To B, on the 29th of April, which according to some, it’s a very special day—I can’t remember what it’s called but it’s a very important day according to Wicca.
To with absolute respect for the people aware of the balances of nature and worshipful of them, I wish you a happy whatever-it-is, pardon my poor memory, I have not studied Wicca deeply.
Dear B,
Jim will return your letter—he’ll answer it but he’s snowed under with an unimaginable file of only two weeks mail, but it was the first mailing after our spring newsletter and he will be sending out books for several days and getting the business portion—which he dearly loves to do—it’s not a sacrifice, but his schedule means he won’t be able to write you right away and when I read your letter I wanted to respond and said when you finish with this letter give it to me because I want to respond too.
I know that your primary correspondence has been with Jim and I think probably he is more able to feed you because his turn of mind is quite different from mine although we both have exactly the same path of service he can say so much more in so much less time and you have that same wonderful economy of words indicating great depth of feeling but not the almost chatty nature that I sometimes seem to use to people’s distraction, I’m sure, going on and on. I just don’t have the ability of speaking tersely, but your letter moved me greatly so I put it ahead of everything else I’ve got. Sometimes I just have the feeling that I want to answer one letter first and I have that luxury—I don’t have a boss, and nobody’s paying me so … a real blessing, I can do just what I wish.
As long as I work all the time, that’s all I ask of myself, just to keep at it, and I consider working for L/L the joy of my life. Plugging along with the household accounts and keeping everything together with the household is distinctly not fun and I try to get myself in a good state of mind to do and see the love of God in everything, but frankly this is my labor of love, this is where I belong, talking to my heart sisters and heart brothers and sharing the great love I have with you and with each that I talk to, but right now I’m really tuning in with you, and your sadness and your strength and courage and beauty and integrity and your deep honestly.
You can be very ruthless with yourself, and that’s good in a way because it cuts through the crap, but, oh, B, be good to yourself now, because the universe is good to you—it loves you so much and I love you so much, and the baby had a chance to be with you and maybe that’s all it wanted, just to spend a little time with you in your aura. Maybe it was a happy thing and never intended to go any further. Maybe it just wanted to say “hi” and to love you a little bit more. Some soul from another life that didn’t want to say goodbye to this atmosphere until it had just once more touched you and said I love you.
I feel very humble when I realize that things that have been channeled through me have really helped people and I’m just so grateful that this opportunity was given to us. I would gladly have given my life for it and wished that it could have been I, rather than Don, who was the weak link, we always thought it was. I was so obviously weak but I’m afraid my insides are tough.
I think your beautiful and healing dream with the lamb pretty well symbolized it all in a really important way. The lamb, of course, is the sacrifice, both you and the baby, the whole situation, the situation of unbelievable sacrifice, and yet there is no life lost, no consciousness lost, no joy truly lost.
All that was seemingly done in this illusion was in this illusion and the souls with whom you have come in contact in both of these pregnancies are imperishable beings and are fully aware of your love and your faithfulness, so I’m sure that you have waiting for you when you leave this life a wonderful reunion with those whose lives you’ve touched without being able to speak, and they will be grateful to you for the time they’ve spent with you. Nothing has been lost and you have suffered and so you have gained. I don’t know any other way to learn—I really don’t.
The other reason I wanted talk with you, was you said “Carla’s doing so poorly.” Well, I could go on for two hours about my physical vehicle and its temperamental behavior, but B, please believe me when I say, I don’t feel that I’m doing poorly. It’s not that I feel separate from my body, I know that this body is giving me a lot of catalyst and a lot of it is very challenging because it’s painful, but I’m not suffering, because I don’t accept pain as any reason to suffer.
When you have pain, you make the proper adjustments—you lie down, you put the hot pad or cold pack on, you go through whatever procedure seems necessary. It does look like, near as I can tell, I will have to have a neck operation, which is serious, but I have a really wonderful feeling from talking to a very gifted healer who works through chiropractic that once the neck is stabilized and the inflammation around that particular problem has gone down because the stabilization is complete and I’m no longer nicking the spinal cord from time to time, that he will be able to do a good bit of work on some other problems that are certainly a lot worse down lower in my back, so that those problems may well be ameliorated by nature means and not by surgical means.
This is a great hope for me—one that I have not hitherto been aware of. That I have made a very strong, spiritual, loving contact with this man and I trust him deeply and I think that this is a situation that will be much blessed for me. He expressed a feeling of being much blessed by me, which again, always makes me feel very humble. Nobody is worthy, it’s the love that comes through us—it’s the being that shines through us—we’re just dust. But we’re dust in the presence of the one infinite Creator, and as long as we know that, the fact that we’re dust and may be going back to dust (or maybe not) is really pretty small change.
