strange trips

Or, perhaps, Bummer Du Jour.  There was an unscheduled landing on the island State of Disturbed Mind recently and hacking through the underbrush seems to have taken what attention I had left over post various and sundry head explosions.  More on that later.

In any event, before the Unscheduled Landing, I’d been pondering something.  Ever since we came here I’ve had the Rash from Hell.  This summer it perched attractively on my face, and being actually able to GO TO A DERMATOLOGIST, I did. ( More another time on how depressed dermatologists appear to be- then again, looking at rashes all day would be enough to lower one’s spirits.)  They diagnosed me with rosacea, which is in fact a catch all term for: We have no idea, it’s a rash, on your face.  I did as told, and as one might expect, nothing really got healed.  So, one day the lightbulb went off, and I said, dude! why not try your OWN rosacea remedy? I made this up several years ago for a client, and it has been successful more often than not.  Duly making a batch up for myself, I applied it as directed (!!) and…guess what? It worked.  Like a charm.  Let’s just say it was a teachable moment.  This year particularly I’ve been trying the things I make for other people.  The usual way this comes about is someone contacts me, says what their current project is, and I tootle around and make something.  Often of course I hear nothing, but just as often I hear that people are thrilled, their problem has healed (like ganglion, rosacea, migraine, shingles, different pains and sores…well, you get the picture) and all is well.  Generally speaking I make these things, keep the recipes for future use, and think no more of it.  This year, though, things have been so rocky I’ve ACTUALLY TRIED MY OWN STUFF.  The cream for residual pain from injuries and chiro adjustments? Works.  My bone spur cream? Works. The across the board pain cream? WORKS.

I don’t think of these things as something *I* make- I am simply a conduit, a vehicle, for a higher level of awareness to be brought to bear, so it followed that I didn’t give “specialness” to, for, or about any of it- in the same way my several matched sets of emotional baggage used to block my mental entrances and exits so that I didn’t think about going someplace far, far away.

Well, haha Gentle Reader.  It turns out that far far away place is ME.  Who’da thunk? It’s been interesting walking around feeling as though I am coming to some totally different state of animation and understanding- no “self”, but SELF which is of course part of everything. It’s liberating, and challenging since of course at the same time several things have occurred pushing all the remaining recessed buttons on my panic panel.  The recently discovered “me” knows that things work out; the panic panel operant is sure that we really ARE going to die now.  In short, the human condition with some additional overhang, stakes and live tigers.

Meanwhile, in my efforts to escape the Island State of Difficult Mind, it became ever more clear that the old tools were not working.  I can’t, for example just go out and get a job like I did when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Society, we’ll use that word, is in a state of collapse and if you don’t think so, just try getting something accomplished out there.  The recent “mass shooting” in Tehama County, California, took place about 40 minutes south of us.  The media has presented “the shooter” as a mad, bad, demented and deranged man, “not law enforcement friendly”.  The dwellers at that particular threshold say they reported this guy numerous times and law enforcement did nothing.  HE said his neighbors were cooking meth, made his dog sick, and wouldn’t stop.  Admittedly he did go way over the edge but one can, if one lives here, see how it could happen to almost anyone. Net net? The whole thing is this place in a nutshell.  Half the people here are just like that shooter.  There is no law enforcement unless the Sheriff decides to do something- as in you can call them, but good luck with that project. Honestly? I don’t know how it happened that the guy (Mr. 98 years in jail) across the road from us actually got arrested but I suspect after a certain number of bodies, something Has to Be Done. So there you are, bravely going forth in a place where the citizenry is unravelling before your eyes, and there is no redress for any misfeasance.  Every law and regulation that gets passed puts us more at the mercy of whatever moneyed interest pushed it through.  We, for example, get to pay twelve extra cents a gallon tax on gas now for some in fact unclear reason, which no doubt involves money passing from one hand to the other for some “project” far in the future.  The “new” and “emergency” regulations on “legal marijuana” are like something you’d make up as a pastiche.  Municipalities get to decide if you can grow plants, and where and if you can sell them, but nonetheless! If you want to do that, in some sort of cloud of unknowing, you have to have insurance coverage of $2 million, a $5000 bond, an annual license that ranges in cost depending on Idon’tknowwhat from $1250 to $78,000, AND a sort of know-me fee to cover processing your “application”.  The rules for “medicinal” and “adult-use” products are now under the same rubric- which I take to mean that medical users get to pay the same (sorry!) usurious tax rates as profligate hell bent adult users.  This was supposedly cobbled together including “robust” public input.  And of course it doesn’t stop there.  Mr. Unmentionable LPV continues going beyond the beyond, and besides displaying a disturbing grasp of geography,  one really important thing that got his recent attention seems to have been, whoa! too many elephants! lift the ban on bringing elephant trophies back from your brave African hunts! Total tip of the iceberg of course but it is precisely this complete wrecking of any kind of social fabric, conscience, and responsibility that makes life incredibly difficult in these times.  Making a plan for the future is only possible, it seems, if you’re rolling in money.  And maybe not even then, but at least you have some choice, which is not available in the more tenuously funded realms.

