spiritflight.co.nz

6 Sept 2005

There is so much going on in the world at the moment. I am sure, like me, you are having trouble keeping up with it all. Hurricanes and fires devastating the United State. Typhoons hitting Japan, and China. Then there is the dire outlook for Global Warming (or should we say ‘overheating’ which connotes a less ‘cozy’ image of what’s truly happening). Our food is being irradiated, chemically interfered with, as well as genetically engineered. On top of that war comes up to meet us everywhere. Recently a friend said that she had spoken to 6 women friends in 48 hours. All had expressed a deep  free-floating sadness. They were surprised to find they were not alone. How could they be?? If we are not aware of what’s happening, we must have been hiding under a rock for decades! Even if we are not activists and environmentalists, there is still enough coming at us from everywhere to make peace a fleeting experience before the news and the morning coffee, if it exists there. What to do?? Well I have been giving a lot of thought to that recently. Having been a long term activist and an even longer proponent of assisting people to change their lives, it has come as a great shock to me to realise that at this point, I can do nothing!

It feels that the time for doing no more and being still is upon us! There comes a time when all decisions have been taken, that there is no more that can be done until the consequences that accrue from those choices make themselves apparent. “Straining at a knat” was an expression my mother used to use. It meant continuing to put effort into something that no longer required it, or required less than that which was being used. It seems like there is a lot we could do, but in actual fact, it is quite possible that the best thing we could all do about now is put our own house in order. It’s like a farmer that plants all her seeds in the appropriate season, but continues to do so when the time for planting gives way to the new seasons need to nourish the fledgling plants. Our actions need to be appropriate to the times.

No matter how we look at it, cheap oil is going to run out, the ice caps are going to melt. Its merely at matter of when. What we have to look at now is how we are going to cope with that. Have we got the emotional strength and courage to face the times ahead? Are we willing to embrace new ways of living in the world that will be very different to what we have become accustomed? Are we willing to let go of expectations we have come to see as normal, and replace them with no expectations at all? Are we capable of living with uncertainty? If we are not, I suspect the times ahead could be fraught with anxiety and anger. Now is the time to build ‘emotional muscle’: to strengthen our inner resolve and learn to listen to our instincts. For it is they that guide us through times of chaos. The mind knows what has worked in the past. It has no idea what will work from here on in. But our instinctual feeling are always there, beneath the layer of mind that controls our everyday life. What happens when a car comes screaming out of a side street. If you try to stop and think about it your done! Making the call to either accelerate out of it or brake has to be done in a split second. If we don’t trust that, we are a statistic. Life is something that goes on while we are making plans!

So right now my instincts are telling me to withdraw from all the effort that I have been putting into my attempts to change things. I am being told to go within. I am being told to scale down even further, slow down more, trust myself. This is tantamount to telling me to move as far away from the corporate mall-styled environment we currently live within as I can get. To need as little of it as I can manage. Am I sounding like a modern day Noah? Well maybe I am! But I see nothing wrong with having a life raft handy. The less we have tied up in the financial world the less we have to lose when our dependence on global goods and services as a people flounder. As it will flounder sometime in the future based on common sense. When the expenditure exceeds the possibility of income, the shortfall is a collapse. This is as true environmentally as it is financially. How well are you placed to survive the collapse of either in your personal life? Now’s the time to do something about it. Globally we have gone too far to turn back. It’s down to personal contingency plans.

When someone stopped a cop in New Orleans recently to ask for help during Hurricane Katrina, the cops response was, “Get away. It’s each man for himself now!” But that’s not necessarily how it needs to be.  There is a way that we can help each other survive. It’s called community, not policy. Do you know your neighbours? Would they help you in a fix? Would you help them? If not, then maybe its a good idea to start by saying ‘Hi’. Getting a heart connection with those around you before it does get down to ‘Everyone for themselves’. It is something everyone can do. Who knows? It might be the thing that saves you! Certainly it’s more likely to occur if people care about each other. That doesn’t cost a cent!