So I was in much worse shape this time last year. I was depressed. I hadn’t worked through Jim’s having to bear whatever was to come. But I’m used to having a body that I’ve considered has an enormous amount of strength and heart and courage. I’m very pleased and proud and touched by my body’s toughness, although people don’t see it that way. But it died when I was 13 and I heard a voice tell me, as I was walking towards that wonderful golden temple, that I had a choice—that I had chosen a very hard, challenging, almost impossible path, and therefore I had the right to come back and rethink the whole thing and maybe sign up for 18 hours instead of 21.
But I hadn’t finished what I was intended to do in this lifetime so if I wanted to come back and finish it that was okay too, and I’m a very responsible soul, and was delighted that I actually had something to do in this lifetime so I said, “Yes, I’ll come back.”
[Carla explains her early medical history and near-death experience at 13.]
So, let your heart be lifted from the burden of my doing poorly. I truly do not feel that I’m doing poorly, I feel that the Creator is clearing out more space so I can do what I came here to do.
[Carla speaks of having to resign from many of her church activity jobs and seeing it as not having accepted her limitations—that she must lie back and do what she can from the position she finds herself in—bloated tummy and all].
I really see this as the Creator clearing out for me a new path and I’m excited—I’m really excited. I don’t know what is going to be new for me but I know that a path has been cleared in my time so that I have time that I didn’t have before to find out. I’m being given the opportunity to find out more about my “I am.”
If I die tomorrow then my work is done, that’s all. There’s no tragedy about that, but frankly B, I think I’m going to live to be an old lady. I’ll be uncomfortable, you can count on that, but I’ll be in there and I’ll be giving praise and thanksgiving because of being alive and being able to try to help, to love.
Thank you so much for this letter, and your wonderful witnessing of working the path when it gets hard to work the path. To me, that’s the sign of someone who is truly conscious because it’s easy to work a path when things are going well—but let’s put the pressure on a little bit; let’s get some serious challenges going and see how many people start moaning and casting aside all they thought they knew.
I’ve been there, so I know how it is—I’ve spent a lot of time there, I can bitch and moan with the rest of them. (Laughs) It’s wonderful that you’re managing to be faithful.
I don’t know what Jim said to you about continuing regardless of any seeming failure or seeming dry period, but I’m sure that anything I say can only poorly echo his sentiments, because he speaks so wonderfully in his terse and economical way—he says so much. But I truly believe that the times of desert, the times that we have to give up all hope of affecting any outcome—just give it away free, don’t think about the outcome, we may think we’ve failed but we can’t think about it, we can’t dwell on it, it’s not ours to decide—we’ll never know.
It doesn’t matter whether we think we’ve failed or not. That has absolutely no relationship to the goodness of our attempt. That’s what counts—our steadfastness. We release any attachment we have to any outcome—just let it go because we’ll never have any control over that.
We only have control over what we hoped, and what we dreamt, and what we shared and how we loved, and how we cared and how we tried and how we desired to be of service. Who knows what the outcomes are. But our attempts as imperishable beings of light to be into this illusion the wonderful epiphanies available to those who sense eternity even through this heavy relative non-absolute confusion of an illusion, are so wonderful, that it doesn’t matter if we are in a desert period, we simply carry on.
That’s when faith speaks the loudest. When there’s no oasis in sight, when there’s no path, when there’s no light, we have every temptation to sit down and cry and if we do that it’s all right too—just sit down by the side of the road for awhile and after a while we pick it up and carry on.
But in the end, all that was happening with you, you still carried on in service. You still were doing your best, although you were not at that time feeling the joy and the peace of oneness with the infinite One, you were trying to carry on in blind faith to offer that experience to others.
Had you experienced it lately? Not likely. Not after what you’ve been going through. But there you were B, plugging right along, Hurrah for you!
I love you a lot and I urge you never ever to judge your efforts or to care one iota about how they appear to others. Just keep trying. Just keep giving. We’re responsible for us—the way people see us—that’s their responsibility. If they mirror something back to us that’s helpful to us then fine—we recognize it and we use it. If they mirror back something we don’t recognize—that’s their stuff, not ours.
Even a bad mirroring can be helpful in that it causes you to go within and sound yourself out—does it feel like anything that’s mine? It’s always good to do that. But if it doesn’t feel like anything that’s yours, don’t hold on to it. Release it and release that person from being the judgmental clod that he or she undoubtedly was.
Sometimes it’s hard to release and forgive, but I have found that if you pray for someone daily, it doesn’t take a very long period of time for you to feel a compassion for that person that completely overwhelms any other feeling that you may have and gives you the forgiveness that you could never have found from within yourself.