All of which is to say this is quite the endeavor.  I ask that I be given the grace and means to do my work, but it is entirely unclear how that may happen.  It’s only clear that it can, and does almost independently of anything else.  And now, I must bid you adieu since the Dog needs something for itchy winter skin.  Watch this space! It will probably work on humans, too.  Blessings and thanks, as always.

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at rest, if lengthily

The Partner’s most common remark to me is that I should do less and relax more.  Usually this rest happens after I’ve had a really busy day and the next day I am completely immobile. Which, while not being actually what he’s suggesting, is better than nothing. Today is slightly such a day.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately, and we all know! Gentle Reader! how EXHAUSTING that is.  My aim has been to deal with the enormous amount of anxiety and dismay I’ve been feeling, both endogenously and exogenously.  Where does this come from and how can I get it to go away, sort of thing.

What I realized was that the whole thing can, in fact, be dealt with and for the most part? DISPENSED WITH.  I felt quite bucked up by that thought, right up to when I got another head-exploding pile of Important, Official Mail and had to take a day or two to remind myself that all of these things can be dealt with and forgotten about. ( The day I’ve picked for all that is tomorrow.  Seriously. ) It boils down to the question of self doubt, feelings of separation and the usual stale stew of rotting matched sets of emotional baggage.  You simply can’t function like that and ultimately, the good news is, you get tired of it and that baggage gets recycled permanently.  Of course there’s always the odd piece you’ve missed that rises up and trips you.  But once you really realize that none of this material is usable, it gave its all and now it is time to experiment, it gets easier.  Of course, this is on the personal level.

The larger level requires a similar process.  We see ourselves in a world that now appears to be at a ghastly culmination point.  A culmination point of thousands of years of selfishness, non-cooperation, and greed, not to put too fine a point on it.  This culmination point has, in the U.S., returned us almost back to our original point in time when the genocide and capitalistic rapacity all began (you know, Founding Fathers and Pilgrims and All That).  Where the despised of Europe came to “make their way”, and now seem to feel as though their forebears weren’t immigrants after all, nobody else was here to begin with,  and that they have somehow made that impossible transformation from pig’s ear to silk purse.  I’m sure you know what I’m talking about here, Gentle Reader.  And looking at it all, just as it appears now, is beyond terrifying.  It’s downright unbelievable.

So I made the perhaps tenuous leaping connection between these personal and public dysfunctional ways of thinking and being.  And realized that in fact none of us really has to truly partake in them.  We can begin, or it is to be hoped, continue, to think and fend for ourselves.  To realize that everything around us IS us so we’d do better being conscious.  What someone told you was real before must be investigated before being accepted as truth.  Stones must start to be turned and the penny has finally got to drop that since you’re only seeing about 3% of what’s actually in front of you it might be best not to act like you Know It All.  It’s actually not rocket science at all and also? It’s not as hard as you think.  Making the effort to regain curiosity and interest is a simple first step.  How DO things work, after all, including you?

Thus, progress has been seen here when, for example, one is overcome with Dread and Nausea regarding the Upcoming Electional Event.  None of it will be anything you can jump up and down about in joy.  And if parts of it are so horrible they simply can’t be,  there will be a way to engage with it and move forward.  That way will involve THINKING and INTERACTING WITH PEOPLE and BEING POLITE, but there will be- there IS- a way.  You just have to set aside the residues of whatever sludge has adhered to you on your many trips around the sun, and remember that the old Magician’s instruction about obstacles still holds.  When something blocks you, you either move it aside,  conquer it or go around it.  The conquering part isn’t necessarily about a fight, either.  It’s usually about a more ongoing argument in one’s own self that precludes clear sight and thus clear action. And, the going around it part isn’t about avoidance or ignoring.  It’s about going in peace.  Moving aside is generally something best done politely and reasonably gently.

