The Saga of Christina – Finding Herself - Finding Family

Episode 15 and a half – Finding out Dan is a fine man

The current mindset of the writer is verging on morose. Blindsided by a disloyal husband, when I swore for decades I’d never marry, yet was stupid enough to over ride that bit of wisdom to immediately be kicked in the teeth for it, within weeks of the override. However, having been given my walking papers, I am now wild and free, on the street, after calling him on his dishonesty backfired and instead of begging for forgiveness, the unfortunate soul told me to get the hell out.

With 40+ years of Army under his belt and all the resultant Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome on top of it, he is due to retire out. The counselor at the Military Family Resource Centre (MFRC) told me its common for the ‘member’ to act irrationally, even become dangerous. Well, my husband is as irrational as they come now, and I’ve been told that since he returned from 2 months away on assignment elsewhere, on Sunday, I should steer clear of him and find other places to stay until calmer heads prevail.

So, since I’m the one that is feeling like I’ve just had open heart surgery as an outpatient, I am honouring myself while I wait for him to clear out for a few days so I can pack, by spending  time with the people in my life who are important to me. Since I am being informed that I am losing my vehicle as well, I am making the most of my time as a set adrift soul by travelling between the homes of my various children and friends who need me themselves, or who are there for me.

The first night, I was caught in a huge traffic jam for hours and wound up driving past an accident scene where folks were having a worse day than I. And between leaving for the highway and arriving at my destination, my hostess informed me that her beloved dog, Serena, had a stroke and had to be put down before I got there. Did we ever need each other to get through that night!

The second night, was spent on Saltspring, where a loving daughter held me as I cried and who bolstered me with promises of help, of a place to stay to get through the next day. Grace reassured me, talked me down off the mountaintop of doom and gloom as that was all I could feel, my sails ripped from my masts, my hull smashed out from under me. She reminded me that I’d been trying to lose weight and that I’d lost a good 198 lbs.

The third night was spent in the company of Avona and her sister Lynda, a single mom with two cute and cantankerous little boys. It was so lovely to be able to stay on the couch and hear the sounds of a normal little family in their mundane day to day routines. I got lots of hugs, spent some one on one time with Avona, getting more and more grounded by the hug, and the next day, started the decision of where to go by sunset.

At the risk of being fragile to a son who doesn't understand what his mom is up against, I bit the bullet and headed up to Qualicum Bay to spend a day with my son, Dan. I didn’t know what to expect, but Grace had said that she and Dan had been talking about me and he was looking forward to seeing me up his way for a visit. With Mr. WronG bowing out, he had become the androcentric male of the family and I wanted time with him, in spite of the risk of being misunderstood or having my feelings tramped upon, as he had been famous for, in years previous as he was growing up.

 When I got there we texted a bit about how to get to a local rock quarry where there is no traffic and I was pretty safe to camp. He wasn’t able to have a house guest because he was couch surfing up there himself, staying with his best friend while there was some animal sitting for him to do so the next best thing was to help me set up a camp nearby. I was hesitant and slightly fearful. The quarry was vast and multilayered and overgrown. In my sad shape, I felt all the fear and anguish I’d ever felt as a 13 year old girl, thrown out on the street by her insane mother all over again, so disappointed in myself that at 54, I was in no better shape, but out on the street again, looking at houses where people had beds they knew they were getting to in a little while.  I cried my heart out with Dan . He’d ridden out from the house nearby on his dirtbike and brought along a beautiful spaghetti dinner and a bag with some cherries and a golden kiwi. Then he said something that just made me cry all over again, but this time out of appreciation of the love of my son. He said ‘Mom, I’ll set up your tent and air mattress for you. We’ll park the Ford this way and put the tent over there and between the ditch and the gully you’ll be safely hemmed in with the fire on the other side. Then after he set up the tent, he rounded up round firestones, made a lovely small fire and bushwacked to find more wood, using the light of his Iphone.

The thing that really got me though, when he said that he would help me get set up was ‘Mom, I’ll stay with you as long as you want, and I won’t leave until you fall asleep, and I’ll go to the house and set the alarm and bring you coffee at 7:00 in the morning.’