4 Aug 2005

Its been a long time since I felt inspired to write here. Maybe too long. Its not that things haven’t been occurring to me, that’s for sure. I have been doing quite a bit of work on my two books. Pete has been working with Kerry to show the movie The End of Suburbia to our local community. It was spectacular to see 40 people turn out and care about each other and themselves enough to participate. We had good home made food and lots of discussion after talks as well. I got to speak to my favourite issue…creating local facilities by consciously choosing to spend our money closer to home. Its so important. When the oil prices hit our pockets even more deeply by the end of the year and forever after, and the cost of imported goods makes them unavailable to most of us, we are really going to need local operatives to supply our needs. But that takes time. People don’t build businesses over night. If we want them then, we must support them now, against the super corporate businesses and supermarkets, even though it might be more expensive to do so. I guess I see it as “spend locally now, or go without tomorrow!” No point in waiting until its too late. And that’s the point that got me on this computer today. I just heard three of my neighbours chatting outside. (I wasn’t eavesdropping, they were loud and my caravan is close to the street). “Did you go to the film the other day?”…..”No, don’t know about all this oil stuff.”……”No, me either. Don’t worry about it ’til it happens I say!”….”Yeah, me too!”

I’ll bet there are a lot of people thinking like that. What comes up for me is this: when its too late to take responsibility for themselves and their own well-being, are they going to want those that have done so to extend that care to them? What about their own loved ones? Will they be happy to see them go without? It’s typical of how our society has trained us to think…separately. Economic rationalism has destroyed community thinking. It’s everyone for themselves. Well it isn’t going to work that way from here on in. If we don’t have a good community that has pulled together and who we have committed to, we are going to be running around looking for one “when the time comes”. But whether those communities will be willing to stand beside people that wouldn’t stand beside them, and themselves, when they had a chance, is a moot point. Maybe some people will get lucky and those that have what it takes to survive will take them in. Some won’t. That will be hard for all. I guess how I feel is that taking responsibility for ourselves is more than just making sure we have money to pay our bills. It’s about the heartfelt caring what happens to us all, and the willingness to be part of ensuring that we all survive. At least as many as possible. But that takes work from us all, not just the few.

So for those of you that are reading this and think Peak Oil is another Y2K and it won’t happen, best you read a bit more of the facts that are out there instead of the sports section. Look at the oil stock prices rise, estimate your ability to survive if there is no work and money’s not worth a hill of beans (in fact, the hill of beans will be worth a lot more). What will your life be like then? If it doesn’t stack up, then make some changes and make ‘um fast. What you need more than money is water, food growing, alternative electricity, no debt and people around you that love and respect you, and are willing to do what you can’t as you do what they can’t. Pulling together it’s called. That always has been worth more than money can buy. Now even more so. Are you going to part of the ‘new way’ or are you going to be one of those who looks for someone to blame when it’s too late, because you “waited until it happened”?

28 May 2005

Its not a new thought to me, but its come up again. “Things” are such a bizarre concept. Our whole life is dedicated to accumulation of them. We don’t need them, but we have been taught that we do, so we work really hard to get more and more of them. When we don’t have any more room for them, we have a big clear out. Ten the things that we don’t want anymore go to places like second hand shops and the tip. Now we have some space, we go out and buy more things and keep working yet again so that we can do that. They fill up our homes and our cars and our wardrobes. In fact it appears that is what we have houses for….a place to put more ‘things’. But then we also need sheds and garages and basements and attics. It feels like the world is drowning in things. Globalization and the market economy is all about making more and more things and getting more and more money to buy more and more things. Why? I question this all the time. What is it all for? I can see that any ‘thing’ makes us one iota happier, healthier or more peaceful and content. In fact most of the wars seem to be about who owns what. I don’t get it any more. It feels like we are all in the grip of some kind of circular insanity. The only way to end the madness is to stop buying and making more. After all, all that we have got will last us a few millennia at least. If I never bought another piece of clothing, i could probably be warm and covered for the rest of my natural life.Humm!