As a result of all this Intense Cogitation I was finally able to make some progress surrounding my “personal” setting, or work (who’da thunk?).  When I got to the place where my practice became my “employment”, it was a traumatic thing, as in, OMG.  There’s no money!  So I did what was said to be best practice in my situation, and a big part of that was behaving as though the things I made were ….. a PRODUCT.   Things went actually far better than I could have imagined.  But there’s a wall that gets hit in the Product world early on, and it was clear it wasn’t going to cut it overall- not financially and not mentally for yrs truly.  I make concrete remedies, yes, but they are not products and they are never the same- which is true of any recipe, when you think about it.  Even the same formula will have different concentrations for different individuals.  So I had to figure this out- balance the necessity for income with being truthful about the thing itself.  And this meant? I had to accept and believe in myself.  And hahahaha- it was an uphill slog! Until finally the daily curiosities I set for myself and the quiet observings and the continual vigilance about loose luggage began to come together.  To wit:

We got a small glass essential oil still! This is something I’ve dreamed about for years and years.  I decided, with the Partner’s stern admonishment to just do it already!, to make a small investment in myself, and indeed, in US and our garden and our life.  It’s a joyous undertaking (lemon balm above) and is already transforming many of the things I make.   And the Dog approves, so, no brainer, right?  It’s really not just OK to do what you love- it’s mandatory.  This is also why there is always hope- because somewhere, love is ALWAYS present and it can be found.  Thank you for reading!

 

ground to a halt

Or something like that, Gentle Reader.  In the ongoing jumble of everything, it becomes increasingly harder to focus on anything besides, perhaps, dog hair.  Of which there is ever more.

Firstly, I know you are all wondering exactly what birthday cake I made for the Partner.  I thought about this topic for weeks, and it may well be the reason my cranium feels filled with inert gas now- cake’s made and it’s over.  But it was a chocolate roulade filled with cream chantilly and lots of specks of prunes macerated in armagnac.  The cooking, at least, has been going reasonably well and the cake was well received, indeed.

Other than that I continue to swing between thinking, well heck.  We’ve actually pulled things together a bit more this year IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING.  And then? OMG, it’s all a mess what happened here?

Then I think, well.  If they managed to elect a Pope who actually appears to be a fully functioning human being, isn’t anything possible? ( I’m trying to keep my happy dance at Boehner’s resignation to a minimum, given that the alternative to him may be unspeakable.)  At the same time, I’m thinking: Hmmm.  This tide of humanity which is seething across borders and oceans.  It’s awful right now but the fact is good will come from it.  The tenets upon which the world has operated, at least in the past century and fifteen years, are beginning to be visibly bankrupt.  There’s no stopping what’s happening, and the moment the people who think of themselves as the “haves” and don’t want any immigrants messing up their perfect piles actually have to live in the real world for even a minute? Tipping point.  Sooner or later everyone is going to have to acknowledge we’re all in the same boat, we may not all BE the same but we are all one.  Perhaps someone will have the brain to ask the right question at long last and cooperation will begin.  Those who have hogged everything for themselves will find that what they held on to isn’t worth anything and it will certainly be interesting to see what happens then.  Somehow I think the vanquished of this world will, truly, rise to the occasion and show everyone how it is really done.  With love.  I”m hoping.

Of course the fact is that many people have been so damaged in the course of things that cooperation won’t be something they’re interested in.  There’s a way in which some migrations have the intention of crashing the place of arrival.  But now that time is changing and is both shorter and longer?  It may well be that the overall perception of things is more realistic in terms of doing what actually works for the most, instead of the fewest.  In my fantasies, anyway.

Otherwise, it finally rained here and wow.  I’d forgotten what that was like.  The day after it stopped the sky was the most amazing blue, and the clouds were sparkling.  The trees looked happy and a person could actually breathe, while looking at the mountains.  There was even a bit of snow on both Lassen and Shasta!  It’s hard to put aside the multitude of quotidian worries about survival and whatnot, but somehow when you can actually be present in nature on a day like that one after it rained, it just seems impossible that all will not be well.  It’s kind of the same view I’m taking of the erstwhile puppy training we’re engaged in now- it’ll all be fine in due course.   More on that another time, except I will say that when The Dog decided he would no longer be restrained on his leash in front of BevMo (where I was doing birthday party preparatory shopping for Polish beer) and raced in dragging The Partner behind him?  Everyone in the place tottered straight over to him, smiling and petting him as he splayed out on the cool concrete floor, grinning and waving a paw regally at all his devoted subjects.  I don’t know who this Dog was in his previous life, but I’m betting he was a rock star equivalent.

cooperation

E.O. Wilson wrote that cooperation works for groups and he’s certainly right about that.  Last year a quail couple allowed a solitary male to join their small family. In a striking show of cooperation, he joined the two adult quail and their three chicks, and stood watching over them while they ate, feeling useful and important (or anyway it looked like that).

