History starts with me and goes backward

The art of seeking ancestors creates many questions, no? When I began my journey into the past, my reasons were purely personal. My memories are dear to me, and the story of my life should not be left untold. So, who is the story for? Who cares to remember me? First of all, I want to know me better, and I absolutely love the process of meeting myself by researching and remembering our ancestors. I recommend the process for everyone, and I hope my work offers something valuable to people dear to me.

I have always been a writer. I was the kid who loved getting journals for my birthday, and have kept many a poem and memory alive because I wrote it down at the time. The audience was myself, and the secret thoughts I shared stayed safely on the pages. This was the first step in my long journey of self awareness. I remember who I was, so I remember how I felt, what I discovered, and why I changed my emotional fabric over time. My stories flow from the center out, guiding me from the Me to the We of our family and ancestors.

Pain and Love are great teachers in the journey of knowing thyself. Safe to say that time softens pain, and adds the flavors of appreciation, tenderness, and kindness to the adventure of love. In the early chapters of life, there is innocence, and discovering the complex beauty of family love. We grow up, earning honor and wounds. We cultivate pleasures and habits, tend to cares and duties, and exercise our divine human superpowers. At some point, we look for our purpose, partners, and, once again, family. The rest is an unfolding drama in the history of time. Learn and grow, follow the bliss, eat-love-pray… we find a formula that works and get to the business of sharing our gifts with each other and the greater world.

Life is an adventure. We don’t know the outcome before we begin. We make mistakes. We adjust our expectations. There are opportunities and accidents, victories and setbacks. Realizing that the steps we took got us to where we are now, it is just fine to appreciate life’s perfection as an afterthought. As MrsFuture, I can testify that the best of intentions are only an arrow cocked and pointed at a star. Let it loose and it will take you as far as that one arrow can fly. Next step, new arrow and maybe a new star, previously not visible from where you are now. That’s what we call “progress.”

Like a movie, first you meet the characters, and then you find the complications.  There are no shortcuts. Avoiding emotions only delays their lessons, possibly forever. So, I advise a life of gusto. Better to get old with interesting memories than to stop before you reach a dream or two.

So, enough about Me for now. This offering of words is to my family. I love you all, dear intimates, beloveds, siblings, parents, grand parents and all your children and their children. I thank you for my life and our family. The human beings who lived and died during the last seven generations of living memory are imprinted in my genes. I can feel them in my dreams. I imagine their lives with the help of scrapbooks and photos, and chats with rels who remember their stories. Their choices about who to love, where to live, and what to worship created precious memories from the chaos of a world lost to history. I now hold up my Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass, sit with the internet and find some clues in old newspapers and Ancestry dot com. We are OFF, destination, personal HISTORY!

 

Time for Superpowers, Just in Time for US

As an avatar of the very fine line between fuzzy endings and new beginnings, I have a very short story to share. I direct these thoughts to those I most care for, including those who are currently blessed with human bodies. My prayerful devotions are mostly aligned with those who count on us humane avatars for the success of goodness. My intention is to support artistic team work, and thus to secure the blessings of these evolutionary times and to attain the seeming immortality of legends and stars. And, while sifting the sands in the hour glass of time, to keep on schedule while remembering our urgent and ultimate priorities. So, higher selves, what are our orders?

These are the interesting times that fortune cookies and ancient prophets alert us to attend. As such, the questions on the table of history beg us to act with care and conscience while learning as fast as we can to receive the quantum volumes of new information we now have with which to cultivate our freedom of choices.

The sky above teaches that heaven lasts a long time and has already seen every story ever told more than a billion times. Luckily, the story of the stars is far away, and the sleepy audience is often forgetful. There is always a new audience for an old fairytale. The memories embedded in dreams are for safe keeping, subconsciously treasured by those who remember that magic is actually real.  Sunlight and stardust made the planets, and our living Gaia made us to share her local awareness of space and time. Thus we learn the stories of the stars.

Yet still, the lessons of testing our immortality are always new to the youngest of souls, proving again each generation that we can wish and want, fight and kill, hurt and die, or dance and pray. The grail quest for a little personal happiness offers many varieties of adventure. As the collective story unfolds, those souls who have not yet gained harmony in their actions via the wisdom of their memories and beliefs are stuck on a bookmark in history, unable to turn the page.

