In the empire of Duality, the open door is always a Janus entity: entry & exit. The music is always swelling & falling into itself to silence. The darkness is always a placeholder for light.

In the Land of Freewill, choices are made by us in firm decision & at random whim: a right turn instead of a left can result in a drive into bliss.

Thus each moment must result in that ability of choice. It has to be more than paper or plastic when all the holy texts tell us we are unlimited Masters of the Universe. Now is the time to act like it.

Hereupon the crossroads: forgive & walk on unburdened. Deny forgiveness & you may not be given the choice of which cross you bear. We are always in the center between life & “unlife.” Every choice results in change within. Our core energy spirals up & down, in & out, upon ebb & surge. Our nature is duality, sometimes interpreted as “do-all-ity” … tho we are inclined to only do so much before the next task intervenes.

I’ve had “missed takes” in my life which amounted to classic error. I’ve incurred debt & paid in full. I’m sure there could be bestsellers written on my backlog of wrong decisions. It wasn’t just me who suffered through them; only I called it my learning process; the others suffering through these may have had a differing terminology.

If we are born innocent, are we living a lie when we learn? Perhaps this depends on the choice of learning methods. Now is the time to release all which no longer serves us, even if familiar, even if comfortable. The tide of the unknown gathers at all borders & we are chilled by it, even as we thrill to its salted bosom.

The rainbows we climb are ephemeral, slippery. Once we climb up, we must slide down tho at times we seem to fall through. I have a set of reserve wings which are gravity-proof. I can be stilled by the face of emotion & have been known to put my head down & slog on even when all the indicators say “stop right here.”

It’s all right, alright? I AM a beloved, believed-in child of God at play in the fields of the Lord. I created my life in the face of Divinity from some invisible blueprint. Is Destiny a firm destination?

In the moving away, I have constantly, unerringly moved toward. The future unwraps itself into the present & I am won.

In writing to another one day, I typed the above instead of the word “Sacredness”.  I thought of how appropos the word turned out to be – since this is what it seems the world has turned into .

I read the many ideas available around the programming of humankind & these make me wonder why we are so suggestible. I believe myself fortunate not to have subscribed to ideas which dim my personal power base. I was not subjected to the standard battery of vaccines or the pharmaceutical cornucopia so readily jammed upon Americans. I had mostly excellent nutrition along the way. I quit the world in my 40’s to learn how to care for myself physically, figuring this to be a salient halfway point.

And tho I joke much about my weight, this overdraft of adipose is, in fact, my only brush with medical mortality & has caused angst which I consciously choose to no longer lend any energy to. I take up as much space as is available for me…joyously now. It has become part of my humor – as though my body is not just a skinsuit, but a source of endless amusement as well.

But sacred mess is the state of most of the world. My donning blinkers to it may work to my advantage in that I lend no energy to the darkness which (many would have it) threatens each of us.

I read very long ago that if I do not put my attention into a situation, the power of such is lessened. This made sense to me & I have attempted to practice it since.

Today I tried to talk to the leasing company which holds the lease on a Clover credit card unit I set up when I started my business at the gym. The customer “service” rep, Gina, continued talking over me even as I tried to present my side of the story. She allowed as how my account is in collections (although I have made ongoing monthly payments after discontinuing the checking account they auto-withdrew from.) She talked over the idea that my three emails & two letters asking that they not tap a closed account for payments, telling me there are late charges galore since I did not pay. Somehow the fact that I did pay & have continued paying counted for far less than their late charges as one of my checks was deposited the day after the due date. I found it interesting talking in concert with her. I’ve never had someone simply talk over me for eight straight minutes as I tried to find out just what happened to the monthly payments made if I was overdue so many months. The phrase “junkyard dogs” comes to mind. What has happened to bring about this total breakdown in the concept of service or the honoring of intent to set up a positive outcome for both involved? Sacred-mess.