Not know where you stand on prayer, guessing that you are quite able on your own, but sharing the kind of thing I do—there’s a prayer I memorized as a kid and in circumstances where I’m having trouble releasing someone and my feelings have been hurt—now I do complete the transaction most of the time—I do say “You have hurt my feelings”—I don’t walk away like a crushed leaf underfoot—I say, “You have hurt my feelings.” I don’t say “I am judging you and you are a terrible person.” I just say “You have hurt my feelings.”
It’s a simple transaction as far as I can see. It’s so that it’s not a one-sided communication, but an acceptance, and a completed transaction. Then I say the prayer that I love the most:
Watch over thy child, O Lord, As his/her days increase Keeping him unspotted from the world Strengthen him when he stands Comfort him when discouraged or sorrowful Raise him up if he falls And in his heart, that peace that passeth all understanding Abide in the days to come and forever.
I also add: “Through Jesus Christ our Lord,” because I’m a Christian, but you can skip that if you’re not, and I don’t think you are, are you? In the name of love would be just fine.
I think you’re right about the mass media culture, people expect instant everything and I think there is a lot more happening instantly from the things that we do than we know. But again, that’s not our business. We’re not here to judge our effectiveness, except insofar as we can try to improve it. Jim and I have talks about it. But when you’ve done it, you’ve done it. You don’t say, “I wish I’d done this or that,” you did it and you did the best you could.
One good example of that is a talk Don gave to about five people—it was a very bad recording, it was from a Radio Shack instrument just like this one stuck under my chair, using the condenser mike, not only that, but we were pretty well triangulated by two radio station signals from the library, one that was the public radio jazz talk and the other the classical station and then there was the rock and roll station, like I said in about a perfect triangulation from the other two. So music drifts in and out of the lecture.
Afterwards Don said to me “How could I come down here and give all this stuff out for five people”—he ask Ra about this. He said “Why don’t you do some kind of advertising—run some UFOs by people so they’ll come to my talks and I can tell more people about this.”
And Ra said “Forget ye the counting.” I don’t know if that’s in the personal material or the public, but that’s what he said.
Anyway, Don’s death took us all shorthanded—we had listened to Don talk hundreds of times, we had expected him to live a long time, therefore, we had not been taping his talks. We searched through every tape we had and except for little snippets here and there, that tape to those five people was the only tape, from end to end, was there, extant. So he has ended up giving that talk to—I think the last time I asked Jim—over fifteen hundred—we’re going towards 2,000 people, which is a pretty big audience and I think it will probably continue to grow through the years.
It had a lot wrong with it, that tape—bad production and so forth, but it gave people a chance to hear a very, very wonderful story teller and a great man doing what he did best, so that is a perfect example of how we do not know when we do things what kind of impact, what kind of history they will have after we let them go, so we might as well forget about it and let it go and keep on truckin’.
And B, that’s what I hear loud and clear in your letter. It’s so beautiful.
We are indeed finding beauty in the midst of difficulty. Jim could not be more supportive or kind or gentle or loving. His is not a romantic love in the sense of being so desperately in love with me that when I enter the room his heart shakes, basically, other than a sexual infatuation which still to some extent, is our most intense thing which we still have, and which we enjoy about each other, basically, it’s the work and Jim doesn’t see me specifically as work—he does see taking care of me as part of the honor/duty that he took on when he took on L/L and the Ra contact and the rest, because where I lost most of my ability to do things was during the contact—I did lose a lot of headway there as far as dexterity of hands and so forth. I became a lot more dependent on someone to help me do things.
And we’ve worked that through to the point where we see it as thing of potential beauty, if we can both harmoniously do it together, so that he’s not working on me and I’m sitting letting him work on me, but we’re working together to move as dancers through this ballet of his helpfulness and my cooperation and my thanks to him and his thanks to me for the ability to be of service.
So we really are in awfully good shape as far as what’s going on mentally and physically things may look rotten but overarching all of that is that spiritually Jim and I are in a very beautiful place right now ready to take what comes serenely and happily ready to carry on. We will let circumstances guide us and I will not say, “Well, if I can’t sing, I’ll be miserable,” or “If I can’t go to church I’ll be devastated,” or “If I can’t do this or that, letter tape, or get together”—we’ve been planning a get-together for an eternity and it never does seem to come off.
I’ve learned one thing from this prolonged experience of things falling apart—it’s been in slow motion all along—I’m just not attached to it anymore. I really do feel that the Creator is doing this not on my way down towards death, but just clearing out more time for me to be, because really I think what people are needing more and more is not what I have to say, but the consciousness behind what I have to say.
And I’m ready—I will learn gladly and I take up this challenge with joy.
So I’ll give you back to Jim now and thank you so much for letting me rattle on. I just wanted to tell you what a beautiful letter it was and to reassure you as best as I can that there’s nothing tragic happening here and all is well—all is very, very beautifully well.
Much love to you, dear heart sister,
Carla