For a year or more, Joda had been working at lightning speed to bring herself to light.  On this occasion a momentary egoic outburst left her proclaiming, “You talk to guides, Ia, you communicate with unseen ones.  I don’t hear my guides.  You have to hear for me...”   I assured her she was a mere smidge away from tapping into the unseen world all on her own, that her guide support continually “cheered” her faultless advancement, and that everything has its own timing.  I didn’t say that with one singular impending shift, she’d be tapping into a system of communication that leaves iPods and Blackberries children’s toys. 

Shortly after this vocalized frustration, she broke her foot, leaving her guides foot-stomping excited, so to speak.  She played hero for two weeks, hobbling around on crutches for hours on end making her hospital rounds—she’s a geriatrics doctor—before she came to terms with the whys of her resistance and scheduled a two-week  R&R. 

We talked during those two weeks.   She learned with no uncertainty that a broken foot demands respect …and distractions are painful.  Once accepting and settling into the “new routine”, everything began to change for her.  NO need for distraction, just quiet, deeper quiet and then even deeper quiet…to the point that coming close to the end of her R&R, a part of her never wanted to leave her new-found sacred solitude.  

Coming out of her two-week reclusive blink-in-time, Joda proclaimed, “Okay, Ia, I understand I had to elevate my feet to elevate my awareness.”  The true significance of her statement was yet to be fully comprehended.  Meantime, she mustered enough enthusiasm to return to work.  Soon after, I received this email from Joda:

 I had a “first” experience today…and it was amazing. I walked into a patient’s room & immediately had a feeling and therefore said aloud: “St. Peter is here.” My patient had been comatose for several days.  This is the first time I have had such a clear experience of knowing when death is impending.  As I tuned in, I said to my patient “You have a lot of support here”, and it was true.  I could feel all of the energy in the room, all preparing him for his nearing death.  I was amazed.  I examined him quickly, my mind not really in the room at all…I was simply tuned in.  All I knew for certain was that this man’s time to move on was very, very near.  I touched his leg with both of my hands once, and then again (though it seemed to be an inadequate gesture, given the occasion), and said “God Bless You” just before I left the room.  Five minutes later the nurse came to ask me to pronounce his death.  Amazing…and beautiful! 

From here she went on to channel the deceased relative of a fellow participant in a weekend spiritual workshop.  On one hand, she was amazed.  On another, it all seemed so natural.  Why?  Because she had crossed over…she had gone beyond the veil, where another world awaits us all—a world of interconnectedness, a world of infinite support.

These changing times require all of us to elevate our awareness, (even if it means feet first) to go beyond the familiar, to enter the space of no space, the place of no place— the vastness of nothingness..that other world waiting for us. 

Joda is a forerunner.  What she did for herself she does for all others who must and will take this journey.   You will want to elevate your consciousness.  We all will.  For the world of unconsciousness is coming to an end.  

Like Joda, you will know in your own heart when it is your turn to begin to elevate your awareness.  A sure sign is a strong desire to change but an equally strong fear to do so.  Don’t fight the fear…the resistance.  Just take one step.  Doing so will support you in taking the next step.  And remember, you are NOT alone on this journey.  As with Joda, support from the unseen world is a constant.  You can turn away from your guidance.  But there is nothing you can do to turn your guidance away from you. 

One after the other, dozens of bats literally came straight at me, like right between my eyes.  I stood there beneath the canopy of trees, gasping for breath, not wanting my nightly run interrupted, but stopped nonetheless.  Each time a bat zoomed at me, I spontaneously jerked my eyes shut and lurched this or that way, trying to avoid a collision.  Whatever this was about, I was consumed by the experience.

In a split second, an unearthly command boomed forth.  It was my guides.  “Don’t flinch!!!!  DON’T flinch!!!!  We are telling you DON’T FLINCH!”  When creatures are seemingly zooming, one after the other, right into your face…don’t flinch?

My training had never been conventional, but this lesson was in a class of its own.  I stood as still as possible, transfixed by these tiny kamikazes, trying not to react at any level.  

