Stitching a new garment

A week ago, my phone pinged.  One of those Facebook PM things.  I’ve been getting a lot lately – little gifs of cute cats, uplifting pictures of sunsets or seascapes, prayers in pretty fonts garlanded with flowers or rainbows, even the annoying ones that instruct you to send the flickering candle or whatever back to the sender and on to all the women/true friends/grandmothers etc. you know…  Kind thoughts, sent with love – people doing what they can to connect.  I send a smile icon back or a heart or whatever I feel will best please the sender so that I can then move on with my day.

Life at LIME Cottage right now is not Netflix, gin and scrolling through social media.  It starts at 8.30 with lesson preparation (daily multi-age primary school phonics and English resources posted online for harassed parents – opentheboxweb.wordpress.com).  God I hate phonics!  A ridiculous system, but that is what the kids have been learning, so that’s what needs to be done.  At 11am it’s a video call with the grandchildren.  Their mum gets an hour to work from home unhindered while I chat, read stories, deliver the wretched phonics and writing, cram in a bit of maths and help the little ones to make some sense of the way the world is now.  A quick lunch, a daily walk or burst of gardening then on to the afternoon job – sewing scrubs and gowns for a local care home.  It’s all very organised in our town.  The coordinator sends out packs of fabric and patterns via masked and gloved volunteer couriers and our team of makers gets to work, each in their own home, just as the spinsters and weavers of yore may have done in this very house before industrialisation came.  My ‘working day’ ends at 4.30.  I check on the salads and tomato seedlings growing around the house on sunny windowsills then put some dinner together.

So it was surprising, really, that I heard the ping.  It was from a lady I’ve been in touch with for many years.  One of those social media friends I’ve never met, and never will, but somehow feel I know.  We exchange messages from time to time and, I confess, as I opened the file I was half expecting another cat picture.  She likes cats.  What I saw instead stopped me dead.  It was this:

My words reflected back to me!  She had sent me a screenshot of a passage I wrote all those years ago – back in 2012 – in my book LIFE: A Player’s Guide.  No explanation came with them.  Perhaps she had stumbled across the image and found it helpful, or perhaps she guessed that, at a time of such utter disempowerment, they were words I needed to be reminded of.

Either way, they worked.  I was transported back to the time I wrote it, returned to a state of optimism and reminded that what I’m doing now is valid.

 

Let me go a bit deeper here.

You see I’ve known a world-changing disaster was coming for a long time (see last post for details).  Stashed away somewhere in a cupboard upstairs is a rather expensive multi-use survival tool, some packs of waterproof matches and a self-sufficiency handbook.  Their time may or may not come.  I wasn’t expecting it to be this way, but I knew some cataclysm was heading inexorably towards us.  My source was impeccable.

I’d been told that me being a teacher would be important at this time – hence the time-consuming daily lessons.  I’ve been trying my best to follow the scant guidance I’d been given.

I was told more, though.  I was told that although technology would remain in tact and be beneficial, ‘finance’ – the economy – would undergo seismic changes and this in turn would have a huge effect on people.  It would, in fact multiply the changes occurring in society, leading to an attitude of altruism and general goodness prevailing over the cut-throat world of inequality, exploitation and global destruction.

It is that prediction which had been bothering me.  I’d had 15 years to prepare for this.  Now it was here, I fervently wanted to see that change.  I read eloquent passages and watched inspiring videos from people around the world stressing that we must not return to the old ‘normal’, that we need to change and that Covid 19, for all it’s cruelty, was giving us all a chance to stop and wonder and see the disparity, foolishness and waste of our old world.

And what was I doing about it?  Making a few bits of PPE for the local nursing home.  Growing a bit of veg.  Liking and sharing the positive ideas on social media.  Tiny drops in the ocean – pathetic!

Reading that message from my friend (and myself), however, helped me to rediscover the bigger picture.

Yes, in terms of the physical self, there are limits.  Once I begin to think of ‘me’ as thought and energy, though, everything changes.  There are no limits to thought or energy.  They are not confined within single individuals.  Thought is a million times more contagious than any virus.  It spreads through the aether, gathering energy and impetus from everyone who acknowledges and shares it.  Once the intention that we choose these beneficial changes in our world has been held, it grows exponentially.  It becomes our creation.