25 May 2005

I feel great changes happening. I have no idea what or why, nor whether it is personal or global, but its there. A feeling that something is coming together. There has been a lot of good activity around me recently. People beginning to change their priorities, or at least I am seeing those that are. In the midst of all this chaos, I am excited by the possibilities. Is it something in me that has shifted, or something shifting on a larger energetic scale or both? My experience tells me that nothing shifts in isolation. As above, so below! As within, so without. I don’t know about timescales, but I have a feeling it will all be alright in the long run. Its true that when a logjam occurs in a river, debris builds up around the blockage. Little blockages attach themselves to the larger one. Then when the big log shifts, all the little ones get swept away with it. It seems to be like that in life. Once we have  accepted and made the decisions that have keep us bound, the energy flows and flows. We play creative catch-up in our lives until we are where we need to be in order to meet our next challenge of growth. Its such an elegant system, mirrored all throughout the natural world. To be part of that is such a privilege.

22 May 2005
I have just read the Peak Oil Newsletter.  It contained a great explanation , of what I saw in the movie “In a Land of Plenty” from a New Zealand point of view, last nigh”: the real effects of economic rationalism all on real people. This economy is tied into oil and energy. “Whoever controls the energy, controls the world”  has been the US theory since the end of the war. The only snag in that is that if the ’source’ of the easily available energy is gone, so has the power and control. Chaos reigns. This Society may have been living on borrowed time, but we have all got used to life as it has been for the last few centuries. We cannot envision that it will ever be any different. But we must!!! Our whole system only stays in place because money allows it to and money depends on oil now, not on work that people do as it used to. The article explained really well the way that the whole economy is founded on ’speculation’: the ‘possibility’ that more will be made/invented and marketed. When that speculation crumbles so does everything else. Including Law and Order as we now know it. However, the human race existed long before the word ‘economy’ or oil’. It can again survive past this point, but not in the way we have got used to.
Last night I suggested (strongly)  to the group who watched the movie with me, that there were things that we could do that would begin to detach us from the sinking ship so that when it goes down (as it must, because its all based on speculation), we will have a softer landing.  Because the whole false economy is based on our continued consumption (buying more and more, which has to be made and made, which uses up more and more of the resources of the planet that is running out of just about everything including clean air), some of the things we can do is to consume differently. So here are a few ideas that I have coming up.

* Use less…..check that we really need whatever it is we are about to buy and that its not something to make us feel or look good psychologically, because it wont do that actually. Its just what advertising wants us to believe. A new cell phone wont make us more powerful and bigger cars won’t make us more sexy.
* Co-operate instead of compete….the whole economy thrives only by taking the power away from the masses and placing it in the hands of the few who invented the whole idea in the first place. They do that by setting us against one another. Can you imagine 6 million Jews being told to take a suitcase and get on a train enmasse by authorities and doing it if they had been united, sharing information and feeling powerful in themselves??? Hell no! But that’s what happened Germany in WW11. If they had been strong and pulling together, I don’t believe the Nazi could have destroyed them. They would not have been on tat train the took them to the gas chamber. And there may have been a much shorter WW11. But we are all the same. We have believed what we are told rather than looking with our own eyes, staying united, and doing what we need to do instead. So helping each other rather than helping the system is a skill for survival of great worth.
* Have independent sources for our own needs to be met where possible…. The more we can provide for ourselves outside the economy of big business, the less we are affected by what happens to Big Business. So if we can gain the skills we need to survive (like fishing, making things-from cloths to diesel engines), and put more and more energy into that, than competing in the system for money, the better off we will be. There is a great book by Tom Brown Jn called “The Tracker”. It talks a lot about all this. But also learning how to be inventive because that’s how our forefathers were and we will need to be again. We need to get our own creativity working rather than rely on a store that wont always be there. If you can grow it or make it, start doing it now. Get the skills. Don’t wait until later when your need will be greater and your survival depends on it and you haven’t got a clue.
* Buy locally…….The more we put our business into the hands of our neighbors, the more they will put theirs with us. What’s the point of paying for something to be shipped from China when someone close could make you one? Less fuel, less air pollution, less money in the hands of the corporations that run all this, and good relationships with the people that are going to help you survive…. together. If we encourage our neighbours into being creative by buying from them, when the oil crash comes, we will have local makes of things we need. If we rely on Big Business, we will be out of luck and out whatever it is we needed. Check the labels before you buy. If you can get something made close to home buy that instead of the imported or transported alternative. If there’s no label (and this is why the Govt. doesn’t want to make labeling compulsory) don’t buy it!! The further it has to come the less likely it is that it will be on the shelves later.
* Get used to eating local produce in season…Mangos from Oz may be nice, but they will not be around once the economy crashes because they have to be shipped and no one will have the oil or the money. If the local cabbage is growing, eat it. If its not in season, eat something else that is available locally until it is. That will mean your diet will have to change but you will be a whole lot healthier (though a little bored to begin with) because they have to pump all sorts of crap into food to keep it during travel.
* Prepare yourself mentally for a different sort of world and lifestyle up ahead. Those people who continue to be uninformed are in denial. And that’s just what they want us to be. The more informed we are the less we are going to keep buying there propaganda or their products. The reality hits those that believe the rhetoric the hardest. Loggers that are running out of forest to log, farmers who have ruined the topsoil by cutting down all the trees, creating draught, people who neglect their friends and partners for work who wake up one morning and find themselves alone. They all have one thing in common. They refused to see the writing on the wall, and are screaming and blaming after its too late. No Govt. funds are going to replace forests or topsoil or relationships once they have gone. So if we continue to train ourselves for jobs and lifestyles that have a short lifespan, we are going to be in trouble. Economists are going to be well out of a job in a few decades, as will miners, loggers and sheep farmers.