This year?  Holy cow.  There’s the biggest passel of quail either one of us has ever seen.  Several mother quail, two males (one ENORMOUS), and nineteen babies.  NINETEEN.  It was hilarious and transfixing to watch them taking dirt baths in the slightly moist and cool compost pile, sliding down the side and stepping all over each other.  Later on they all sacked out on the back garden path and went to sleep for a few minutes.  It was almost weird looking at all those inert little bodies; but after they’d rested they went on to demolish the sowbugs in our front garden bed.  Plus some strawberries, but the sowbugs were well worth it.  It was also quite interesting to see that quail moms are just like any other moms.  In the crowd of kids and adults they looked a whole lot more alert and focused, not to say just the teensiest bit stressed, and although no sounds were heard, when the inevitable quail baby went the opposite and wrong direction as at least one always does, the mom’s shoulders were tense, her eyes were bright, and one can only imagine what message the baby got as it abruptly scrambled into line, completely chastened.

We also have our annual frog, and this time a skink too, living in the yurt.  The frog has been a marvel of cooperation.  Although he initially wanted to stay on my bag of almonds, being disturbed at all was just more than he could tolerate and he’s figured out a place to hang out between meals that is out of our way.  Unlike the last couple of years where everyone wanted to live in the muffin tins and that was that, this guy pays attention, and obviously does Not Want To Be Disturbed.  He makes a lot of noise all night long, hopping around and ponging on the inside of the zinc tub, but seems to be responsive when we ask him to be quiet.  Either that or we’ve both gone crazy, thinking we can talk to frogs.

Which of course brings us, Gentle Reader, to my more frequent and normal train of thought which is, in fact, all about crazy.  What IS crazy, after all?  I realize now that being different allows people to apply that label, and conflate things that don’t really go together at all but can have a lasting and damaging effect on a person.  (Or, I suppose, a frog)  The danger is that when you’re a child, you cannot really differentiate the judgments people make, understand that they’re probably just off balance, and make a decision about whether or not to accept them.  You just take them in and bingo! You either think you’re OK or you think you’re really NOT OK.  Then you toddle off into the world.

Of course, in my experience it’s usually the people who ARE technically crazy who believe they are not- and really, who’s to say?  Hearing voices isn’t a helpful thing when one is looking for a job but they are still real to some extent and therefore, as real as anything else.  None of which is actually real in the sense we all want to think it is.  The truth about reality? It’s not stationary, humans are not the hottest thing since sliced bread, everything is dependent on everything else.  Nonetheless, it has also been my experience that if you are different from those around you, they will treat you as though you have some affliction along the lines of hearing voices, and that can really put a cramp in things.

So, what to do? (As always.)  We find ourselves in a world where, for example, FIFA is so rife with corruption it truly stinks and then they make women play a world cup on artificial turf.  Just a little of that old time punishment for being different? You have to wonder how they believe they can get away with the totality of their misfeasance, financial and social, but they seem to be doing it.  Then? Some person who really WAS crazy shot a bunch of people in a church because they were the wrong color in his opinion.  Where did the poison he was filled with come from?  Perhaps, and this is what I’m thinking, the “power elite” (we’ll call them that for convenience) are the crazy ones?  A person who looks like them and behaves in a crazy way that they understand- violently- gets a pass.  A person who doesn’t look like them?  Fuggedaboudit.  There’s a kind of insanity that seems to be almost institutionalized at this point.  I realized, for example, that the fact that my long time physician told me that everything going on in my body was in my head (and I believed her having had a lifetime of being told just that) led to the physical problems I didn’t interpret correctly, and further to the hospital experience that came close to ending my life.  But I’M the one who’s depicted as being crazy in that particular paradigm.  A black person can be told from now until the cows come home that we’re “post racial” and racism doesn’t exist.  I saw a white man from Idaho say just that last night on the news: No racism in this country at all, according to him.  Placing that against the daily reality of seemingly invincible racism must make a person feel…well, crazy.  You do come to expect your place at the end of the line but that doesn’t make it right.