There is nothing – no multinational corporation, no bunch of self-serving policiticans, no reactionary lobbyist who can stand against the groundswell of opinion that is forming as we sit in our separate homes but combine our intent.

As I sit over my sewing machine this week, I will be pondering the deep and abiding changes that are happening in my thoughts, my energy and those of the world community around me.

Sonya Renee Taylor’s words express it perfectly:

‘We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.’

Metacogknitting

…Almost the active verb derived from ‘metacognition’, but with a few extra ideas thrown in…

Metacognition, as just about anyone reading this post will already know, is a wider knowing – those inklings, impressions, fleeting ideas and gut feelings that supplement and complement ordinary common-or-garden cognition.

As for knitting, though…  I’ve always loved any kind of textile work and there is something almost alchemical in transforming a single strand of yarn into a complex and beautiful garment, using just two simple sticks and one’s own hands.

For me it can be almost a meditative practice – busying the body while freeing the mind, and creating a unique physical item as I do so.  I like to weave in different textures and colours as I go.  I like to think about how every stitch is a vital part of the whole, while appearing so tiny and insignificant; rather like ourselves, really.  Drop a stitch and the whole thing can unravel.

And how (and why?) am I combining the two into a newly coined word?  you may ask.

Well, for me, the last six months has been a grounding experience.  I’ve been heavily caught up in physical, practical day-to-day matters.  They have taken up almost all the time I might otherwise have spent pondering, writing, dreaming and wondering.  There’s barely been time or opportunity for reading, blogging, chanelling or long, rambling, metaphysical discussions with cherished friends.  There’s barely been time to miss such activities, even.  Instead I’ve been stuck firmly in this mundane human skin-suit, supporting, surviving, problem-solving and grafting away.  (The only reason I’m not digging bramble and stinging nettle roots out of my daughter’s massively overgrown garden right now is the heavy rainfall outside as the English summer fragments into autumn.)

What I have come to realise, though, is that throughout the whole process of rescuing my little family from disaster, helping them back onto their own feet, rebuilding their confidence, dealing with the practicalities of re-homing them and helping to make that home habitable, the metacognition skills I’ve been noticing and developing over many decades have become knitted into the very fabric of everyday life.

Metacogknitting is living human life and grounding ourselves entirely in the physical dramas, effort and heartache that entails, while always allowing those extra strands of ‘Knowing’ to permeate every planned action and thought.

It’s only now, as I reach the final weeks of my stay far from home and see things here settling down and being almost sorted out, that I can recognise how the pattern or blueprint of what I wished for them has come to pass.  It felt absurdly optimistic that I would be able to help to turn a desperate situation around in just six months.  The idea that these frightened, traumatised and hurt people would have a new home, close to relatives, and settle into their new environment seemed next to impossible, but I’ve learned enough, over the years, to know that holding firm to that idea and believing in it was crucial.  With deeply valued help from the wonderful Cheryl and Higgins, I learned to put that Big Dream out there, to trust that it would arrive in time and to focus on the tiny steps we needed to take, to make it a reality.

One stitch at a time, the garment grows.  Every stitch is vital.

Without all those years of practice, I could easily, in all the mayhem and stress, have forgotten to take note of the faint and fleeting metacognitions.  There was so much else to focus on.  At such testing times, though, they become more vital than ever.  I would wake at 3am, Knowing what new fears were surfacing in my little grandson’s mind, and how best to help him with them.  Later in the day, he’d pull me aside and share those fears and I’d have my response all ready and waiting.  A ‘chance’ unexpected meeting with someone would set me on alert, wondering Why now? Why this person?  What purpose do they have in this drama of ours?  There always was one.

Helping the family to integrate in their new community, I went with them on Monday to a village fete.  I managed to resist the urge to brush aside the young man asking me to buy raffle tickets for his stall.  He’d singled me out.  The metacogknitting reminded me that there’s a potential purpose behind every apparently random situation.  Sure enough, he called me that evening.  I’d won the prize.  When I went to collect it, we ended up chatting over a coffee at his kitchen table about his business and my daughter’s.  So many similarities and synchronicities.  They could help each other.  I’ve put them in touch.  Whether they act on it or not is their pattern, their blueprint, of course.  My step or stitch there was just to form a link between the two.