And he did. We had a beautiful fire. I sat on the minibike like a queen as he built the fire up over and over and we talked. He set up his ipod with nice music and we watched the fire and he helped me ground, helped me process, helped me grieve. I could have written my intentions on a slip of paper and set it ablaze, but there are other fires where I can attend to the necessary healing rituals to move me past this, as is the way of my people. But this time, I was just happy to be alone in that cleared out, overgrown rock quarry, with my 25 year old beautiful, loving son. Finally, I told him I was exhausted. Hadn't slept much in days, spending most of the night staring at dark ceilings looking for some sign of light. Dan then crawled into the tent, just like old times, and asked for a back scratch, just like old times, and I did just like old times. After a while, we talked some more and then I told him it was okay for him to go. He slipped out of the tent, zipped me in, and walked the minibike up the hill so that he wasn’t too noisy leaving. When did my holy terror become so thoughtful? Then in a little while, my cell phone buzzed from under my pillow, a text had arrived. “Made it home safe, Mom. Love you.”

Today, we had breakfast, I took him to a job interview and we had some sushi for lunch. We went dutch and it was the first meal I’d eaten since Thursday’s disastrous news killed my appetite. We went back to where he is staying and he fixed the duct tape on the roof, filled my water bottles and stocked me up with ice. As I sat there, wondering where I would go tonight, he said ‘Why don’t you go to see Grace again?’ to which I replied, ‘Because I don’t want to spend another $42.” And he handed me $20, saying “Now you only need $22.”

I can’t help feeling like this is the gift that is coming out of this spiritual experience that is pushing all my buttons of worthlessness and abandonment. I have splendid, healthy, capable adults for children who love me. I also can’t help but feel that somewhere in the twisted recesses of the mind of a man who claimed he loved me one day, and didn’t the next, there is a soupcon of jealousy motivating his resentment, because now that he’s shot himself in the foot and run off the only person who knows him better than anyone, he doesn’t have this kind of genuine, unconditional love in his life at all.

“Mom, I’ll stay here with you until you fall asleep. And I’ll even bring you coffee the way you like it in the morning.”

I may be homeless and feeling lost, but if I continue to take things day by day, I know I will wade through  this mire of unknowns and I will emerge on the other side with an intact self esteem, and dare I say, be even better, even more independent, than I have ever been before.

If only I hadn’t gotten that job and hadn’t discovered that stuff on WronG’s laptop, I know now, I wouldn’t be so proud of my children and friends.

Silver linings… bathing me in their golden light. I am healing.

I hope, in my heart of hearts, that the catalyst to all this does serious healing too.

I Don't Know About You, But For Me I am Exiting the Betrayal Grounds

Nights consist of three hour patches of staring at a dark ceiling trying to find the bright side of life

This is where I thought I had a home.

Days trying to maneuvre in a morras of blindsided betrayal that has torn my time / space continuum asunder

How do I manage to get into these situations that have me so helpless and powerless?

Pink skin ring, I sunburned the patch where the ring used to be.

One of these days, I will be on the other side of this and things will be good again.

I have to believe that for both of our sakes.

But I will be on my own way.

I never saw it coming.

They say the wife is the last to know...

Honesty we said, we agreed, in the early days of establishing each other's core values... honesty
like porcelain. it can be mended if broken, but can never be whole again. Trust is everything.

Now we have nothing

with one deal breaker decision

or maybe more

I don't ask for details because I don't want to know.

Don't make me out to be the crazy

one.

I'm trying to keep both our dignities intact.

And exit the betrayal grounds

with Grace.

My Queen of the Sun Story - Awakening chakras and inviting awareness

The means to achieving awareness, empowering your divine organs, the chakras, to awaken and engage.

"The six petaled flower of life

1)      Positivity. All your thoughts and actions must become positive. You must be able to see the good element in everything. Always there is something beautiful to be found. When negativity is transcended, your world is transformed, becoming lovely, joyous, almost heavenly. Seek ever the good, the beautiful, the true.

2)      Concentration. Control of thought. Our thoughts must not occur in a random, haphazard manner. We must guide the flow of our thinking, and thus also our feelings. We must master our minds, subduing elements that arise without our permission, thereby training our powers of thought.

3)      Control of action. Guidance of will. We must develop strength, tenacity, and endurance in our will-life. When we make a resolve to do something, we must carry it through without fail, as long as it is an honourable, worthy intention. Be not a leaf in the wind. Obey your inner commands. Always remember, repetition of specific actions strengthens the will.

4)      Inner tranquility. This is the serenity of spirit. Equanimity in the life of feelings. Nothing must for long throw you off balance or shatter your poise. Going with the flow.

5)      Be open-minded and tolerant of other viewpoints. Careful attentive listening and the withholding of snap judgments. You must be willing to listen to any and learn from all, even the most humble. This attitude of open-mindedness does wonders for expanding and illumining the inner life, stimulating the growth of the light in the soul.