I believe with Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr and HH the Dalai Lama that non-violence is the way, however long it takes.  But I finally realized what you have to do to make that work.  You have to truly be yourself, no matter what ANYONE says, and be the best you possible.  As fearlessly as possible- so, no pressure, right? (And. Obviously the best you possible is not the you that cheats and steals and lies and hurts others as a matter of course.) This makes connections manifest and action possible.  It’s hard to do, of course, and you won’t find a whole lot of help in the endeavor but sooner or later you will find cooperation.  However small it may be in the beginning I am convinced that this is what will eventually make the difference and allow us all to move forward.  However afraid I am that the people *I* think are crazy and who are currently running things will win out?  In my heart I know they cannot.  Because they don’t cooperate.  Things can only be accomplished through love, not through power, and the true craziness of the world today is that people seem to think the reverse is true.  Fortunately we have quail and frogs to show us otherwise.

Formative Years

Why, the Partner asked a bit pugnaciously, don’t YOU do curses?  We found ourselves going to Red Bluff for the second time that morning, pursuant to a planned power outage and thus needing to get a generator for back up power AND said generator having a defective breaker switch and not working as we unplugged our wiring set up and struggled against the rising thermometer.  His position, and he’s sticking to it, is that a curse has been placed on us and THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING.

I was able to contemplate that query with amazing calm, given the situation.  I didn’t even have my head explode when we got to Red Bluff and realized the problem was yet another blankety blank breaker switch.  Which we’d had plenty of already that week, what with our landlords not fixing the rinky dink electric set up we live with and thus, yes, no power, no water.  We could be in New Delhi.  Anyway after a long volley of cross words we did get Bum Breaker One resolved, then on to the second.  In the end it all worked out and I wondered to myself whether I had developed proper gratitude (nothing caught fire! we made it through another day!) or just finally lost my mind altogether.

But back to why I don’t do curses.  Not my area, I said to him.  It seems a bit ham handed to me, after due reflection.  Curses involve exerting power on this, human, plane and usually stem from fear, anger, desire for power over others.  They’re violent, in a sense.  Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I started following the path of the unseen that sort of thing didn’t make sense to me- so much mystery to open up, why bother forcing things to do what your limited capacity can think up?   Also, bad karma, and like most things that are unproductive, way too complex and too much to remember.  Good, if we can use that generic term Gentle Reader, is at once simpler and harder.  The Partner, upon hearing this, blinked in that way dogs do when you’ve taken their picture once too many times with the flash on.  I suppose he puts up with a lot.

I don’t think there’s a curse on us, particularly, either.  The whole planet is shifting and we’re all being solar flared to within an inch of our electromagnetic lives.   This particular adventure in weird living we got propelled into will reveal the twists and turns of plot when it is good and ready.  In the meantime we’re feeling our way with our hands and there are sure one hell of a lot of stickers and thorns.  There’s definitely a path through this culture that some have found and it appears to work for them in terms of worldly success.  Those of us who were, however, apparently behind the barn door when the fitting in thing was handed out just have a different road to walk.  For me, it all seems pretty clear from this vantage point; much if not all of what we got told as kids was total, complete, absolute hogwash.  The question is how to walk through that with an open mind and heart after looking at all the putative wrong turns that have been taken.  Anyway, we’re out here in the woods and I don’t do curses.

But.  Here’s something interesting from this morning’s research for some nausea and stomach cures.  In HEALING WITH ESSENTIAL OILS, Kurt Schnaubelt notes the following:

“An observation by Jeffrey Yuen: The most important duty of the immune system is to distinguish self from non-self, and consequently to attack what is foreign.  Since the immune system apparently does not fight cancer, or does so only minimally, we might arrive at the unsettling conclusion that cancer is not foreign.  By extension it would follow that cancer is a part of the self, potentially the expression of a metabolically confused self.  From this would follow that changing the self into a state that does not allow the proliferation of cancer could be a successful strategy.” (p. 190)

The task, then, seems to be always the same.  We must bring those pieces of ourselves which we disown or don’t know into our selves, to begin the work of becoming whole.  I don’t think we can do that by maintaining attitudes of exclusion and power-over.  Now, for some baseball.

They had me at scorpions…

My goodness, Gentle Reader.  These many days since the last post have been filled with frivolity.  Not.

