As events unfolded through the latter part of last month, I found myself blowing into my little God Whistle asking for strength.  It was a February of change and challenges that shook me more than anything had for quite some time.  The strength did come and right beside it flowed wisdom and comfort.

I dubbed this last month a period of “Bethie finding her religion”.   There is nothing like situations that metaphorically or literally bring me to my knees to remind me I’m not in charge here and frankly, there’s very little I’m in charge of around here.  And isn’t that a relief?  If I had to rely on myself to spin the planets, orchestrate thousands of different processes in my body, raise the sun, set the tides, we’d be having a lot of chaos in the world.

Often I don’t post about the particulars of the sh*t hitting the fan in my life.  It is found in between the lines of my poems and posts.   What I do tend to write about is the place I finally land, a little stronger, a little wiser and ultimately returning to what remains when all else falls away — that all consuming Love that’s back of Everything.

I’ve not yet reached the point where I’m grateful for all the contrast and challenges when I’m in the thick of it but I know enough now to see that I’m always grateful for the delicious expansion that comes just as soon as I’m willing to take my own hands off the levers of control.  As Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote “in the difficult, are the hands that work on us”.  Yes … the hands … not my hands.  Once again I am reminded of the humility and surrender in a simple prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.  Surrender is so much a part of the fabric of this Universe.  As surely as the day must surrender to the night, so must I give right of way to the “hands that work on us”.

I’m going to post some quotes from A Course in Miracles which played a big part in “Bethie finding her religion” again.  In the ensuing weeks I’ll post some lessons from the workbook.  There is much in ACIM I don’t understand but I’m comprehending more of it than I have in the past and I find the lessons to be so liberating that I believe they actually could be life-changing.

“There will come a time when images have all gone by and you will see you know not what you are.  It is to this unsealed and open mind that truth returns, unhindered and unbound.  Where concepts of the self have been laid by is truth revealed exactly as it is.  When every concept has been raised to doubt and question, and been recognized as made on no assumptions that would stand the light, then is the truth left free to enter in its sanctuary, clean and free of guilt.  There is no statement that the world is more afraid to hear than this.

I do not know the thing I am, and therefore do not
know what I am doing, where I am, or how to look
upon the world or on myself.

Yet in this learning is salvation born.  And What you are will tell you of Itself.”

Chapter 31, V:17

“The truth in you remains as radiant as a star, as pure as light, as innocent as love itself.”

Chapter 31, VI:7

This is the final passage in the text:

“And now we say “Amen.”  For Christ has come to dwell in the abode You set for Him before time was, in calm eternity.  The journey closes, ending at the place where it began.  No trace of it remains.  Not one illusion is accorded faith, and not one spot of darkness still remains to hide the face of Christ from anyone.  Thy Will is done, complete and perfectly and all creation recognizes You, and knows You as the only Source it has.  Clear in Your likeness does the Light shine forth from everything that lives and moves in You.  For we have reached where all of us are one, and we are home, where You would have us be.”

Chapter 31, VIII:12

And finally I leave you with a passage from the poem entitled Today, by one of my favorite poets: William Stafford.

“Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now, You could close your eyes and go on full of light.”

When we learn to trust the Universe, we shall be happy, prosperous and well.  We must learn to come under that Divine Government, and accept the fact that Nature’s table is ever filled.  Never was there a Cosmic famine.  “The finite alone has wrought and suffered, the Infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.”  God is always God.  No matter what our emotional storm, or what our objective situation, may be, there is always a something hidden in the inner being that has never been violated.  We may stumble, but always there is that Eternal Voice, forever whispering within our ear, that thing which causes the eternal quest, that thing which forever sings and sings.

excerpted from The Science of Mind~Ernest Holmes

what if all our paths are the right path

what if there is no wrong path ever

what if the only thing that held us back from knowing this,
is a conclusion that it’s a bad unfolding, it’s not good, it’s wrong

what if we took a deep conscious breath up from our
toes through our legs and spine and up to the tippy top
of our head

and exhaled onto the shores of this Divine Knowing:

All our paths are the right path.

Imagine a world where
“not one illusion is accorded faith”

If it isn’t the voice of strength,
if it isn’t the voice of love,
if it isn’t the voice of confidence,
it is the voice of illusion.

Imagine according your faith only
to the voice of strength, love and confidence.

Imagine withdrawing your consent,
your agreement with all else.
Imagine paying all else no mind.

Imagine.

["not one illusion..." is taken from ACIM]

If a sadness rises in front of you,
larger than any you have ever seen;
if an anxiety like light and cloud-shadows
moves over your hands and over everything you do.
You must realize that something is happening to you,
that life has not forgotten you,
that it holds you in its hand
and will not let you fall.

~Rainer Maria Rilke~
Letters to a Young Poet

Here is another “found” poem I have created.  This time I’ve brought Rumi and Rilke together.  No small task!  Great poets they were but not contemporaries as are Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry in my previous found poem.  This particular found poem starts with two lines from a Rumi poem and then alternates with Rilke’s words on the next two lines. This pattern is repeated with Rumi’s words then Rilke’s. No more than 1-3 lines from any one poem is used. There are many ways to create a found poem – this is one way. Below I list the eight poems that were used to accomplish this.