The bats weren’t coming “at me”.  They were zipping back and forth through the corridor created by the canopy of trees, feeding on the kazillions of insects flying around me, attracted by two streetlights, one at either end of the canopy.  The more still I became—body, mind and spirit—the more I became one with this divine experience.   I could literally hear and feel the air movement these tiny wonders created within inches of my face, in a split second veering away…  

Being trained to not flinch had been a major part of my training back then… a few decades ago, one which I understood was preparing me for my path, my purpose, for a then unseen future…which has arrived. 

It truly is time for all of us to learn to be unflinching, to stay centered, steadfast and present—eyes wide open—despite what may be happening around us, despite these extreme changes upon us.   Whatever the form—whether the earth trembles, lightening strikes, floods besiege us, nation turns against nation— life comes crashing down around us like a “chicken little” phenomena, we must stay centered, present with and to whatever circumstance is at hand.  We can and we must!  For staying present, calm and collected will create the critical difference for ourselves and for all life.  Let us work together.  The time is now!! 

 This email was sent to me just today.  After reading it I sat in silence for some time.  A main reason being that for a looooooong time Laura has been belaboring the thought/belief that her life is a waste.  That despite all the focus and effort she has invested in her own awakening, she could find no way of being of service to the world.  Her gifts are wasted.  Her light dim. Her love unused.  Her heart atrophied.  No one sees her…hears her, cares what she has to say.  She’s just viewed as a dumb and/or aggressive female wherever she goes (in her mind).  I have continually informed her that just her working on her own awakening is itself a great light onto the world…and when she least expects it, or no longer looks for it, she will find what her heart desires—to serve.  Laura’s story…

Earth Mother energy suddenly coming to life inside me drew me to action.  I dropped the task at hand, grabbed my down jacket, stepped out the door and headed straight for the canyon, my canine angel flying off ahead, following a well-worn deer trail. Within minutes, pellets of snow, driven by a sudden forceful wind, stung my face and bare hands.  Visibility plummeted to zero. Stopping for guidance, my feet were suddenly immobilized, my attention drawn to the energy of the carpet of dormant vegetation beneath my boots.  Simultaneously, as if having their own consciousness, my feet became sensors, probing deep within the soil, pushing through miles and miles of hidden mysteries, and then deeper still, deep into the heart of the Earth Mother--into her center.  

A thought formulated somewhere in my consciousness, “Mother Earth, how are you managing the magnitude of change upon you?  How are you managing all this fear in the world?”  Her response was to draw me deeper into her heart, into a space of calm--a profound unearthly vastness. 

Simultaneously, a similar calm began pulsing down from above.  The words “Galactic Heart Center” penetrated my consciousness.  As my awareness was drawn upward into that center, my feet extended downward into the calm of the Earth Mother...ever more deeply.  Back and forth, rays of calm moved between heaven and earth, my own Heart Center being overpoweringly attuned.  The two avenues of energy movement grew stronger and then merged, nothing else existing but an all-pervasive, timeless calm.  

Earth mother announced in her wordless way that this unworldly calm must be actively brought to the world.  I must be the center of calm between there and here. That to counteract the escalating fear in the world, we must all, not simply take comfort from the calm within our own hearts, but we must put that calm into a useable form and bring it into the world, touch heart and minds with it.  

She took me into a potential future, one where calm was like the air we breathed.  Calm was the sustaining factor.  My gratitude reached out to her…she returned it exponentially. 

Then, as if walking out of a dream, the white-out ceased, the winds quieted to a breeze, the sun burst forth, my feet were released.  I laughed to myself at the thought of being able to see now…laughed, because it was the white-out that gave me in-sight.  I reversed my steps back through the canyon, treading lightly on the pellets of snow blanketing the earth, not here nor there, but in the calm of my own Heart Center—this place of no fear.

Calm is what will make a critical difference as these wondrous winds of change move ever more strongly through our lives. Staying connected to the heart of the Earth Mother and to the Galactic Heart leaves us centered within our own hearts and brings us to the Collective Heart… where a higher order of consciousness awaits!

 Simple Gifts, a Shaker song, is a song I know well.  My “sky guides” had dropped the song, like a bomb, into my world a couple decades earlier, revealing to me that it was time to come round where I ought To Be.