* Find good people to support and be supported by throughout the process. “The divide and separate” policy has broken the back of our communities and neighborhoods. Where people used to get together to bring the hay in, or support the sick, or help with the kids, now we buy childcare so that we can go work for the corporations, hire contractors to get the hay in, and build houses, and put the sick in hospital and the old in homes. All so that we can carry out ‘business as usual’. Time to build relationships with Friends or Whanau. The future will not be a good place for the isolated person. It might be good to be away from the cities. They are going to go crazy. But its not a time to be without those you care about.

* Live in the NOW but watch for signs of change. Whilst we all still live in this society the way it is, and have to make decisions to some extent based on what’s here, we need to be aware of the signs that we are being shown personally and globally. We are living in a time of radical change. The sand is shifting under our feet. We need to be very present and aware of all that is going on around us and in us so that we make appropriate decisions with our life direction. We cannot rely on the current way, but the new way is not yet here. We must be alert as we would have to be if we were living in a forest. We need to develop our ability to listen to our own instincts…and use it. Following others wont work unless those others are going where you need to. In which case, you will already know the way.

30 April 2005

“Have you heard about Peak Oil?” she says. Inevitably the answer is “No”. Why don’t they know? Why is it that something so big that it is going to change the face of human society world-wide is so obtuse?? It seems to me that the power-brokers that don’t want us to know that life is not going to be just ”business as usual” have done a good job of hiding the truth. They were able to deny ”Global Warming” until recently too. When its too late to stop the earth from ”adjusting” herself. They are hiding the fact that oil has all but finished. The half that is left is too expensive to extract. Cheap oil that has meant modern society and has driven the economy for decades is over!!! When I speak about it, people make remarks about car pooling and bicycles. They don’t get it. They were never supposed to. Its not just their cars that are going to go. As I sit here in my caravan and gaze around most of what I see was made out of, with the help of or transported by, guess what?? OIL. The food on the supermarket shelves is put there by oil. The bags we carry it home in are made from oil byproducts as are all plastic goods. The electricity is maintained by oil, the coal is moved by oil, the world runs on oil. Synthetic  materials in cloths are made from oil. Its the best case of ”putting all your eggs in one basket” that ever was. Well, the baskets almost empty. The hen has stopped laying and all that we find are what she laid last season.

So what’s going to happen? Firstly, costs are going to skyrocket as the transportation costs of goods, particularly food, go through the roof. Then there will be shortages as it becomes too expense to keep manufacturing certain things that we have come to expect. Food that we have stopped growing locally because of globalization will disappear. Cloths that we have stopped making will disappear for the same reasons. Replacement parts will become a thing of the past and EVERYONE will be recycling because that’s the only way to get anything. Next, those that are already on welfare and those that number among the working poor, will find themselves severely without. Those with high mortgages to maintain who are right now only just making it, won’t be anymore. The well-healed will still be able to afford the little that is available for a while, but as their wealth has depended on commerce and industry, and there will be little of that without oil, their wealth will not last long nor be worth much as money loses its value. Value will shift to those people with skills. Particularly food growing skills and cloths-makers. In fact, crafts-persons of all sorts.