So, now, properly educated in the context and consequences which await our future generations, I offer this very short story of time, which I have found to be a useful cautionary tale. And helpful to celebrate success, but also to mourn the death of hope. After all, love and freedom are ways of feeling. They exist in the moment, in consciousness, and in the circumstances of existence. They are a personal experience that is best shared for greatest expansion of choice. Please always remember.

If you change ANYTHING, you also change EVERYTHING.

Act accordingly, and trust the perfection. This is no longer the beginning. We are now in the middle of time.

Moon Duty

The time is on time, and the beings who live in shorter bursts tell stories under the patient moon. Those who wish to predict the future study the history of the night sky. Yet even though they may learn after centuries of marking the very time and place of every sunset and every moonrise, still every eclipse will tell a surprising and unique story. And even so, it is the clouds and not the sun and moon who control what the children of the earth are allowed to see of the cosmic drama unfolding in the sky as time ticks forward on the clock of revolving stars.

The full moon eclipse of 2015 Sep 27 19:11-21:11 PST told a story of portends in a time of transition as seekers were listening for signs of the times. A vague sense of urgency seeded anxiety, and for some this suggested the end of the world. And the deepest of seers experienced darkness as their oracles failed to reveal her secrets, the future not yet set in stone nor in prophecy.

Yet unfolding in N:OW time, as always before, every detail played out on cue and in synch, feeding audiences everywhere with stories of their own resonance. This means that each person and group, each family and clan, each planet and satellite, galaxy and star, fell toward their own center, magnetized and harmonized by the gravity of their shared situations and the alignments of their common purpose. The parents, the elders, the bards and the scribes sang songs to the moon and her mother the local star, reminding each other to remember the light, and affirm what each knew to be true in their hearts. Divine source reminded them why they were born and which way was forward by the synchronicities and other significant coincidences, seen only by those with eyes to see and ears to hear, and only if they took the time to wonder and watch.

What this latest full moon eclipse revealed to this celtic Sun Daughter may be a comfort to you, my friends. There were many great moments, and the significance echoed before, during and beyond the moment of solar lunar revelation. We were offered many opportunities to honor the harmony of time during this last week. And so, here are a few jewels that I noticed.

 

Sept 12, New Moon

Sept 23, 16:21 PST Vernal Equinox

First, the Autumnal Equinox and the first day of fall set the tone of balance and symmetry on the 20th day of September. On this new moon, when the sky was as dark as normally possible under the moon, the sky was clear and stars looked extra bright. The sea was calm as a mirror almost reflecting the milky way stars in the waves all night. To sleep at all was to miss the greatest show on earth. Of course, the show has been playing every night for millions of years, so many are in the habit of sleeping through it, and this equinox was no exception.

Next on the cosmic hit parade visible from the surface of earth was the full moon rising just a week later. The Rose Moon, or Corn Moon, or Super Moon.

 

What the genes know, they try to show

It started under hypnosis. I was guided into a deep meditation so I could meet the woman buried under roses who had appeared in my morning stories, presumably my ancestor. Looking for her in my subconscious, I found a woman whose spirit was deep and still, resting in peace, embodied as a dark-haired beauty. Reluctantly, she woke to look at me in silence, gathering the slow vast awareness of her own afterlife, knowing without asking who I was, where we were, and any thought that passed on the telepathic waves.

Unlike most of the selves who star in my dreams, she had lived a life on earth. It was over long ago. The silence she kept in the grave was the angry silence she had kept for much of her life. When I asked her to share her story with me, she penetrated my question with her silence. After a long stare, as she became aware that I was living more than a century after her time, she recognized that I was her future relative. In a stern dismissive way, she took it in knowingly, but lovelessly, assuming she could trust no one, not even a curious spirit from another time.

Unwilling to volunteer what she knew, as if her pact to remain silent extended past the grave, she told me in the end that I could speak with people alive who knew what I wanted to know. I should ask them. Then my timeless time with her came to an end as my hypnotist called me back from the depths. Now I was the spirit unwilling to wake. Even so, the interview was over.