That hellishly transformative period was shaken awake when recently I received an email from a woman who was having a parallel experience.  Her only words “you probably already have this” were followed by the lyrics for Simple Gifts.

 'Tis the gift to be simple,
'tis the gift to be free,'tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
It will be in the valley of  love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed.
To turn, turn will be our delight,
'Til by turning, turning we come round right.                  

'Tis the gift to be loved and that love to return,
'Tis the gift to be taught and a richer gift to learn,
And when we expect of others what we try to live each day,
Then we'll all live together and we'll all learn to say,               Refrain:

'Tis the gift to have friends and a true friend to be,
'Tis the gift to think of others not to only think of "me",
And when we hear what others really think and really feel,
Then we'll all live together with a love that is real.        Refrain.  

“Probably already have this” was a laughable understatement.  Back then, not by choice, I had played the Shaker tape, rewinding to that specific song, playing it, rewinding, over and over, each time the melody being driven deeper and deeper into an inscrutable inner somewhere.  Even without the tape, the melody sing-songed through my mind 24/7, no pause button to be found.

The message within the lyrics of this seemingly simple tune also had a life of its own…taunting my nerves…plucking my heartstrings…humming to my soul.  Over the course of a year or so, two tapes were stretched to ruin playing that song.  It was madness!  No!  It was The Master’s way! 

The message was not cryptic:  Simply, I was not “where I ought…To Be.”  I was not where The Master was calling me To Be.  I was not living simplicity.  I was not free.  I had yet to come down right, to be in that valley of love and delight.  I had yet to live my life as a gift.  

I was “shown” that a Herculean expanse existed between where I was living my life and that valley of love and delight.  But how to change?  How to live from simplicity?  How to navigate that Herculean expanse?  From where I am to where I ought to be? 

The only place to start was where I was at, which is where we all have to start.   I started by examining my life…from the inside out—NEVER JUDGING, but assessing and addressing, which leads to understanding.  Understanding brought the first necessary step of change to light.  Taking the first step brought the second to light, and so forth. 

Everything that kept me from living simply had to go: possessions, thoughts, ideas, beliefs, behaviors, emotions, fears, pain, insecurities, relationships, conventionalities, self-identity, my past.  All attachments!   

Without attachments, all sense of self slips away.   Yet, being stripped, the “gift” comes alive.   In moments of weakness or self-indulgence, I would beseech The Master to take from me that which I was unable to relinquish on my own.  The Master never hesitated.

 One time The Master declared that I had to relinquish a relationship that had gone beyond fruitfulness.  I cried.  I struggled.  I tore my own heart apart, not able to let go, knowing that when I said goodbye to him, he would die, literally.  Informed that if I didn’t let him go, I would die, and exhausted from my own struggle, one night alone beneath a starry Caribbean sky, I said goodbye.  A few weeks later he exited his life through a fiery car crash.  I was free.  So was he, as he informed me from the other side, free to re-embody almost immediately. 

 I was learning true simplicity—having exactly what I need at any given time, nothing more, nothing less…a most extraordinary gift.  People come.  People go.  Things come.  Things go.  But in any moment, my life is bountiful.  I am never in want of anything.  What I “need” manifests of its own volition.  In simplicity, abundance always springs forth… this is not about faith or manifesting and attracting, which are all mental constructs foundationally born on ideas of lack.  Truthfully, simply Being—where we ought To Be—in and of itself, brings.   And, gives. 

Over the years, I have studied the Shakers.  Their lifestyle had no extras, no baubles, no fluff, nothing made in China.  Every item was hand-made and utilitarian, yet a work of art: pitchfork, round barn, wooden basket, quilt, herb garden, all infused with love.  All aspects of the lifestyle exuded simplicity…and beauty…and a “rightness” of being… an untainted joy.  Their generosity, kindness, their foot-stomping religious fervor, their love spoke to my heart.  I wanted this “where we ought to be” lifestyle for myself…for all of humanity.  To have nothing more than actually needed—which is true freedom.   

Years have gone by, simplifying remains a focus.   What truly do I need to be free?   To live my life as a gift?  I Master-talk my way through situations, requesting guidance, keeping tabs on my thoughts, letting matters go their own way…side-stepping attachment pitfalls.  The more I simplify the more I can be where we all ought to be…working along-side The Master…in the valley of love and delight.