6)      Develop a profound gratitude for life and the gifts and opportunities that each moment brings. Life itself is a gift made possible by the deeds of innumerable beings. The natural kingdoms provide us with a bounty of beauty. The earth and the heavens are a vast treasure house. One’s heart should beat in thankfulness to the all of life. This state of constant gratitude exalts the soul, creating happiness and lifts one into the celestial regions.

These activities must be integrated and practiced together, without undue exertion on our part. Of course, this takes time. And they must be linked together by one essential, unifying virtue, which may be visualized as a pink rose in the centre of your heart – the practice of loving kindness. When kindness characterizes your approach to life, and when the qualities become second nature, done without effort, a striking metamorphosis will take place in the soul.

The petals of the subtle, spiritual organs, the chakras, become pliant and alive and begin to gently revolve. Inner perception, both seeing and hearing, quietly unfolds. You are born into the higher planes of life, possessing direct vision of the heavenly spheres. Angels rejoice, for the world gains a conscious seer, a clairvoyant, an initiate of life.

This is the way and the goal. It is the path of inner/outer freedom. Your inner life becomes one of quiet attention and heavenly contemplation. Your outer activity becomes a source of helpfulness and blessing to all. Thus you kindle the fires of your spirit and illumine the inner regions of your soul. You will then radiate strength and light, becoming a beacon in the darkness of the world. " *( link to source at end of article.)

I have been a beacon in the world for many years. In the 80's - 90's, when I ran Moonwit (Meeting Our Own Needs With Imagination & Tenacity) we were a beacon in the darkness, a candle lit to attract weary women so that we could provide them with holistic solutions to the challenges they were physically experiencing in a world where Patriarchal influence diminishes the very act of peopling the planet.

 This is the story of how all this has affected me, especially after reading the book that this quote is from.

I am reading ‘Queen of the Sun’ by E.J. Michael. It is like ‘Mutant Message Down Under’ and ‘The Celestine Prophecy’, and not unlike the experiential books by Lynne V. Andrews. You can’t read it without feeling your evolution hasten. These 6 points to becoming more aware really resonated with me and I had to document them so I can easily pull them up and refresh my memory as to what I need to do or what I need to remind myself I’m not doing.

As a sentient, conscious and sustainably minded person, I have been on a shamanic path for the past 40+ years, ever since I discovered that the gift of reading (which I learned INSTANTLY upon finding out what those strange characters meant in Grade 1), I discovered the ‘Occult’ section of the library and between 7 and 14 when I left home, I read everything I could get my hands on in order to heighten my understanding of a very strange and distorted world, that which was revealed to me by my very strange, scarred and mentally distorted mother. That there was a sixth sense, that Edgar Cayce existed helped me to develop my own answers when I was so puzzled continuously by the contradictions of a woman on pharmaceuticals who was present one minute and irrationally furious the next. I read Tarot from the age of 13 and had some interesting incidents between then and 31, when I began to read a lovely deck called the Motherpeace deck, by Karen Vogel, as a means of providing income. Learning about other's wisdoms about the supernatural world around me kept me sane.

Now I am 54 and I have been coasting on my laurels for quite a few years, as if my shamanic self went dormant. The Tarot cards asked to be kept silent, I lost contact with pagan friends who had shared the seasons of the year with me, and I started a new life in a new city in a new role, that of someone’s wife, and the kids were grown so  I could rest from those years of intense responsibility.

But the other day, I knew that was all changing. Little signs started occurring with more and more frequency as synchronicity and coincidence abounded sometimes hourly, sometimes even more. Then I wandered into a bookstore when I had some time on my hands, waiting for my elderly charge who I take to her appointments now and then. I selected a few books and took them to the cash thinking that it was a second hand store, and these books shouldn’t cost more than $10. When the clerk asked me for $24, I was surprised and said so. I immediately looked at Sonia Johnson’s Wildfire ( I have a copy in storage already, highly recommended) and Laurel K Hamilton’s Cerulean Sins and at the Queen of the Sun and decided upon the fiction, passing the other two back to the clerk. The owner of the store was there and heard my exchange and I explained to the two of them that it was too close to payday and I couldn’t justify spending that much when the owner piped up, ‘Let her have Queen of the Sun too. Give her both of those for the $9’. I was thrilled and smiled, leaving the store with a promise to return with many books, but puzzled as to why he would let me take that very expensive copy of Queen of the Sun. It alone was marked at $14, a generous gesture, I thought.

Little did I know.

When I started reading it and time started to fly, I knew why. The pages were telling me subtexts of subliminal consciousness development as I enjoyed the surface story, a fiction of a man and a sacred relic that he found and had to protect from the Trilateral Commission, a world organization bent on assuming global control and how spirit stepped up to restore the imbalances such a huge, angry, violent megalith could impose upon our world.

