happiness. Happiness is the freedom to create for me and those around me, whatever feels good. I haven’t got time to do that though when I am chasing the dollar. Dilemma! We all have to live. To do that it has been set up so that we have to work in the system which leaves us no time to be creative. If we had the time, it’s possible that our creativity would feed us, but we don’t so we can’t use our creativity. We must just ‘earn a living’ as prescribed for us. Catch 22! Like all tangles though, there is an end to it somewhere. However, it seems to me that we won’t find it if we don’t create the time to look. So I did. Here I am. The creativity WILL flow. I know it. But I must be patient and not allow time or money to weigh heavily on this process. It will unfold as it is meant to…