At first I thought: I really can’t do this.  This could be tantamount to blasphemy on some level.  However I’ve recently discovered that God is a cat lover.  When I get to the pearly gates, I’ve got extra credit as well as he’s grading on a curve, so blasphemy I can do a little and still not risk the fantasy suite and hot tub that awaits me.  :)

And now without further adieu, I bring you Rumi and Rilke, together at last.

There’s a surge up from the surface
into what is beyond dying

Like dew from the morning grass,
what is ours floats into the air

It is sunlight slicing the dark
The way the night knows itself with the moon.

Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another’s life that’s wide and timeless

If each of us held a candle there,
and if we went in together,
we could see it.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.

Inside this new love, die
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.

The Vigil – Rumi
The Second Elegy – Rilke
All Rivers at Once – Rumi (note: “I am” replaced with “It is”)
In the Arc of Your Mallet – Rumi (note: it is sunlight… and the way the night…, two separate Rumi poems put together in this one verse)
The Book of Monastic Life I,5 – Rilke
Elephant in the Dark – Rumi
The Book of Pilgrimage, II,1 – Rilke
Quietness – Rumi

I’ve been thinking lately that night dreams are my final frontier in consciousness.  They fascinate me and I wonder if they might be a link for us between the physical world and the non-physical, Spirit world.  Or as Susie called it in The Lovely Bones, the Inbetween.

I dream every night vividly.  Last night before I went to sleep I was thinking about my Mom who died in 1988.  Macabre thoughts perhaps about whether her body deteriorates even though its embalmed.  Thoughts of that moment when I was saying goodbye to her, as she lay in a coffin, and just had to reach out and touch her hand one final time.  I cringed and quickly withdrew my own hand as I felt her cold, hard skin.

Last night in my dreams, we have moved into another house again, something we so far seem to do about every five years or less.  Even in my youth we moved around quite a bit.  So once again another move, but this time it’s back to the first home I ever purchased.  I bought it about a year after my Mom died.  She had never seen it, my home, my first “real” home.

There are boxes everywhere.  We are in the living room and there’s a lot of talk with the kids about their first day at a new school.   The front door slowly swings open and my Mother walks in.  I know that she’s visiting us from the Spirit world and I yell out to the rest of the family that my Mother is here.  She takes a seat on a couch.  There are boxes cluttered all around her.  I sit outside the ring of boxes that seem to surround her.

My Mother then comments how she has finally come to see me: “I’m so close you could touch me but you don’t, you let the boxes be in the way,” she says.   “Here’s your chance and isn’t it interesting that you let the boxes get between us.”  I tell her, “oh my gosh, you are right, what am I thinking, let me move the boxes.”

I clear a space and I sit down beside her.  Yes, here is my chance.  My Mother has only ever played small bit parts in my dreams, almost as an aside.  Now here she is playing a central role.

I look deeply into her eyes, they’re bright and dark and luminous just as I remember them.  Her eyes are the darkest brown, so dark, they remind me of the color of dark chocolate.  I take her hand in mine and run my hand slowly over hers.  It’s warm, soft and smooth.

She’s wearing a navy blue suit, large lapels and buttons the size of small saucers.  I note that her outfit is circa 1970s.  The decade when she would have been in her 40s still wild around the edges, still relatively young and most of all, free of the medical label she would later have pinned to her.

I see that she has two necklaces on.  One is a rhinestone necklace and the other necklace extends long down her chest and at the end of it dangles a small golden whistle.  I reach out to touch it.  “It’s a God whistle,” she tells me; “I use it whenever I need God.”  “I want one,” I say to her.  And the next thing I know, I’m awake and the dream is over.

I could analyze the dream “to death” if I wanted to but I don’t.  I love living in the questions and not having all the answers.  I love final frontiers that are never conquered.  I love, as my friend Kim says, being alive in the mystery.  I love that I get to be alive and live in the mystery of it all.

I love you Mom, the path is clear now, no more boxes to get between us.  Your fair skinned hands — they are warm, soft and smooth, that’s what I take back with me.  It’s the gift you left for me in the Inbetween world of my dreams, that, and a small golden God whistle.

And now, I’m off to find my own God whistle.  It’s what we’ll share now.  It’s my forever link to you Mom.

Optimism is reflected in many areas of life.

Many birds in their fantastic migrations demonstrate an amazing optimism, traveling thousands of miles to distant shores, almost literally flying by faith, as it were, ignoring all dangers, unbesieged by doubts.

There is no hesitancy, but the sure flight. Birds do not question whether or not the weather will be favorable, the winds fair or foul. They simply fly towards their destination. Even if some birds do fall or die, this in no way impedes or undermines the faith of the others.

Monarch butterflies, in their remarkable migrations, often fly toward land that they have never seen themselves — and yet they reach their destination.