What happens to those who are addicted to substances no longer available? What happens to those with lots of kids to feed? What happens to those who require medication to stay alive (medicine, and the medical profession in general, are no where without drugs and high tech equipment. Ask the Iraqis.) What about the old? Chaos. For a time the world will be in chaos. Many will not survive. In the inner cities, violence will break out as people’s frustrations reach boiling point. As those that are not opposed to taking, will take. Best not live in one of those places. You can’t grow food in concrete and the supermarkets will be empty.

But there will come a time, maybe long after I have gone, when the world will become a more peaceful place. The lighting will be soft and the noise level low. The people will have learned that we survive only through co-operation and community. Through treating the Earth with respect and each other the same way. We will have gained back many skills we discarded for plastic, and our young will work alongside the old for the good of all. Where the Spirit of Place is honoured, as is the wisdom of all things. That will be a world worth changing for.

So what can we do?? Well, we can get ‘mentally prepared’ as a friends 15 year old son so wisely said the other day. We can readjust our priorities to something real that reflects what is really happening in the world. Rather than planning on long distance travel, we can look at forming closer bonds with those around us, so that when the time comes to rely on others they are there and care. We can begin to use our money to purchase things that are going to benefit us in a world where self-sufficiency will be paramount.  Have we got enough land to grow food on?? Have we got seeds to plant?? How about water tanks? Composting toilets would be a help. Are the cloths we have in the wardrobe going to keep us warm without heating or are they just for show?? Have we got enough food in the cupboards to keep us going in the meantime? Something to cook it on??

We can up-skill and I don’t mean do a polytech course in management. We need skills that will help us in a world without corporations. Electrical engineers familiar with alternative energy sources will be in great demand. People that can do things with hammers, pipe, and yes, NO.8 wire even. We need to know how to save seed and planting times. Recognizing wild foods would be very handy, as well as fishing. We may do well to know how to spin and weave and make felt out of the abundant sheep around, not to meantion skinning possums. Hey how about cooking, milking, making fire?? All of this could come in handy. Banking won’t help much.

In the meantime, we can turn off the TV and start educating ourselves. “They” are not going to tell us what we need to know because if they did we would all stop buying what they are marketing. We can use the net to source information, and alternative skills. Most of all we need to talk about it and to each other.  We need to share information. Those that are informed are better prepared. If you are aware of what’s happening, you can cope. If you are unaware, you are a victim. We need each other like never before. If we turn against each other in this time, we will not survive. We will survive and prosper eventually if we empower ourselves as well as our neighbour. We pull together or we pull ourselves apart.

How does all this make me feel? Excited and afraid. Sad and angry. We need a new world. What we will have to go through to get it does not turn me on. But I am grateful that I have enough knowledge not to wake up one morning to the biggest shock in millennia.

6 April 2005

She groans and moans and splits apart. She blusters and shakes. She is shaking us like a dog shakes its fleas. She is no victim. If we would learn to work with her rather than ‘work her’ our survival may well have been assured. Now we are in her hands as she heals what we refuse to. I welcome the return of her power. That which brings death, also brings renewed life. Maybe I will become the compost upon which the next generation will thrive, the soil through which the planet will regenerate. Blessed Earth. We have too long ceased to know you as you truly are. You have become a resource for our misguided dreams. Thank you for rising up again and reminding us who you really are. Maybe now we will rediscover who we are. We are in for a big surprise. Bless you Mother. You love us more than we love ourselves.