And that, of course, is what metacogknitting is all about.

 

 

Lost in Conurbation

“Stone walls do not a prison make
Nor iron bars a cage.”

wrote Richard Lovelace, back in the 1600s.

I’d sometimes wondered, passingly, how true that was.  Could the human spirit rise above physical incarceration and fly free, despite all?

Life – considerate as ever – has given me the opportunity to find out.  Not, I hasten to add, that I have been walled up in some dreadful prison cell.  I’m free to come and go as I wish and my surroundings are clean, dry and comfortable.  It is, nonetheless, a cell.

I will be living, through the rest of spring and summer and well into autumn, in a square white room.  There is a tiny shower room, but all other aspects of life must be accomplished here.  Where once I had rooms, now I have corners – one for cooking, another for sleeping, an eating, relaxing and working area.  Where once I had a garden to tend, stuffed with nodding daffodils, bluebells and tulips, I now have a single pot of hyacinths on a white windowsill.   Where once I watched the sun set amidst distant hills across the Somerset Levels, now it drops below a tower block across the car park from the one I live in.

My windows look out on to other blocks of flats.  A hollow-eyed woman with dark hair sometimes peers out from the one opposite.  A gaunt man coughs and gasps in the window as he drags at a cigarette from the room below hers.  Beyond the blocks are housing estates on two sides and roads on the others.

Yes, it would be easy to sink into self pity in this sterile, soulless, monotone place.  On my first night here, I lay in bed listening to the sound of traffic, far below, on the dual carriageway that leads to London – a soft, irregular swishing sound that rose to a crescendo and fell away again.  It could almost have been taken for waves, breaking on a pebble beach, I decided, before noticing that this gave me no comfort at all.  I’ve never much enjoyed the sea – too wide, too cold, too unpredictable.

I have with me the few comforts and essentials I was able to cram into a relative’s small hatchback and a few sticks of furniture I’ve borrowed, or bought from local second-hand shops.  It’s a world away from my lovely cottage, my dear friends and my contented life over in the west.

So is my spirit broken by this cruel exile?

Slightly battered, perhaps, in these early days of readjustment, but far from broken.  This has become an exercise in actively seeking out the positive.  Since my arrival two weeks ago, a froth of may blossom has covered the narrow strip of wilderness – a haven for dog-walkers and fly-tippers – that separates the estate from the trunk road, so that I now barely see the lorries and vans hurtling towards the city.  Tiny bluetits cling impossibly to vertical brick walls outside my window as they gather some form of sustenance from them.  Beyond the flyover, a single green field can be glimpsed obliquely from one window, if I position my chair carefully.

The greatest help, though, has come from the two little children I have come here to be with.  They and their mother have been permanently uprooted from their home, in the most traumatic of circumstances.  They, too, are living in temporary accomodation nearby, but with no hope of returning to their home and friends.  They have lost so much, yet they teach me, each day, about positivity and optimism.

“Grandma has a lake in her garden,” the six-year-old informed his mother, referring to the drainage ditch that crosses the small piece of grassland beside the flats.
Scale is unimportant. For us, now, it is a river, with meanders and tiny waterfalls created by twigs and leaf litter.

His three-year-old sister can easily spend ten minutes peering with total delight into a patch of wild violets she found there, stroking its petals reverently, or having earnest conversations with a passing beetle.

Even in my room, their imagination and creativity fills the space with magic.  A side table became an enchanted forest home for the fairies for a while.

A garden, bath and sofa were created in a box for their toys.

For all of us, now, Life insists that we build our own joys and delights and that we trust to its bounty and goodness to allow my little family to heal and rebuild their lives, so that I can ultimately return to mine.

I won’t be the same person who left, though.  There is richness in this experience that will stay with me forever and I am deeply grateful for it.

 

 

Long, long ago…

I’ve had this theory, for quite a long time now, that my life is based around a fairy tale… and just maybe everyone’s is.