So I am browbeaten into making payments I do not owe. I have been unable to determine if they received the unit I returned, even, since no one will answer this either. I think they are salivating over the chance to collect another fee by saying I have not. And every attempt will be made to trash my hard-won credit score in the end. But, see? This phrasing participates in the idea there will not be a happy ending…just what I do not wish to lend energy to. All this brouhaha over $31.58 per month.

Do I jump in these waters & thrash around? Do I pay the late fees just to keep out of “collections”? Probably. Because peace for under $50 seems a bargain. The real question becomes, do I let this scenario suck my energy into their dark hole of greed, dishonesty & unpleasantness? I think I’ll just work it into my little comedy routine of a life. My high opinion of me as honest, hard-working, kind-to-strangers-children-animals must hold in the face of this societal impairment called greed. The oily grins offered when they “cut the deal” back when have slid off their faces, creating slippery grounds for resolution.

Where’s your sacredmess? As ACIM says, “what is stealing your peace today”? I’m here to be a piping voice for balance & understanding, for communication & tolerance in the face of crazed snarling coming over the boundary fence. This is the City Hall we have forfeited the fight to. Their morals will never match mine – but the system is set up to bite first even when the hand of conciliation is offered. None of us can “afford” risking our credit score – our good opinion of what we attempt in righteousness to do – against this kind of rabid idiocy.

Brother, can you spare a dime?

I have come to believe that vanity, and not hearing, is the last sense to leave the expiring body. I settled into this physical shape as though it is the most comfortable in the world for me – and indeed, it is!

Once upon a time (that beginning making the tale worth the tell) I wished for a perfection of form, an enviable figure with a trim waist, bubble butt, hair down to here & legs up to there. Yet this body is the crowning achievement of my physical plane.

In 2009, I succumbed to peer pressure & went for a physical. The assistant measured my height at 5’1.” “Wait a minute,” I said, “I’m 5’2.” She didn’t even smile as she said, “Not anymore.” I could hear her thinking, “Another of these over-50’s with no understanding of shrinkage.” Wrong…I did know shrinkage, just thought it’d never apply to me! I knew it as dry fact, without the damper of experience.

“I can be as tall as I imagine myself to be,” I mumbled, standing under that slim metal measuring rod. Gravity, whether pulling me down or pushing (a late-arriving theory) can do its worst. I need not pay attention. My visual world pretty much ends at 5’3”, so if the item is on the top shelf, I don’t buy it until the younger (taller) attendants walk me back down the aisle to my etheric imprint to show it to me. “Up here, Ma’am, see?”

(I quit doing Girl Scout troops when the third graders collectively looked down on me. I started training adults instead, where we were all around the same height.)

True, I never returned to a physician’s office. No need for more bad news, yeah? They seldom have tidings of great joy. In fact, their track record is quite incommensurate in that regard.

I call it compacting, or condensing, not shrinking. Semantics rule…I should know.

I’m not timing out, I’m indemnifying.

In the days when I had a cute little figure, when I bought for fashion at boutiques & trunk shows & fixed my hair for husbands, I didn’t really pay so much attention to vanity.

It was a fleeting time, to be sure, before the situation changed. The Pill put on ten pounds I’ve yet to lose 50 years later. The hysterectomy seemed to create lots of storage space for adipose. And since the area is stretchy to allow for growth; wait, I don’t want to go there. You’ll see no profile shots of me on this site. I didn’t think my female parts took up quite as much space as has become available.

This body is the go-to one. I wake up to reassemble it every morning, molecule by molecule. So what if it bulges here & there? This is why science invented elastic & necessity invented Spandex.

I burst into song to be free of single-minded vanity which reduces life to what actually fits & looks nice. Too limiting! It’s a burden I’d rather not bear. My smile weighs a lot less than the rest of me & that’s what counts. I love & honor fresh greens; I just prefer pasta.

The twinges & creaks concurrent with approaching seventy nourish the stellar joy of rising to walk two miles, attempting to dance my ass off now & again, & knowing I’m not competition for anything but a contest of wits.

Being a plushie surely stands out over all those Barbie’s.

I guess I’m still growing into me.