People’s lives have become more burdened with stuff, with warped beliefs of what they need to be okay…verging on drunken obsession.  Going deep into slave debt.  The price being paid for losing sight of what is important has now come due.   We have lost sight of ourselves.  Humanity has lost sight of where it ought To Be.

I watched a news report lately (mainstream, no less) where homeless people were being interviewed, many who had once lived upper middle-class lives.  A homeless woman said she now spends her days dumpster diving, collecting enough recyclables to keep herself fed.  When asked what her life was like before losing her job, house, expensive car, etc., she regretfully declared that her life had been about shopping. 

I tell a man that if he doesn’t change his habits he will be gifted with a DUI.  He was blustery.  At a later date, I repeat the message.  He is more blustery.  I could say no more.   Shortly, he obtained his DUI.  Consequently, his life has simplified in uncountable ways, moving him humbly to where he ought To Be.   

There is NO question that it is time to come round where we ought To Be.  With the winds of change blowing ever more strongly much will be taken from us.  Life as we know it cannot and will not continue.  Our ways are not sustainable.  The Master is pressing us all to change.  To let go of what makes our lives crazy and complicated so that we may live with and from simplicity…so that we may come round where we ought To Be.   To have all that we need, we must let go.  We must relinquish. We must cast aside all that keeps our lives complicated.   

This odd word “ought”, defined as:  Duty!  Responsibility!  Obligation!  Rightness!  Knowing!  Ought…TO BE!   The valley of love and delight awaits us all.  The only way to get there from where we are is to bow and bend, not be ashamed…turning, turning, coming round right.   Then we will all live together with a love that is real.  

Take the song Simple Gifts to heart. Use it as a mantra. Sing it daily.  Where we ought…TO BE!!  The time is now!  All living together with a love that is real.

It was a casual Scorpio birthday dinner.  I was the designated cook.   Everything was going routinely, when suddenly I felt pressured to “speed up,” to get the food on the table ASAP.   Whatever was in the air, it was clear that I would not be joining in this celebration.   As the last person sat down to the table, the phone rang.  It was a neighborhood volunteer ambulance driver on the way to the hospital.  He was asking for someone to go the neighbor’s and tell her to get off the phone so he could inform her that her husband had been in an accident.    

There was no question that I would be the someone making the trip to the neighbors.  Obviously, it had already been “set up.”   Neither was there a question about the nature of my evening: the neighbor did not drive.   I grabbed my jacket and hiked around the hill and up a steep lane, taking note that the same intense energy pushing me to speed things up was close by.   Angelina’s emotions erupted the moment she saw me at the door.  So did her daughter’s on the other end of the phone.   It was a crazy moment as I got my feet on the ground, calmed the daughter and handed Angelina my cell phone to talk to the ambulance driver.  Five minutes later we were heading down the mountain. 

A flashing red light a distance down the valley revealed where the accident occurred.  As I was about to turn onto the highway, Angelina stated that she wanted to first go to the accident site.  The county sheriff was there, awaiting a tow truck to arrive.  Identifying ourselves, he aimed his flashlight down a steep embankment where the truck was only vaguely visible.  He explained that Joseph had hit two deer, and his truck was resting in the opposite direction headed, the driver’s side in a ditch of water.

Ready to pull away, the sheriff warned me to drive carefully.  It was hunting season, deer were everywhere, and it was snowing.   I turned the car around and headed for town, Angelina sitting next to me, struggling to keep composure.  She jerked from thought to thought: her husband’s condition, cost of emergency care, whether the truck was totaled, (they had just gotten it repaired after being broken down for a few months)… the whole time dabbing tears from her cheeks.

Asking for guidance, I intuitively tuned into Angelina, wondering what I could say that would be of comfort, while simultaneously monitoring my speed, and trying to focus beyond the windshield wipers and through the densely falling snowflakes into the darkness of the night, watching for deer.   