Let me try to explain.

Imagine that, at the very start of becoming human and beginning this great adventure of playing at being physical creatures in a three dimensional world, our greater, non-physical, soul selves created a sort of master plan for human life to play out in.  Let’s imagine they (we) came up with a set of archetypal storylines, each involving a journey – an adventure of some sort with heroes and villains, difficult choices and wise ones who just happen to appear at the right moment.

Now imagine that, no matter what else we forgot about our origins and our true purpose, however muddled and confused we became by religions and sciences and politics and cultures, our greater selves would find a way to ensure that these vital blueprints for living out physical life could not be forgotten.  They would be hardwired into us.  Every generation would feel an innate urge to share them and pass them on to the next.  We would not be able to lose them.  Is that possible?

Diagram from Wikipedia

Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell and many others have written about the mono-myth, the hero’s journey or whatever they chose to call it.

Here it is at it’s most basic.

I suspect, though, that there are several variations – a collection of mythic journeys – and that, maybe in our pre-birth planning stage, we selected one to work with, in just the way you might select a video to watch, a book to read or a game to play.

Here in the West, the remnants of these blueprints are gathered in the collections of Hans Andersen, the Brothers Grimm and (in the USA) Mother Goose.  The same storylines, though, exist all over the planet.  They are in folk tales, soaps, Hollywood movies and Shakespearean dramas.  There’s always a twist in the tale, an unexpected choice, a reversal we weren’t expecting, to keep us interested, but the themes remain, because we need them to.

I won’t tell you which story is mine.  It’s a bit too personal.  You see, you know the story too well, and if I were to reveal its name, you’d know my life.  My character is on a long journey, seeking for something.  Various other characters and situations appear and distract me, lull me into a false sense of security.  Then, all of a sudden something happens to remind me of my quest, and I feel angry at the wasted time and set off again to continue my search.  There’s nothing trite or trivial about this journey.  It’s not even just a matter of life and death; it’s more than that.  It’s my soul/sole purpose and I need to get on and complete it.

I wrote about this theory at greater length, although probably not particularly well, in Life: A Player’s Guide, because I knew then – back in 2012 – how important it was.

Since then I’d forgotten.

But something happened this week to bring me back to it, so on I’ll go, hoping that now I finally have all the gifts, all the helpers and mentors and all the luck to complete my quest and reach a happy ending.

 

Will a hat make a difference?

I think I first heard the story of the boy and the starfish from Wayne Dyer.  He, of course, has been in my thoughts a great deal this week, as he gracefully withdrew his consciousness from that earthly body and moved on to other great adventures.

Dr Dyer made a difference, a huge one, while he was here.

Then there are the rest of us.  This week our lives have been touched by the sight, not of starfish, but of small children washed up on the beach.  We, too, feel the futility of any gesture amidst the mass of suffering as countless displaced people – mums, dads, sons and daughters – make desperate bids to find refuge and rebuild their lives somewhere safe.

What an opportunity it gives us – the chance to decide how we want to react; what we want to do.  If we can step back for a moment from the wringing of hands and the economic and cultural challenges, each of us has the chance to make a difference, even in the smallest way, and that is a great gift.

Please don’t think I lack empathy with the refugees by saying that.  Certainly I believe that every single person on the planet chose, as some level, the life they’re currently living, so that they could play this massively complex and often agonising game called Life and experience all it can throw at them.  We can’t come close to imagining how painful that is for some.  We can decide, though, how we will respond.

So I decided I wanted to make a difference and the idea that came into my head was – bizarrely enough – ‘make hats for the children’.

Hats?

Well, autumn is coming on, and many of the families are moving into colder places.  Hats are great for keeping the body temperature up.  I have an ancient and basic but functional knitting machine and shelves of yarn in all colours of the rainbow…

How was I to get these hats to the children?  That was the next challenge.  No sooner had the thought entered my head than I received two emails, detailing local drop-off points for supplies which would be taken to the refugee camp in Calais.  Once synchronicity starts to kick in like that, I stop asking questions and get going.