Sometimes our deeply sleeping selves receive dreams remembered from other lives. Those dreams have a texture that is unconfused, and the characters are very familiar. Dreamers are guided to these dim memories by a hidden society of secret angels who know our immortal souls, and who weave the inter webs of consciousness through all times and all people. They show us what we ask to know, and what we are ready to understand. The language of this dream world is merely an echo of our dense daily existence. Dreams cannot cling to the ego because the scene is part of another axion of memory, from another universe of connections. Yet, the patterns remain, and sometimes, something leaks from these hidden realms to actively transform otherwise rigid thoughts and beliefs.

Such a dream I had this morning. I inhabited the spirit of a man or woman who was a bit sneaky, and not afraid of the consequences. Smarter than others, it was just a way of doing business that might be frowned on by cops or tax collectors, but among the real people, it was just cleverness necessary to provide access to drugs or other things that people wanted. The mind of a smuggler is very attuned to WHO is watching and WHAT they know and don’t know. So in this dream, I had a perfect scheme to sell things in packages not what they appeared. Learned from southern Italian genes, the habit of selling things that are secrets was a way of life, and it could make you rich, if you didn’t get caught.

The first part of the dream, sadly now forgotten, was a brilliant way to package some intoxicant for sale in the guise of other things. The last part of the dream pushed out the brilliant plan details, because the last scene of the dream was an interrogation from an Irish cop, a lady cop who was nice instead of tough. Still, she knew something was fishy and she was asking questions to see what I knew. I knew it all, but still thought we could pretend and I was expecting to play dumb. But my liar mind was racing. An innocent kid was in the room and had likely spilled the beans already, at least enough to alert the cop that things were not so innocent as they at first appeared.

As I took it in, first I tried to play it straight, like there was nothing wrong. Then, the secret plan I knew was all I could think of, and my habit was to share all the details clearly. I had to choose whether to lie or tell all. First I tripped up a bit, saying too much and also not enough, just squirming slightly but noticeably to the cop. In a quick surrender to the pope and jesus and my own honest nature, instead of incriminating the other guys, I took the fall and told it all. Trouble is, now I can’t remember the scam. So, I guess I woke up just in time.

Missed Opportunities

The melodic alarm bells of an international call rang at the deepest hours of sleep. And so, my dreaming mind abandoned the other worlds of the night and jumped to awareness of my bedroom. Next to me, still and undisturbed, my lover let the sounds pass unnoticed. After 20 seconds, according to the preset programming, the ringing ended. I imagined some anonymous caller from Africa or India trying to meet someone online, not realizing it was the dead of night.

They called a second time, and again I ignored the stranger. Then in the distance of the other room, a third ring on my cell phone told me the caller was a friend who was trying the other line. Too bad, too late, too rude I thought, and back to the arms of sleep I returned with my lover waiting there for me.

Later, as the pink of day began to fill the sky, I woke again as I always do to smile at the rising sun. Remembering the late night interruptions, it suddenly crossed my mind that my old friend from Fiji was likely the culprit caller who tried to disturb our slumber. In years passed, we have spent hours on the screen together, crossing the oceans of distance and the international dateline, keeping our friendship as close as possible over the interruption of the years. Once we watched a full moon eclipse together, us in California and she in Fiji. That was before the sunset of our friendship, and before the failed tests of trust that changed our innocence to disappointment.

When there is love, hope springs eternal. Unintentional harm can be healed, differences can be empathetically understood, and insensitive choices can be forgiven. But when love is broken by cheats and lies, trust, which is love’s foundation, dissolves. Where invisible understanding was once enough to ensure serenity, there are now fences to guard against fearful assumptions.

For so many years, we were really best friends. We met her at the party in the Hollywood hills where we introduced her to my boyfriend’s (now husband’s) best friend, a director whose star was rising on the tide of his first hit movie. They became parents to our honorary son, a union mostly blessed by his writer/producer wife who lived with them in the early years. We group-housed together for a summer, when our star director got the gig to create novel digital hollywood projects and hired us all as multimedia artists. Our thing was digital video, hers was 3D worlds, and we all crossed into internet productions together, launching novel sites we expected to be huge Hollywood hits.