I leaned forward in an effort to see more clearly, then I was gone: drawn out of the car through the windshield and into the space between the snowflakes, a great expanse where everything was visible.  In this void, I was suddenly seeing swirls and swirls and swirls of energy—everywhere—reminding me in the oddest way of angels…swirls of angel energy.   The energy was spiraling around the ambulance somewhere ahead of us: spiraling in the ambulance and around Joseph.   As I was drawn further into the darkness between the flakes, the swirls became more visible.  I was taken to the accident site at the moment of impact, this angel-like energy swirling there also, swirling up and down the road to town, across the entire valley.    

I watched the lesser part of me maintaining careful attention to practical matters back in my vehicle, while the greater part of me was drawn further into the night, to a point of merging with this energy— this odd, mesmerizing angel-like energy, swirling like ribbons-no beginning, no end-crisscrossing further and further out in all directions, until it was circling the planet.  Swirls and swirls and swirls of silent, synchronized, swiftly  moving energy.  Angel energy!  Active, attentive, supportive!

 Dropped back into my vehicle, I glanced right and with crystal clarity declared, “Angelina, we will be bringing Joseph home from the hospital tonight.  He’s fine!”   

Declining Angelina’s invitation to follow her into the emergency room, I positioned myself in the closet-size waiting area, lights maddeningly bright, near the emergency entrance, and from there proceeded to experience an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.   Four people ahead of Joseph had also met deer head-on.   A bevy of teenage girls had had their first fender bender.   A man, who with a number of stab wounds to the face, caught in a domestic spat, trailed blood across the hallway as he headed for registration.   A line of wheelchairs was moving slowly up and down the single-lane hallway heading to and from x-ray.

An hour after arrival, Angelina appeared, profusely apologizing for taking up my time, telling me that Joseph was coherent, battered and bruised, a gash on his head and himself waiting his turn to be taken to ex ray.   I assured her that I was fine, would keep her daughter posted, and that in no way should she worry about time. 

When suddenly my cell phone rang, I realized that it was two women who were scheduled for a conference call at that moment.   Learning of the situation, they readily agreed to reschedule.   A moment before ending the call, I found myself asking them to hang on while I maneuvered out the door.  There I asked them to take a deep breath and then follow me.  Soon they were out in the night between the snowflakes, seeing what I was seeing, in awe…  I left them there and returned to the painful brightness of the waiting room.

Five hours after I received the push to get dinner on the table, Angelina informed me that the doctor had ordered another set of x-rays.  I hunted down some bottled water for Angelina but hesitated at the doorway to Joseph’s cubicle.  Joseph greeted me warmly, his angelic smile shining through his cuts and bruises, and that angel energy still actively embracing him. 

Suddenly, I asked permission to speak.  I began to divulge my angel experience as Joseph nodded.  He said nothing for a moment, thoughtful.  Then he disclosed that he was found on the side of the road by a woman driving behind him.  He had remembered his name but asked the woman why he was there.  She informed him that he had had an accident.  The gap in his memory puzzled him.  After another moment of silence, he queried, “do you think ‘they’ got me out of the truck, Ia?”   I nodded. 

Well into the wee hours, I drove Joseph and Angelina home. 

I crawled into bed, watching the morning shadow the night, wondering and wandering through the still-fresh experience, thoughts being provoked in all directions.  Joseph had been brought safely through the night and into the morning of a new dawn.  Joseph had been protected.  He was needed.  Angelina too.

 I was suddenly in review of all the times I had been “protected.”  Once heading home from a month on the road, I was suddenly forced to take a circumvent route, and ended up in a blizzard just hours into the first day.  Exhausted and angry, knowing that an extra day had been added to the return trip by taking this route, I asked” why?”  I was told without hesitation and in no uncertain terms that I had been kept out of harm’s way.  A fatal accident was waiting for me had I taken the shorter route.

 This review revealed that Joseph’s “accident” was also by divine design.  It was a means to remove his antiquated truck from his life.  If he had continued to drive it, he would have been facing a fatal crash, involving both he and Angelina, and perhaps others.  In essence, the “accident” had saved lives. 

With permission, I said as much to Angelina a couple days later, when she stopped by, lamenting that their truck was beyond repair.  Her memory jogged by my message, she stated that she had had a dream of just such a deadly accident a month or so earlier. At the time, it had shaken her to the core, but had slipped from consciousness until now. 