12 March 2005

I’m sitting here on the banks of the Aviemore Dam, a salmon pink sunset creeping over the horizon. It’s been an amazing day. Something that keeps coming up for me since my self-imposed period of non-doing, is that I notice more and more the frenetic pace of those around me. Working, hard work, long work, annoying work, work that takes over as many hours of the day as is practicable, seems to have great status. People boast about how hard they are working and how tired they are and how much more they have to do. They sigh and they wipe their brow with pride, telling me what a bugger of a week it’s been and that they still have more to do on the weekend. They quickly get in that they must, however, find some time to mow the lawn and go for a quick jog because they need some time out, too. I have been feeling more and more breathless as they share their daily lives with me and I sometimes suggest some time off. To that they reply that it’s scheduled down the track, when they intend to take a break, and landscape the crib!!!!! Exhausted, I crawl back into my caravan and try to get bored or guilty at contemplating my navel.  I used to get a similar response from people when I used to ask them in my practice, what they felt. They usually answered that they felt it was time to do or change something and looked quite bemused when I exclaimed that they were telling me their thoughts not their feelings. Feelings have sensations attached, I would say. But they couldn’t get it. Not till I trained them, over many months, how to recognize a feeling. Now I see this same bemusement when I suggest that people stop doing things. What? Are recreational things not resting? Not stopping? No, they are doing something else. It may well be enjoyable but if done at the same frenetic pace there is little difference in the action taken.

I have questioned myself time and again. Am I projecting onto others because I, myself, have nothing to do? Sometimes I still question that. Am I somehow letting down the team, the community, by refusing to be gainfully employed in some worthwhile activity? Isn’t not wanting to do things depression? Well …no. I have chosen to do nothing to allow what comes up to come up, and what is surfacing is the feeling that the world is spinning around me at a rate of knots, seemingly going nowhere. Well, that’s interesting. Going nowhere fast.

I lay on a log on Katiki Beach earlier today, and stared at the sky. I put a lump of sand on the back of each hand and held them out, laughing that I was practicing flying. I started to wonder why I needed to justify what I was doing and I realized that I needed a purpose to do what I was doing. Then it hit me. That was what I saw happening with all my friends. They were soooo purposeful. Everything in their lives had to have a purpose or it was invalid. Recreation had to be fixing the holiday home or the garden. Playing sport was allowed, as it added to fitness and skills and could be competed against, thereby creating the purpose of winning. Nothing seems to be done for no reason at all anymore. I started to think of the concept of purposelessness. Not doing anything, or doing something for no reason whatsoever. I looked at my dog and saw her digging around me….for nothing. Just the hell of it. I watched the clouds skim across the sky and then stop. Why? No reason. I thought about my old dad, and how he talked about sitting on farm gates and whistling when he was young, and I realized that all time has to be accounted for these days.

Then another realization hit me. Nothing in the world has a purpose. It just is. Now this paradox is going to totally confuse my students. I talk all the time about the Higher Self representing our purpose here in this life. But when I talk about our life purpose, it is more the essence of who we are than a justification for being that. Our purpose can just as easily be doing nothing as doing something. All other purposes are merely ways of appearing valid……to others. So the concept of there being no purpose is not at odds with that at all, although I am sure the dichotomy will confuse some no end. At this point I just cracked up laughing. All these people, world- wide, frantically doing things that amount to nothing for fear of doing nothing and being judged for it. That’s a scream. It’s also incredibly sad. Maybe the old zen saying “Before enlightenment draw water and chop wood. After enlightenment draw water and chop wood” could be changed to “Before enlightenment draw water and chop wood. After enlightenment do whatever you like because it doesn’t matter anyway”.

1 March 2005

Process has been hitting me hard and fast this year. For that matter, for the last couple of years. Taking time out from work and earning is something that we don’t often give ourselves. Most people would say they can’t. Most of us could, if we were willing to change our priorities. Selling the house allows me to sit with myself for a few years. The fallout from that however, is that there is nothing to distract us/me  from our/my internal process when we do take that time out. I suspect that’s why most of us don’t do it. Looking at and feeling the pain that we are in and actually be willing to learn from it and grow is not for the faint-hearted. For me, I don’t want to live with it inside a moment longer than I have to. Mum said it was better out than in and I agree with her. Getting it out requires observing the pain however, and that’s what puts people off. So I have been being with the stuff that I used my work to avoid and its been coming up thick and fast, but I have had the time to deal with it and heal it and I have been doing that. Many fears have been faced and moved on from. Many changes are still to come. But the theme of the need to ‘live differently’ continues to repeat itself. Last weekend I went with 9 others to the Psychosynthesis Conference down here in Dunedin. We lived, ate, processed, talked, played, together for 3 days, in a forest round a central fire. We did rituals, drummed, gave talks for each others as well as planned the activities for the year ahead. When I eventually left to drive home, I felt that I was entering an alien environment. The traffic, noise and people: the pollution of the city, small as it is, all left me feeling that I would rather live in the forest with my friends. I felt grief that the weekend was over, but it brought home to me, how very much it feels right for me to live in a community of like-minded others in a natural environment. I suspect that is true for all of us if we were but able to experience it. Most of us never have or ever will. So the urban/suburban chaos that we think is life remains our only known option. If we would but stop what we are doing for a while. If we would question our commitment to self-destructive avoidance of what is real in our lives, maybe we would find a place inside that say ‘No More’. A place that starts us looking for alternative ways that may be just out of our current field of vision. Maybe, just maybe, we would see what we never dreamed was possible: a new way. And if we kept looking in that direction, perhaps we would see that its more than just a dream. Its a possibility. We can do whatever we set our path towards. All we have to do to begin is stop doing what we are doing long enough to see those possibilities and begin choosing them instead.