Life rolls the dice as we sit at the table, playing the game. I don’t know all the card-playing mantras – seven come eleven & that…but I believe in living forward with a healthy dose of mystery pouring around the edges of any shades I’ve inadvertently drawn.

Dark never lasts. The light breaks through in the most unusual places. I find signs (literally) like the one above on Bullard Street in Silver City. The note on the door said they were in meditation session, so I could not explore further; however, I was quite satisfied with as much as I did find. We are all in need of grooming, four-legs & two-legs both. Wouldn’t you say?

We groom our lives incessantly, trying to get all the edges lined up, all the stripes aligned in colorful rows. We try to keep to the speed limits & see to our safety. We keep in touch with old friends as we discover new relationships. So we outpace the question “What’s in it for me?”

Circumstances morph to need. If you can unlearn old habits & pour energy into the more rewarding & fulfilling “new” ones, all circumstance can be satisfied. This is what is so intriguing about the Biblical phrase “And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins.” This would seem to be more difficult in practice. We age & our bodies are old wineskins… The new life we pour into them seems at first to create untenable situations. Where do we find strength to leave old relationships, to forge new ones, to remake what once held meaning into what we are called to do for fulfillment at this exact moment?

There doesn’t always seem to be a way through. An old adage from the Orient tells us “Be water. Flow” The teachings of Abraham (Esther Hicks) were at one time all about going downstream instead of fighting against the current. And this, Abraham repeatedly said, was so hard because as a culture, we do not feel we are in accomplishment unless we are fighting.

But fighting is part of the old paradigm. The new life pouring into the planet in the form of children who are aware of the the prism of love all must filter through shows us just one example. The expressiveness of our four-leg friends/mentors/companions is another. Every morning pries us open, begs us to allow in the untried, untested, new, while simply glossing over that stubborn “no!” we want to hide in corners & wail. Yes, species die off. Yes, trees are drying up. Yes, oceans are dying. But let’s all just sit in the space of Yes! long enough to understand that this same vacuum we see forming is abhorred by the continuum of Life living itself all around us in glory heretofore untold by history.

We are based in history without the references as to why & where our habits arose. We feel more comfortable to practice the old far more than the new & it’s time for that to stop. It’s time to welcome in the change we are invited to become. If those invited to be trees want to move into another life, we must needs understand this enough to help redirect their energy. We must fashion the new wineskins, hold ourselves open, allow the pouring overflow to fill us. We must groan through the growth process this engenders with the sure & certain trust we were fashioned to have this happen in precisely the manner it does.

If you find you’re guilty of some sin, make amends. Make Amens – sum them up & bring these to closure so refreshing, novel, au courant (coeur = heart) that fresh information can manifest. If the trees die, look for what now grows there. If old habits have packed up their heavy trunks & laid these by the door as you walk out, leave them behind.

Try it. Close your eyes, press on the lids lightly, envision what you would rather have take place & pour the new wine of your beautiful Light energy into your refashioning life. It can be easy if you don’t make it hard. It can be done if you start somewhere, lay something down, pick something else up. I told a friend to write a love letter to his ailing knees & he wrote back to ask, “What should I write?” I replied, “This is your task. Find a pen, smooth out the paper in front of you & begin.”

All we need is at hand. Reach for it! Give life permission to stomp something out so that making new wine becomes all there is to do. I can’t tell you how to do it – I can only suggest that it has worked throughout time. I can tell you there are paths through the forest waiting for your feet; footprints in sand which fit only your size eights, ideas which only you make manifest & bring into fruition. This is the promise we are given. This is the talent we are not permitted to pull a bushel over anymore.

When everything else is closing in, walk on. Expand, try, seek & bring the finding close enough to inhale. Breathe life in & allow it to explore your body with the love it bears for you.

Smile, too, & don’t forget to have some fun with it. No one can hold us down when it is our time to fly. And at times that may mean mean jumping off the cliff to see if the wings work. Determine what you want to be & become who you are, leaving behind who you think you were.

Find Your Yes!