The energy of the night, the angels welcoming the morning, became stronger with each passing day, making it evident that a blog was waiting.  The facts were easy to flesh out, but the message, the point of the story was another matter.   A story has limited value without a message.  I searched.   I asked.

 My work regularly takes me into the unseen world—out there in “the darkness.”  I’m continually putting those out there in contact with those still embodied and vice versa…promoting the deepest healing possible.  To work with someone is always to work in collaboration with their unseen support, their guides. Truthfully, we are never ever alone, not in our healing process, or otherwise. 

A song, “Angel of the Morning,” made its appearance on a Facebook page shortly after this incident and had been playing in the background of my mind since…”Angel of the morning, angel.  Just touch my check before you leave me...”    Day and night, no relief —a constant reminder that “they” are there…or here.   Again, I listen to the message:  it has to do with a new day dawning…a new beginning.  Angels maneuvering humanity through its night.  Angels of the morning awaiting our arrival.   Present in the morning of a new dawn.  Active, attentive, supportive!

Clearly, the message was to tell the world about what’s out there in “the darkness.”  To let all of humanity know that, not only do we direly need help, it is here…or “there.”  This loving energy circling the earth, more powerful than any technology imaginable, there…for us.     There… for Gaia.   It’s time to move out of our night and into the morning of the new dawn.  Angels of the morning are waiting. 

These massive Bur Oaks were speaking to me, in fact, weeping, their pain searing my heart, jerking me from my own misery. 

Eight of these giants formed two parallel lines along a hidden area of a hundred year old cemetery, of which the city had now grown around.  Their bark was thick, maybe 8 or 10 inches, their limbs were the size of tree trunks, turning and twisting in various directions as only Bur Oak limbs can.  These giants didn’t quite reach to the heavens, but their energy did.  And forest fairies danced among their boughs.  To me, they were god in form, receptors bringing other worldly information to earth. 

These godly sentinels calmed and comforted me, lifted my pain, soothed my tears when life “out there” was too much.  They understood me.  I drew strength from them, having sought shelter in their embrace for a decade or more. 

Now, these gentle giants were clearly speaking of their demise, “telling” me that their time was limited—an oak alarm!  Feeling the pain of these giants was as if I were one of them, or one with them; their pain and mine were so intertwined. My rational mind stepped in: a cemetery is a safe place, sacred, untouchable?  But already I had observed a bulldozed older section, partially-exposed coffins and headstones tilted to and fro. 

The Burs continued to infuse me with more alarming information.  Time and space disappeared.  Although rattled, my wondering jumped alive the minute I was grounded back in the physical.  As I reluctantly departed, questions exploded:  Is this real?  Am I crazy?  Do trees really talk?  My God, how could I ever speak of this experience?  All I knew, as I dragged myself home, was that my heart hurt. My childhood fantasy was to live in the treetops, as high as possible.  I had always measured the quality of life by the number of trees present.  I just couldn’t imagine life without “my” oaks. 

Shortly, I left the country to work overseas for two years.  During this time, a brief stateside trip provided the means to visit The Smithsonian.  My soul/sole interest had been a display on old growth forests.  Within minutes of arriving, my attention was drawn to a video on the subject.  A camera was panning over miles and miles of ancient forests.  I watched with intrigue, while well aware that excessive logging was reducing old growth forests at an unsustainable rate. 

While I watched and wondered, suddenly, like a hologram, I was witnessing a different image overlaying the video, one of all the old growth forests being destroyed, all trees on the planet toppled and tossed and heaved in one fell swoop. I turned and stumbled down the stairs to the entrance and into the sunshine.  Another undeniable oak alarm!  

My two years overseas, where I had come to cherish the tropical trees as much as my oaks, came to an end.  I returned briefly to the city, my first stop being the cemetery.  Following a familiar trail through an obscure area of the forest preserve, and ducking under a rusty old fence, hesitantly I looked up to connect to my trees.  I so wanted to believe they and all the elementals they supported would be there to greet me.  Concrete-cold condominiums stood in their place, reaching to the sky, but not in any way to heaven.  Like ghosts, the spirit of my beloved oaks lingered.  Small comfort!  But there was no room for disbelief.  They had told me.  While I understood their energy was implanted in my heart, still I wept.
  