One of the designs on the amulet, (besides the one of Isis, Queen of the Sun and forebearer of my own favourite goddess Ishtar) was a six pointed flower and the quote I began this story with, is what one of the protagonist’s teachers taught him. I thought, worthy of my recording for future reference.

Now comes the eery and enlightened part.

I am already trying to follow these  tenets in so many words but never have I had it laid out so well. I struggle constantly with trying not to apply a harsh judgment and criticism of everything I look at but there is a negative element to my thinking that has been able to assume priority and often my first response to any irregularity or dissonance is to respond critically and negatively. By reading and rereading these six points, I have been able to weaken that muscle and to strengthen the positivity muscle, allowing me to stay in the positive, and to stifle that critic. Of the six points, that has been what has been my hurdle to assuming  my role as being resourceress, she who taps into the abundance of the world. I can feel my chakras slowly starting  their revolve and it resonates through my every minute now. It feels as if someone has taken the ties that bind me off and I am lighter in some way. I am feeling a profound sense of interconnectedness with friends, with my remaining family, with people I meet and yesterday was no exception. And then abundance started to increase exponentially. I started getting emails from like minds, met them and were friends immediately. More job offers started coming in, of the ilk that I could even dare to consider. When one seemed sweeter than the rest, I set up an appointment for that initial interview that was requested of me and the next day, drove to the real estate office to meet Tony.

After two years of slogging to find work and coming up empty, I had posted an ad on Craigslist outlining my skills and employment desires/criteria, a couple of months ago. The position was to fill a developing position as marketing assistant for a real estate agent who is making home buying accessible to more people through a ‘better than rent to own’ program that is very compassionate. The man who interviewed me, Tony, and I clicked right away, and it was soon apparent that we were destined to work together. I had the job. I felt an instant kinship with Tony and was happy to shake his hand to finalize the deal. I was employed! The drought was over.

Except the second I shook his hand, I felt a growing sharpness in my chest that started to get tighter and more painful, as if I was having a stroke. I am healthy but this was like heartburn on steroids as we were saying our goodbyes outwardly, but inside I felt this pain increase and increase until I got out of there.  I prayed I wasn’t having a heart attack as he was finishing up his instructions and guidance for my immediate tasks and I didn’t want my feeling unwell detracting from this interview. I mean, what a good impression, you’re hired… now let’s call you an ambulance. I was able to get out without betraying my increasing discomfort, and I drove home via the Victoria General hospital, just in case I needed to turn right at the highway, to Emerg instead of left, towards home. I don’t have heart issues. I haven’t had heartburn since my first pregnancy but the profound experience of tightness in my chest was impossible to ignore and marked Tony and my first handshake/contact with a huge ‘underlining in red’.

I bundled up my laptop and purse, and slipped out to my car where I sat for five minutes waiting for the tightness to subside and was very relieved when it did. I have not been eating much lately as a result of the domino actions of all these changes in my mind/spirit, so it stands to reason that my body was also coping with the changes, affecting my hunger/need for food in a positive way, so I stopped at a local coffee shop, had some eggs and potatoes and felt better instantly.

Then today, a small task had Tony ask me to drop by the office with a smartstick so that he could load a program on it for me. As I sat in the office and we chatted about the different discoveries of our lives, he revealed to me that he was slated for surgery in October. When I asked him what it was, he said that he was slated for a double by-pass! What I had felt on that first physical contact with Tony was HIS heart in arrest, not mine!

What this is, is evidence that my chakras are indeed becoming awake and that my sensitivity to others is heightening as a result.

Clearly, as a shaman, I would be wise to refresh myself on the means necessary to protect myself when encountering others physically, so that there is a wall of white light to defer such violent and consuming symptoms so that I can be aware without suffering the consequences of careless contact.

I hope my tale encourages the reader to review those 6 points and possibly to reread their ‘Celestine Prophecy’, ‘Mutant Message Down Under’ or even this beautiful book which I am going to finish now, ‘Queen of the Sun’. I would love to see all my friends and their loved ones benefiting from the wisdoms that lurk within.

The mysterious bookstore owner will see me again. And this time, I will have the link to this story for him to read. It seems he is a part of the scheme of things relating to enlightenment. I wonder if he knows or he was just following destiny’s instincts.

I do know one thing for sure.

It’s time to awaken our chakras. And I do believe that mine has had a head start from the form of the boost of this book's wise words.

http://www.amazon.ca/Queen-Sun-Revelation-J-Michael/dp/0062513559