Here are the first two.  Each took about an hour to make.  The little crocheted starfish take another 20 minutes.  It struck me that I could make more hats if I left the decoration off, but intention is everything.  As I create my rather lumpy little starfish (I’m not great at crochet) I’m pouring into them all the love and hope I can for the child who will wear that hat, and the starfish is a powerful symbol for me of how, even in this absurdly small way, each of us can make a difference.

Travels through spacetime and beyond

Today’s post is a result of three recent conversations I’ve had.  All of them took place while I sat here at my computer in my cottage in Somerset, England.

One was via email with a friend in New York.  Another was via WordPress comments with someone, somewhere  – no idea where – who shares my interest in metaphysics, sacred geometry and the like.  The third was via telepathy and the use of my dowsing pendulum with some aspect of my friend Will.

A few decades ago, all those methods of communication would have been considered equally magical  and strange.  We now take the first two for granted… maybe the third…

It started with a question from the person of unknown location.

Communication with someone beyond the veil and another time is plausible according to what you can do.. but jumping dimensions and timelines that is an ability to change your frequency which– is unthinkable. What would you do on the other side? Do you just pop out in the middle of nowhere? or into a different conscious form of your own being? Your psychic, can’t you just ask your high dimensional friend

So I did.  Here’s the conversation we had.  Will’s comments are in Upper Case.

IT DEPENDS HOW HE INTERPRETS DIMENSIONS  

Yes, I agree but he is a seeker, and I have great sympathy with his desire to find answers.  So let’s go to specifics.  When you used to jump dimensions, what was going on?  Are we talking about other probable lives?

YOU COULD CALL THEM THAT 

In Seth Speaks, Seth states that there are many possible pasts, presents and futures.  For most humans, because of the way we’re wired, we see the future this way, but not the present and past, but since everything is happening at once (in a cosmic sense) it’s equally true of every event.  So when you inadvertently found yourself as a teenager in an alternate reality where you didn’t have a train ticket, although you had one while you were ‘here’, is that what you were straying into?

KIND OF  

Come on, Will, give me a bit more here.  Were/are you able to move into a ‘different conscious form of your own being’?

WE ARE ALL BEING MANY VERSIONS OF OURSELVES  BUT MOSTLY CAN ONLY HAVE ONE EXPERIENCE   GARRISONNED AGAINST OVERLOAD 

Okay, so just as we can only – in our human form – perceive certain frequencies of sound and light, so we can normally only consciously perceive one of the many versions of us.  I’m assuming (and going a bit dizzy in the process) that these are lives in other times and places – commonly called past and future lives – as well as all the probable/possible forms of each of those lives.  Is that about right?

YES 

Right, so returning to your use of the word ‘mostly’, I assume there are exceptions.

YES I WAS ONE PLACE BUT DIFFERENT PROBABLE LIVES 

I recall you being very freaked out by the experience.  Do you think your ability to jump ship, so to speak, was due to your autistic spectrum perception, to your mental state at that time or a by-product of adolescence?

A MIX OF THE FIRST TWO 

I see.  So is it something that still happens to your physical counterpart?  

IT ISNT INVOLUNTARY NOW     BASIC SKILL  

So I’d like to get my head around it.  I, for example, can project various possibilities into my future – mentally and emotionally – such as thinking how I’d feel if I went to the cinema and comparing this with how I’d feel if I stayed at home.  I can also compare probable pasts (‘What if I hadn’t said yes to that person?’ etc.).  But I imagine what you’re describing isn’t just conjecture – it’s actually experiencing this other reality/dimension/ call it what you will.  Yes?

YES 

Again, it’s something Seth describes.  He even suggests exercises to develop the ability.  To return to my correspondent’s original questions, are you jumping dimensions and timelines?

IT DEPENDS HOW YOU DEFINE THEM     YOUR TIMELINE CHANGES WHENEVER YOU MAKE A CHOICE 

But that still implies that I just have the one timeline that I consciously work through while I’m in the body.  You apparently can straddle several.