23rd Jan 2005

This website fills the gap as I battle with the concept of redundancy. The conflict that is not wanting to do anything and not wanting to do nothing is ironic. I am more than happy to leave the Psychosynthesis work to others. It has been the way that I have been able to do my bit for healing Self and Others. Without it I wonder whether there is something else I can do, need to do and on what level. There comes a time in everyone’s life when they must pass the mantle to the next generation. I am willing to do that, but I question if there is a place still for me in this civilization of ours between now and when I leave. The concept of gracious retirement does not go down too well with me. I was never going to do it. I was going to work till I dropped. I didn’t count on my Higher Self wanting something different. I didn’t count on me wanting something different. But what is it I want? I don’t know and HS isn’t saying. Yet anyway. I await ungraciously the next chapter to unfold. I will learn. I hope its not the hard way. Tsunami’s notwithstanding, the world has changed. I guess we all wait to find out how. Maybe we all are having our job descriptions reordered. Transition is always the hardest time. The light at the end of the tunnel may or may not be just around the corner. But moving forward is all I can do. I guess that’s the same for us all.

4th Jan 2005

I had a wonderful Xmas up at Lake Ohau. We were miles from anything except mountains, lakes, rivers and friends. So far away that we didn’t know about the Tsunami until 2 days later. It’s amazing how world events just change things. Not only the physical things they touch, but the concepts we hold. Concepts like safety. There had not been a quake or tidal wave in that area since the 1800’s. The ice caps have not melted for millennia, but now the grass can seen in Greenland. Does it change my life? I still get up and eat breakfast. But now I get up and eat breakfast with the sure knowledge that each breakfast cannot be taken for granted. Just because it hasn’t happened, is no guarantee that it won’t. There is something sane about being aware. Not worried. Aware. Worry is when we fear the consequences of the future.  We paralyze ourselves. ‘Aware’ is when we know the possibilities, and live on in the present moment. Worry destroys the future either way. Awareness lives with all of it, good and not so good . Out of that comes all other possibilities. An AND can arise out of awareness. Of course the other option is called denial. “It’ll never happen here!” Or  “I don’t want to know what’s going on because there’s nothing I can do”. That’s the flip side of worry. Sort of “Ignore it and it will go away”, as opposed to “Worry about it enough and it will never happen”.

Awareness give us options that the other two methods don’t. We can have what we have now as well as do what must be done when the time comes. The Tsunami has taken me into a place of acceptance. I know what’s going on in the world. I have done what I could to help. Now it’s out of my hands. Maybe it always was. But I did what I had to do. I always will, as soon as I am aware of what that is. Now what I have to do is accept that the choices are made. The die is cast. The time for the consequences is here. I have always said that we can make a new choice not to step out in front of a bus, right up to the time when the bus hits us. After that, that choice is no more. We have new choices before us. How to live with a broken body for instance. Or what to come back as, next time. There are some things in the world that have now reached the consequences stage. Wisdom is in knowing when to let go, and without regret, make a new choice from the current circumstances. I await the new information that will show me my next choice. Bless you all for 2005. May wisdom always accompany you on your journey, no matter what the choices are that you are called to make. No matter where those choices take you. We sit in the Divine Unknown. Its always the safest place to be.