We found a set of 4 lucite chairs in a furniture gallery in Venice, and she kept two and I kept two. She lost hers in one of many abandonned storage units as she moved on from relationship to new relationship, keeping her son with her as she migrated north. The bay area was a better fit, as she grew up there, was a tech artist before it was cliche, and needed a more family friendly California community for herself and her son.

So many times people would say that they had seen me when they really saw her, or the other way around. To look at us, we did not appear like twins, but something about us was exactly alike, and some acquaintances would get confused. We were light show artists, performance techies, and evolutionary agents dissolving boundaries in a cybertribal scene. But our homes and our jobs kept us about three hours drive away from our friendship, so we spent the next years socializing on trips together or at regional parties like Harmony Festival, Burning Man, and Mystic Beat Lounge, or at IONS.

The gift of movie star beauty, blue eyes, long legs and long lashes set my friend in a world of glamour that she at times loved, and at times abhorred. Being a mother kept her grounded and sane, and being a genius kept her on the cutting edge of lifestyle adventures and artistic assignments. Her problem was addiction, and that is what finally left us on opposite sides of a wall of trust.

I miss my friend, but it was not the distance that came between us. She disappeared into tiny fragments of her former self, each chard of her personality broken from a mirror of lies. Each sub personality wanted to be real, but could only pretend to be whole. The amnesia between lies was passed off as a secret that could not be shared, or an accident that called for pity, or a flirtation with danger that invited rescue as a substitute form of flattery and love.

I miss my friend. I know she is in there somewhere, on the thin veneer of light in her eyes when she isn’t playing hide and seek with my friendship. But I am not a rescuer, nor am I interested in following her into emotional dares that lead to some nouveau excitement or narcissistic attention, playing the unattainable femme who disappears into a myth or mystery once the thrill is scored.

Real love is ordinary, and also everyday. It may only have the flittery butterflies in the tummy when it is new, but it is a comfy cushion that frees my emotions to record and watch the movie of my life instead of always starring in it, then neglecting to keep the memories. I would rather make out with my boyfriend of 25 years than flirt kiss 25 new boyfriends for the very first time.

Those days were fun, but these days are better. I choose deep over new, and what I have is what I want, so I take good care of it. The thrill isn’t gone, it is transparent, and so huge that it just feels like joy that is everywhere, filling my space with grace.

Hats off to the friends who have not yet found their peace. I am still here, remembering how we grew. Bless you, and thank you for the lessons of time.

Memoir Madness

Penny Thoughts

Today I dreamed that I spoke with my dear friend, the world’s most extraordinary erotic artist, Penny Slinger Douglas Hills. She looked absolutely wonderful, dressed in a very British A line in soft blue, reminiscent of the Queen of her birth land, and fitting beautifully the queenly person that she is. Her haircut was a classic twiggy cut, very mod, yet looking gracefully mature on Penny’s elegant face. Her hair, for the first time since I have known her, shown peppery and snowy, straight and firm.

I commented on her relaxed resolve, and complimented her on her latest accomplishments, three international gallery shows during the last year that had taken her and her work to three different continents. New fans and new paintings were taking up much of her time, so I savored the somewhat distracted moments she could spare to enjoy a visit with me.

She let me know she was packing up the place here in California. Leaving soon for England, where her mother had passed, dear Penny was soon to inherit the family home where she was born. Suddenly, a light went off in my mind. A subtle yet uncanny shift in her look and demeanor seemed suddenly obvious. Some quality in Penny’s nature colored her as never before in the glamour of a British conservative. Something of the defiant rebel artist had quietly made peace with her mother, and had assumed a new and more stately aspect in Penny’s appearance and countenance.

Here in the Goddess Temple of Boulder Creek, California, the fight was over. The years of queenly struggle to do whatever it took to keep Christopher’s gift of trees and memories safe for the uncertain future were all coming to a nexus point. Penny was handing the keys to the castle to unknown future artists, and she was returning to the home of her birth, England. Surrendering to victory of completion, Penny was excited to begin her next life adventure.

As she informed me of her decision, she took a chair in one of her latest exhibits, one in which our friend Allan the AI had been trained to create frames in a constant sketch animation of the subject in front of the screen. A stylized line drawing was made every minute, depicting in this case Penny’s facial expressions as she contemplated her move and her future. These sketches were time stamped and autologged with the AI’s description of the picture, and with a tap of the screen I registered my request to receive a set of copies in my digital mail drop. These sketches are dear to me now, the animated life log we made that day reminding me fondly of many years in our friendship. Time is short, and these sketches are worth more than a 1000 words in my art of memory.