YES    IT CAN BE CONFUSING 

I’ll bet!  This brings me on to another discussion I was recently having with a friend.  It concerned the possibility that – since we all create our own reality – two people could create completely different realities involving each other, and both have the experience they chose, although these involved quite different outcomes.  The example was that a lady whose granddaughter was sick could experience the child recovering and being well, if that was the reality she selected, while if the girl had chosen to experience being ill, dying at an early age and being mourned by the grandmother, she could experience that reality.  Can you comment on that?

YES  IT IS POSSIBLE     IT CAN BE UNDERSTOOD BY DESCRIBING IT AS QUANTUM SUPERPOSITION  

I’m sort of getting that.  I actually used that concept to describe how you are living as a recluse in London and barely communicating with me, yet also carrying on these rambling and fascinating metaphysical discussions with me.  Is there a link?

YES BUT YOU COULD GET TO A POINT WHERE YOU HAVE FACE TO FACE TALKS WITH ME 

I’d have to throw away any concept of an objective reality, to do that.  Cause and effect would go out the window, too – at least in the terms that I’ve understood them.  You would be consciously sending me one-word texts each week and experiencing hermitude, but you’d also be consciously participating in my chosen reality as someone I meet and talk to… and presumably those are only two of the probable/possible lives you and I are simultaneously living out.

YESSSSSSS YOU HAVE GOT IT 

Life really IS a game, looked at in those terms, isn’t it?  I know I wrote a book about it, but living in this kind of multi-dimensionality is something else again.  Thanks for the insights, Will.  I’ll get to work on creating (or moving into) that reality for myself.

SEE YOU THERE 

And how do I get there?  The same way I manifested LIME Cottage, I suppose – expect a miracle!

Link to Seth Speaks on Amazon.

Link to Life: A Player’s Guide on Amazon.

Bring on the AFGOs

 

If I’m right in believing that I – and all of us – at some point outside of space and time and the other trappings of 3D existence, planned this lifetime in which certain situations and experiences would appear, then I have to take some responsibility for what is happening to me.  I can’t blame fate, ill luck or even other people, no matter how tempting that may be.

 

It’s taken a while, but I’m fine with that now.  When an AFGO (Another Bleeping Growth Opportunity) comes along, I’m fairly good at accepting that this is stuff I embarked on this life to work through.

Something I’ve noticed, though, after many years of working with children and young people, is how many of those who are special, sensitive, Version 2.0/ Old Souls or however you choose to describe them, seem to have selected particularly difficult, challenging and – frankly – horrifying ‘Growth Opportunities’.

It’s made all the harder, of course, because they didn’t consciously choose these situations – not in their current lifetimes.  The higher self / god-self / soul may be brilliant at selecting challenges that will allow them to make huge and wonderful amounts of spiritual growth, to bring more love to Earth and to heal themselves, the planet and those around them, but it is so very hard to watch them suffer as family problems or other circumstances tear their young lives apart.

Yes, I could give specific examples – ones that are showing up amongst young people I know very well at this point in time.  Maybe I will in a future post,  if I think it will help.

For now, I just want to flag up how much harder it is, sometimes, to watch a child suffering than to work through one’s own difficulties.

On the other hand, we can be reasonably sure that, if they have shown up in our lives, there’s a reason for that too.

We have something to give them.

Or they have something to teach us.

Or, more likely, both of the above and more besides.

My pain, as I feel for them, is of no value, but showing them kindness and understanding, being ready to offer support and humble enough to learn from them about how to deal with the most challenging parts of this terrifyingly realistic game called Life – that’s where the value is, for all of us.

 

 

Available in paperback and Kindle editions

More ponderings on this and related subjects can be found in LIFE: A PLAYER’S GUIDE, available on Amazon or to order through booksellers.  

ISBN 9781 78176 7764

 

 

 

Exploring life through the autistic spectrum

Earth and Moon from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter taken by HiRISE (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Either you subscribe to the view that we are all spirit and are temporarily engaged in playing an elaborate game called Life or you don’t.

I’m not attempting to make converts here – just discussing this Life the way I view it.

I’m reaching the end of my professional career now, but have been working in education long enough, and had enough encounters with children and young people to have formed some interesting ideas.

So the way I see it is this:  Before you or I were born, we existed as consciousness/spirit which made a conscious choice to head for Planet Earth and spend a few decades in a skin-suit, exploring and expanding our experience in a way that only physical life allows.