Almost immediately, life took me to Alaska.  That’s when my Nostradamus visions first came forth. I’d be awakened in the middle of the night, by a now familiar force.  Night after night I was shown “videos” of the future. They came fiery harsh: black, red and strange gold colors, horrific sounds, and feelings of unimaginable changes on earth—terrifying changes.  An all-encompassing oak alarm!  One night, I beseeched, “Why am I being shown the future?”  I was informed, “So you will be prepared when the time comes.” 

Last week I went to my preferred retreat, a petite lake high in the mountains far from the madding crowd.  The lake houses an otter family, and giant spruce and pine define the perimeter.  Intuition revealed even as I parked my vehicle that things had changed since my last visit in the late fall.  Immediately upon the path, I noticed that a tree here was stressed, one over there dead.  The more I climbed the steep hill, the more I saw that the majority of trees were in various states of dying.  And where I should have been viewing a green carpet across the mountain slopes, I saw shades of brown and gray.  Once at the lake, I noticed many of the giant of giants were now dead, others close behind.   My thoughts were drawn to my Bur Oaks and my Nostradamus visions.  I had no reaction.  I had been trained well—trained to expect change, yet have no reaction. 

Then too I keep an eye on the pines around my area. Last year there were only a few browning spirits dotting the landscape.  This year one tree after another dead!  Junipers and a few firs remain.  Everywhere these great energy receptors, these great bringers of divine energy, are disappearing—indicators of the great changes upon us.  Oak alarms are sounding across the planet.
 

Now, all the trees in the world, every minute, night and day, are tuning me into this Gulf “accident’.  This Gulf phenomenon is wreaking havoc like nothing we’ve ever seen.  No one will be left unaffected. This is a global matter.  This is such a monumental oak alarm.  A wake-up call of all wake-up calls.  What do we do?  What can we do?
 

I don’t judge.  I don’t condemn.  I don’t react. I watch and listen and wonder.  Fear is not the way.  Understanding is.  I look to the sky for understanding.  Oak Alarm!!!  Time to wake up!  But we must ask, “What is this really about?” and “What does it have to do with me?”   Like giant oaks, it’s time for all of us to tune into the heavens and hold that space of consciousness here on earth.

Losing our connection to nature has left humanity to lose sight of its core self.  We come back home to nature, we come back home to self.  Like the trees, the time is now for us all to tune into the heavens.

I watch world events as they unfold while staying tuned to a greater understanding, focusing on what humanity has to learn from all this…knowing that we all have agreed to be here at this time.   Whatever it takes to bring us home, is whatever it takes.  Without question, the winds of change are upon us.  THE TIME IS NOW!

One day, fighting mad, I vowed (or more accurately I initiated the awakening of a deep inner vow) to discover who I am and why I am here.   That was in my middle thirties.  Even as a child, I had studied others, and questioned them - thinking that if I could understand at least my mother, father, brothers, cousins— I could figure out who I am and why I am here.   Three decades of effort had led to nowhere other than disillusionment.  I couldn’t find myself in my life as I knew it.  Through my vow a quest had been born: to understand who I am and why I am here.  The deeper urge was to live my life as a gift.   

But where to start?  First, I said goodbye to my therapist.  In my deepest knowing I had been as valuable—maybe more— to him as he had been to me.  His final words were, “You know you are embarking on a lonely path?”  I had responded that it would be no lonelier than my life to date.   Then I walked out the door, shaken to the core.

My first desperate impulse was to obtain the latest self-help books or take some spiritual classes.  Slowly, it began to sink in: what I needed would be provided—I didn’t get to call the shots. 

I knew for certain I was on “the path”, when suddenly there was nothing predictable about me.  I scared people—more than ever.  I scared myself even more.   I thought I was going here and ended up somewhere else.  People came into my life and just as fast they were gone.  That wee voice inside of me that I had attempted to squelch for so long could no longer be controlled.  And I didn’t want to control it.  This was crazy scary, a form of spiritual madness.   I was on the freedom path.  