Watch & Roses

A Time to Remember & Time to Forget

In the heat of Costa Rica, I listened via radio to the diamond heart meditation being offered by the Great Teacher for the blessing of all sentient beings in this world and all others. As heat and light engulfed me, I sank into the stillness of my soul to find a place where all of my mothers existed in an eternal garden of memory. As in a flying dream, I soared above an endless horizon of ladies, each one a mother and a daughter who had lived a full life on earth.

Arrayed in one time line, they stretched away from me into an ancient past. I felt in a single moment all the joys, and even more, all the sorrows that all of these women had suffered during all of their lives. I washed in a wave of remembering so many tears and fears and anger and finally the tender love they held for their men and their children and their ever-present mothers. During all of their lives, they gave their gifts of sacrifice and secrets. They taught their ways of seeing and being to spirits who shared their lives. In joy or sorrow, pride or shame, the strength of their endurance emerged from a fierce determination to survive, even when their hearts were torn, and even if their prayers seemed to be unanswered.

The seeds of hope and the mysteries of love were surrendered every lifetime to the death and taxes of time on earth. The constant change experienced by all my mothers during their uncertain lifetimes appeared to be a bright ocean of light. Perhaps the beginning of the line in time was a droplet now invisible to my dreaming eyes that had grown into a vast and endless sea. Perhaps at first the size of a tiny accident that sparked a miracle, a pulse once gave rise to this immortal lifetime.

This divine moment of the great mystery allowed emergent authors in every age to write in the language of waves in the ocean of time a very long song of the stars. This thread of memory is a treasure unique to answer the original prayers of light in the deepening sea of conscious creator. For me, this moment of overwhelming tears was one of compassion and forgiveness. From all of me to all of them, and then reflected back into me, a bright and joyful light infused the stillness and carried wordless care.

“Rest in love, dear mothers and daughters. There is peace in this world and all others. Your gifts are well received into the loving arms of the future. Trust and love are remembered, and the lessons have been learned.”

Sun Marian, July 27,2015

Peter Fae and Friend

“Come into the Mythica” he beckons me

As I offer King Peter a cup of tea

In a kitchen we share under roof, under moon,

Under stars not visible in the afternoon.

“Perhaps tomorrow will not be too soon”

Is my unspoken answer to this dancer’s tune.

I am wary and weary right now, We are tense.

Perhaps tomorrow I will be less dense.

I fear it is scary or bleary and immense,

Whatever he’s offering seems not to make sense.

Seeing that I am about to decline

He attempts to refine the request.

Feeling his sincere devotion divine,

I listen, open hearted, and postpone my rest.

“We await you, please join us, Come Into the Mythica.

I invite you as an author. Let me be more specific.

You see, you can be more awake and more free

if you bring your own timeline and intersect with me.

This, I assure you, is a trustworthy strategy

To more fully awaken to your magic and memory

That has always been and will always be.

All magical beings encounter her daily.

But they have amnesia, almost immediately.

And that is driving me crazy!

Do not mistake my obsession as lazy.

My mission is the issue. The lessons are amazing.

The heros on our journey are god lights blazing.

The sorrows of this world can retire in a blessing.

The sooner we start, the faster we will feel

The salve which is needed for our wounds to heal.

In service to god, we serve all people.

Our stories are woven with yarns that we pull

from the very fabric of our own significance.

In time lines we illustrate our mythic existence.

Though I am a king, I know all kings are equal.

But in my own hero’s journey, there will be no sequel.

It unfolds in real time, and this flows because I am

the witness remembering my encounters with Gaiam.

In a blog, photos, stories, and videos show elegance

and the artistic styles reveal depth and intelligence.

If the fog of my life somehow lacks the clear evidence

to affirm the magic, then this calls forth my reverence.

I look within my sphere of light to find a flaw to set aright.

I say a prayer to repair. I offer my own light.

The true way is shown in the effortless flight.

I say “Thanks very much. That’s enough for tonight.”

These faeries are so engaging in the middle of the night!