Some of us chose to completely forget our greater, spirit selves and to become so utterly immersed in The Game that we remain unaware that there is anything of us beyond the skin.

Others started off that way, but through spiritual, ritual or religious practice over the years, have rediscovered that greater consciousness and have linked back to their spirit selves.  People who are able to do this – mystics, gurus, saints, shamans and the Hay House brigade amongst others – are often revered and followed by those seeking enlightenment.

A third group, and these are the ones who fascinate me in particular, have chosen a third path.  In LIFE: A PLAYER’S GUIDE I called them the Version 2.0 kids, because they appear to be playing this Life Game in an enhanced and updated form.  Many in this – very loose – grouping display, from a human perspective, features that have been labelled as autistic spectrum ‘disorder’ or one of the range of ‘disorders’ and ‘syndromes’ which roughly translate as ‘not like the rest of us’.

The ‘skin-suit only’ brigade work tirelessly to cure or alter the Version 2.0 lot and force them to conform to the skin-suit-enclosed way of perceiving the world.

I’d argue that many of these very specialised humans have arrived on the planet with a far greater awareness of their spiritual origins, and are far less strongly tied to their human existence than those around them.  That’s not to say they are gurus and saints, just that they are exploring the Life experience in very different ways.  They have by-passed the years of meditation practice or other paths to opening up to their greater selves by refusing to become so besotted with the Earthbound experience; they’ve retained a sense of perspective, if you like.

This would explain why so many so-called ‘disordered’ people have skills and gifts the rest of us don’t.  I once taught a whole class of ‘special needs’ children who were able to communicate telepathically with each other – and eventually with me – although (or maybe because) they had not developed speech and language skills.

Interestingly, a sizeable proportion of these children start to develop spoken language in typical fashion and then stop at around 18 months.  Although devastating for their families, this seems to me to be because they find themselves losing the pre-verbal language they had been using – the one that depends on intuition, telepathic skills and subtle sensory signals the rest of us have largely forgotten.  This language dwells in pictures, thought forms and ideas, and provides a clarity and subtlety no human spoken language can achieve.

Our Version 2.0 brethren are not prepared to relinquish their spirit selves as completely as the rest of us have.  They have chosen to explore the Life experience in a new and – to my mind – exciting way, although their path, like everyone else’s, is far from easy or straightforward.

They wear their skin-suits loosely.  They do not need to seek enlightenment because they have never moved fully out of the light.  They are here to test – and perhaps to show us – another way of playing  The Game and one of our challenges is to allow them to be as they are.

In my opinion, this lady has got it right:

 

 

Synchronise your wishes

More of the cottage saga…  I’m afraid my mind dwells on little else at the moment.

Living on purpose and creating my own reality isn’t quite coming naturally yet, but life is definitely moving in that direction.  I’m getting better at it.

English heritage flag (Photo credit: Meandering Mammal)

I’m not sure how other countries protect their treasured historical buildings, but here in the UK, they are Listed.  The soon-to-be-my cottage has a grade 2 listing.  That means it’s not quite in the Stonehenge  or Glastonbury Abbey league, but being at least 320 years old means that English Heritage and their minions are understandably protective of it.  they want to be sure I’m not going to defile it with UPVC windows and plastic guttering.

That’s all well and good.  I’m not, of course, but they don’t know that.  On the other hand I would quite like to make a few subtle changes, especially to the back of the cottage which was badly mucked about in the 60s and is now leaking like a sieve.

Sadly, the listing covers the botched 20th century work as well as the beautiful 17th century part.  That means I need to submit detailed plans, technical specifications, before and after elevations and all manner of hard stuff I can’t manage alone.

I asked the surveyor.  He said he’s love to help and quoted me an eye-watering amount of money – a sum I couldn’t possibly afford.

Where once there would have been panic and dismay, there was a glimmer of optimism.  Sure, the panic bobbed around the edges of my mind for a while, but then I remembered that I’m creating this.

I called my brother, on the other side of the world.  He called his daughter’s partner.  That young man called his friend.