In all such cases there is an inbred biological faith, that courage and vitality, that biological optimism. It acts the same in people, triggering the necessary bodily responses. Only when the optimism is severely tampered with do the physical mechanisms falter. Even then, however, all creatures are sustained
by that innate gift, that inner sense of security that not only propels creatures toward life, but safely conducts them past physical life and past death’s doorway.

The way toward health is simplicity itself.

It is the natural, easiest way to behave, yet this natural mental behavior is often quite difficult for the intellect to understand, since the intellect is apt to enjoy playing with complications and solving problems. Therefore, to the intellect it often seems ludicrous to imagine that the answer to a question lies within the question itself.

All of nature demonstrates this almost miraculous seeming simplicity. Plants and animals and all of life’s aspects take it quite for granted that the sun will shine and the rains will fall in the way best conducive to all creatures.  Animals certainly do not worry about tomorrow’s weather conditions. It may be true that animals do not need to know tomorrow’s weather, since they do not plant seeds or collect the harvest. It is perfectly fine to make plans for the future, yet each individual should live day by day, without worrying about the outcome of those plans.

The physical body can only react in the present moment. Worrying about future events, or dwelling upon past unfavorable situations, only confuses the body’s mechanisms, and undermines their precise activity in the present moment.

I am not saying that anyone should pretend that unfavorable circumstances do not sometimes exist, or that they may not be encountered in the past, present, or future. It is also true, however, that advantageous events occur with a far greater frequency than do negative ones — otherwise the world that you know simply would not exist. It would have disappeared in the throes of destruction
or calamity.

In a basic way, it is against nature’s purposes to contemplate a dire future, for all of nature operates on the premise that the future is assured. Nature is everywhere filled with promise — not only the promise of mere survival, but the promise of beauty and fulfillment. Once again, the keen sense of promise is
innate within each portion of the body. It triggers the genes and chromosomes into their proper activity, and it promotes feelings of optimism, exuberance, and strength.

… Live each day as fully and joyfully as possible. Imagine the best possible results of any plans or projects. Above all, do not concentrate upon past unfavorable events, or imagined future ones.

~Seth – Jane Roberts – The Way Toward Health~

I thought it fitting since we are at the end of the month, to write about beginning at the end.  It goes like this: begin at the end and stay there.  This is something I was taught at The Field Center and Neville Goddard as well, has spoken on this topic.  What does it mean?  The end that you begin at is to embody the feeling, the sense that you already have whatever it is you were wanting.

Passing through a wrinkle in time, time now collapses in on itself, the veil is pulled back and your heart’s desire has already unfolded.  What does it feel like in your heart, your body to know that what you longed for is no longer at arm’s length but it’s here right now?  Note what it feels like because this is a feeling you can come back to again and again.

It sounds easy enough, doesn’t it?  I never really understood that it took a bit of commitment on my part to actually stay there.  That commitment flows out of falling in love with your heart’s desire so that it is no longer a desire, it’s a given.  You just know it and no fact that shows up in your now can sway you from this knowing.  It’s that kind of faithfulness and commitment that I am referring to.

The one who taught me about committing myself to “staying there” is my son.  Those who know me personally, know that I have a special needs son.  There were times in the past that his needs seemed to exceed what we could provide for him and for many reasons we thought he might have to live in an environment outside of our home where he could obtain the supports he needed.  More than anything, I didn’t want this to happen and I suffered a good bit over it for awhile.

One day I made a decision.  I would fast forward to the ending that I wanted.  He stays here with us throughout his childhood and we have the supports that we need to provide for him.  I could see it in my mind’s eye, even though he is still a child today, here he was a young adult.  He had grown up and he’d stayed living with us in our home the whole time.  I could feel the feelings, the joy and contentment of raising him.  No more would I worry, will it happen?  It did happen — in my mind’s eye, my heart, my body it happened; I knew it was real and it was the truth.  I had peeled back the veil and saw and felt all that I needed to know.

Now my work is only to stay there.  By staying there, this means that nothing that happens day to day counts against my happy ending.  Why?  Because I don’t let it.  I don’t let myself come to any conclusions about anything that happens today.  I don’t take it seriously and I don’t allow it to have any importance.  That’s the commitment of staying there.  Only once since I experienced my happy ending have I given myself to a conclusion that counted against that happy ending.  On that day, I suffered and I suffered enough to renew my commitment again.

Ultimately children, pets, loved ones become our greatest teachers.  What we might not do for ourselves, we will do for them.  And what we do for love, we essentially do for ourselves, too.  It does not matter what path we take to get to alignment, only that we do get there.

Rumi, of course, said it best:

Close your eyes

Fall in love

Stay there.

Half the day lost, staring
at this window. I wanted to know
just one true thing

about the soul, but I left thinking
for thought, and now —
two inches of snow have fallen

over the meadow. Where did I go,
how long was I out looking
for you?, who would never leave me,
my withness, my here.

~Kate Knapp Johnson~
Wind Somewhere, And Shade