Whether it’s been the intense heat, the smoke from all the fires, the fact that all the kids are out of school and busy surfing the web, or sunspots, the fact is we’ve for the most part had no internet.  For a brief moment there was suspicion of a fried modem, but in the end it appears to be the usual thing.  HughesNet, which is the only game in this one horse town, does not try harder. So I had to keep all the words to myself, more or less.  Which perhaps was not all bad, being a culling and decision making sort of thing, keeping words to oneself.  But more on that later.

The other really fun thing that happened was the Annual Running of the Ants.  As dawn blasted across the sky here a few days ago, 5 or 6ish in the a.m., we once again found ourselves blinking in bed, covered in large, stinky and biting ants.  Vacuuming, shoveling, hosing, trips to town to return with, alas, not bait stations (my brain evidently leaked out my nostrils on the way to town and I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at) but a ridiculous syringe thingy full of goop (of which naturally some found its way into my mouth), more bait stations…..oh, it was just as much fun as ever.  Maybe more.  So when we bethought ourselves of the electronic pest repeller a friend had used against HER ants, we waited feverishly until the internet gave us a 15 minute shot, and found the Pest Repeller Ultimate.  Makes sounds they don’t like and ALSO, here’s the big thing, repels scorpions.  Eureka! we cried, we’re ordering this baby this instant.  Now of course our only problem is where to plug it in but so far…..SO FAR……

Yes.  So far?  So good.  The spiders are bailing, it seems, and we’ve seen no interior ants OR scorpions (WOOOOHOOOOOOO)  Except that the Partner had to kill another rattler last night.   But what the heck.   Then there was the excitement provided by PG&E.  They had scheduled a day long power outage for this week.  You gotta hand it to them, PLANNING to turn off people’s power at the hottest part of the year.  I mean, really.  Also in view of the fact that a large percentage of people here are on wells which means when the electricity is off there’s no water, spectacular timing when it’s 108 degrees in the shade.  We shlepped into a rental place and got a generator to use for that day.  Filled buckets and garbage cans with water.  Then, in a shocking moment of rationality it all got called off in the instant morning.  So, OK, Return generator, blahblahblah.  But at the end of the day, the power went off anyway and we learned even more about the precarious nature of the power grid right here, including the fact that OUR part of it is installed upside down.   Among other things.

Aside from all that…..I’ve been mulling over what exactly wishful thinking might be- I mean, is abiding in faith that things, since they are what they are, will be as they should no matter how it looks in the moment…is THAT wishful thinking?   I think not, really, especially if a person finds themselves confronting something huge (like serious illness or the global “economy”)- it is a way to maintain focus on what needs to be done, and stay in the present instead of inhabiting either a boogeyman-filled future or a regrettable (or nostalgic, for that matter)  past.  It continues to boil down to that Emersonian distinction between AUTHORITY and SPIRIT.  The shift from an externally dictated life to an inner directed one is not, maybe, something everyone wants to do.  Taking that inner direction means to some extent that you abandon acting out of your ego, your personal desires and whatnots, and take a longer and larger view for instruction.  It means on some level your actions are about everyone and not just you.  Gandhi’s admonition to assess one’s actions by whether or not they will be of help to the poorest of the poor….can seem overwhelming.  What can one person do, after all?  But the truth is that one person CAN do something helpful.  Keeping your little piece of the Whole Catastrophe moving in the right (minded) direction really does help others.  There’s a difference between things moving in the right direction all together, more or less, and everyone being in a lock step handed down in the interests of control.  Rivers flow, clouds move, things go on and the huge interconnection can be missed.  That interconnection, though, provides wisdom to the observant- the patterns and flows of things can be seen over time and then the story is more like an astonishing piece of music, in which each thing has a solo along with being an important part of the band.  This leads to the OTHER thing I’ve been mulling over (while vacuuming and weeding and all the rest of it) which is the difference between “spiritual” and “intuitive” healers.  This, to me, is perhaps the way the healing path gets divided overall, no matter what modality the healing is being performed in.  It’s a question of already having a story and fitting the individual into it, versus spending the time to observe, to learn the individual’s story as a whole and seeing how that fits into the overall pattern.   Both ways have things to offer.  I continue to think, though, that one thing going on now, in these times, is a return to the awareness that one size does not fit all.  Each thing, each situation, has to be looked at as a unique constellation, from which threads of continuity may be pulled and harmony can be rewoven.  Tall order, perhaps.