Within 24 hours, I’d been given the phone number of an architect and assured that this man would sort it all for me.

What else should I expect, when buying the cottage I first saw five years ago in a vision of a unicorn?  Here, clearly was my knight in shining armour.  He calmed and reassured me, quoted a fee that was a fraction of the surveyor’s and patiently answered all my questions.  He’s going to handle the whole planning application process.

Tomorrow I’m meeting him to finalise the plans.  The synchronicities are back in place.

As it says in Conversations With God,

The deepest secret is that life is not a process of discovery, but a process of creation.

Dis-Easy

“Try to stay at the eye of the storm” a wise friend once commented, when we were discussing those times when everyone and everything around you starts typhooning.

I’ve become rather good at that now.  In fact, for the week or so leading up to this weekend, I was very aware that every friend who contacted me had a problem.  People they’d trusted had let them down, finances had suddenly become a nightmare, relationships had fractured, illness or physical pain was afflicting them.

I listened to each of them with compassion and care.  I echoed back their statements, to allow them to find answers or ways forward where I could, and I tried very hard not to offer solutions or to drift into monologues about similar situations of my own, because I’ve learned that neither of those is particularly helpful.

You see, the Janonlife belief system is that each of us creates our own reality – and that includes any difficulties and problems – in order to gain the most experience possible from this short and tricky lifetime we are currently playing out, and to bring as much light as possible from our expanded, multi-dimensional selves into the existence of the Humans we are Being at this particular point.

I take full responsibility for what happened next, because I actually remember the thought that triggered it.

“This eye-of-the-storm bit is all well and good,” I commented to what I call my God-Self (also variously known as Soul, Spirit, Higher-Self, Essence, God, Goddess or what you will).  “Trouble is, this life has been going along smoothly for such a long time now.  I think I could do with a slight tweak, just to throw me a wake-up call.”

Oh be careful what you ask for, my friends!  By the end of the week, I was laid out by a physical meltdown.  All energy evaporated.  My skin became hypersensitive – to the point that even turning over in bed was agony.  My digestive system seemed to have temporarily been replaced by a particularly bad-tempered nest of vipers.  Strange swooshing noises swirled between my ears at every attempt to move about and waves dizziness overtook me even when I stayed still.

“OK.  Right.  Fine.  Got it,” I told the G-S.  “I take to my bed, drink water, stop eating and wait to see what comes in terms of experience from this lot.  Got it.  And could you ease up slightly on the stomach cramps please?”

So that’s how I spent the next few days.  I’ve had enough similar episodes in my life to recognise that – just as the New Agey lot say – physical illness is, quite literally, dis-ease.  This time, I’d even noticed beforehand that something inside me needed a hiatus – a cessation of everyday activities to give it the time and space to shift.

I didn’t force it.  I felt way too ill to do so, in any case.  I knew that something would come of this.  It always does.

Anger (Photo credit: ZORIN DENU)

On Sunday night, the something arrived.  Just as the physical symptoms were beginning to subside and I was ready for a relatively normal night’s sleep, huge tidal waves of anger swept through me.

Shaken but not altogether surprised, I grabbed a notepad and allowed a storm of fury against situations, individuals and events – recent and far in the past – to flow through the pen.  Whoa!  Can’t remember the last time I did anger.  I was amazed how much I’d been bottling up.

Did I feel any better for expressing it?

No.

I now had a list of people and events that I felt totally, utterly, mind-numbingly furious about.  I sat back exhausted for a few minutes and asked the G-S to remind me what came next.

“Er, mirrors?” the G-S hinted.

Oh yes.   Of course – I knew that.  Each of them was mirroring something inside my self – showing me aspects of my Being Human self that I was ready to change.

I returned to the list and worked my way through each situation.  None of these people was intentionally angering me.  Each was mirroring behaviour or attitudes I wanted to alter in myself.  Some took a bit of ferreting out.  One remained stubbornly insoluble, so I decide to sleep on it.

On Monday morning I woke feeling extremely weak, but physically fine.  All trace of anger and spite had evaporated along with the mysterious illness.  The elusive answer arrived as I relaxed in a fragrant bubbly bath and I knew the dis-ease had done its work well.