K8sl's Blog

I woke today to the horrible news that anyone in the country without tv, internet, radio or people calling them to tell them about it were spared; another expression of rage ending in carnage in Colorado. I was glad to hear what Obama had to say about it, relieved that I didn’t have to listen to Romney. Of course, if I hadn’t checked the web, or turned on the radio I could have gone on through the day without knowing – without more grieving for strangers, without more wondering why anyone would think it would make him feel better to slaughter a dozen or more people just out for a night’s entertainment.
The thing is, that everyday this is happening somewhere. People get up every day without remembering that we have been at war in one way or another for most of our lives.
A friend of mine was murdered in January. She was an entirely good-hearted, uplifting and generous person. A brilliant gardener, hard worker and new grandmother with a voice like an angel. I knew her because many years ago she sang in a jazz combo with my cousin. Over the years, she and I crossed paths infrequently, but every time I saw her was a clear experience. She was never insulting or derisive or even in a bad mood that I experienced. It’s not that she didn’t struggle with normal, regular human challenges, it’s just that she reached for the best in anyone, the best in herself, the most understanding and light in any situation. This is someone who over the decades I knew her was entirely committed to the practice of Heaven on Earth.
Because I have always tended to come from a more defended location, it seemed to me that she was being a Pollyanna. I came to know that this was not the truth of her, just as being hostile was not the truth of me.
She had lately become a shamanic healer through the Four winds Society, and I volunteered to be a practice subject. Curious but skeptical, I selected a stone and laid down on her table while she waved smoke around, and chanted. I drifted and handed over control. I figured if it was bogus I had nothing to lose, and if it was not, I also had nothing to lose. She performed what she called an extraction, something she hadn’t expected to be doing, but it amounts to pulling an energy parasite out of the subtle body. For people who don’t believe that this kind of thing exists, let me tell you, it does. I felt a “thing” being pulled out of me, and the short story is that afterwards, things began to change for me. That night I went to sleep without the continual voice in my head upbraiding me, criticizing and hating. I didn’t wake up int he middle of the night with terror that kept me awake until dawn. For days afterwards I didn’t have a evil companion in my head telling me what a piece of shit I was like a mantra. It was freedom I hadn’t experienced since I was a toddler. There had been nothing in my life that had made a dent in this relentless internal shredding that often made me wish for death, except that I feared that without the dampening of the physical this demon would have me completely. In the quietest and most unassuming of ways, Carol saved my life. Until I went through that process with her, I had been using so much of my energy trying to counteract, ignore, do battle with or otherwise escape the pain of inner tyranny that I was too tired to even know I had a life.
There was more to the process, it happened over a period of months. Subtly, my own desire for my life, to be able to have some openness to others [progress, not perfection], to stop several deadly habits, to start going in a direction that looked inspiring, grew.
Carol went traveling in Arizona to help a friend of hers find a place near the Canyon to live she and her friend were shot multiple times from behind as they sat at a scenic overlook by some guy with an assault rifle and military issue bullets.
23 shells on the ground, 2 people dead and the engine still running when they were found.
I drive by her house often, her son is living there now, her car still in the garage and I feel her presence hovering around now and then. If I believed in a God who had a plan, I’d believe that there’s something more. I have to rely on my sense that the universe is not a wasteful system, though it is inhabited by some apparently wasteful beings.

This entry was posted on July 20, 2012 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.