One evening, called with great haste to my sylvan sanctuary, a message, straight and direct, jammed my energy field with a force never felt to date.  “That now-familiar God voice declared with iron severity:  “You are not free until everyone is free!”    

The message carried me far and away to a place of true law.  That I could not be free until every last being understands who they are and why they are here transcended linear thought.  Yet, the truth was alive within me.  I could feel it. No one is free until all are living their lives as a gift.  EVERYONE!! Humbled to the core, I continued on.

 Years passed, my search was my life.  Along the way I watched my personal self die—one by one, ideas, desires, wants, needs, all illusions had to be surrendered…or else ripped from me.   My personal death was a small price to pay for this journey of greater understanding.

One day a woman proclaimed that she had read a quote by an Aboriginal woman on her girlfriend’s bathroom wall and she thought I would like it.  It went, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time.  But if you have come because you know your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”   Another road sign: we are all in this together!  

Thousands of miles turned into tens of thousands.  I struggled with the engrained compulsion to pick up others along the way, talk them into joining me, carry them if necessary.  That drive, which was in my DNA, came from many past lives where I had had responsibility for the well-being of the collective.  Now was different.  I had to stay on “the path” all by myself even while I understood that I would not be free until everyone was free.  It seemed heartless and self-centered, but it wasn’t.  I was leaving the masses, climbing Mt Clear Vision, leaving earth, traveling way out there where a greater “I” was waiting for me, as well as information that could never be found in textbooks.   I was traveling home.  Leaving the human world while still embodied proved to be an excruciatingly lonely situation…for the ego.

One day, shortly after my mother passed on, she came flying in panicked, clamoring to explain that I had to help her.  She understood that she had wasted her life and was presently stuck in what she called the collective disconnection.   She showed me all the others there with her—the grand scope of the collective disconnection.  She beseeched, “you have to help get me out!                You have to help all of us get out of here!”  She proclaimed that I had the power to help her and all the others—and that I had agreed to do so.  

It became ever clearer, that as I pulled myself out of my own disconnection, the more I was creating space for my mother as well as others to follow.  The more who free themselves from the collective disconnection—as my mother had labeled it—and move into the greater connection the stronger the greater connection becomes and by contrast the weaker the collective disconnection becomes.  Step by step, as each of us embraces “the path” to knowing ourselves and why we are here, we become a gift to each other.

Today, as I watch this earth world being turned around and around, and inside out—fighting here, fighting there, fighting for this or that, fighting for freedom, it is clear that this false sense of freedom is crumbling.  It’s not about saving our things, or saving our lives, or having life on our terms.  This is about moving from our old way of being to a god self waiting for us.   As we each step onto “the path” leading to true freedom—living who we are and why we are here— that vibration pulses ever more strongly within each of us.  

It is time to open to the awareness of what lies beyond the human realm.  It is time to walk through the veil that separates us from the truth of who we are.  Make the commitment.  Take a first step.  Embrace your fears.  Unearth your pain.  Face your shame, regrets, sadness.  Heal old wounds.  Be brutally honest with yourself.  Let your heart speak.   The path to freedom has its perils.  Staying put is deadly.

Know there are many ahead and behind and beside you on the journey.   Those ahead of you are reaching out to you.  Those behind you need you to reach out to them.   And too the support of the unseen ones awaits us, but “they” are held immobilized until we take our first step.  That first step is the invitation.

As we each embrace the knowing of who we are and why we are here, we become part of a force that magnetizes us.  We are all in this together.  Coming together in the realm of greater awareness, the world of “we,” means we are all free.  This is the new paradigm.  The time is NOW!

Last night the winds of change blew with great spirit.  Rain hit the windows sideways.  The new metal roof was put to the test.  This morning everything was left slippery, the tail end of this spirit wind still visible.  I stepped gingerly down the steps, scraped the ice from my windshield, and headed out the drive. 

Despite being ill, I understood the night before that I would be heading for unexplored territory—a lake higher in the mountains, one that had been waiting for me.  I also knew that no one else would be there.   From a distance, it looked more like a pond, planted in the middle of a rolling plain, no trees, but sagebrush bumping into each other.  I imagined how hot it would be there in the summer.

As I neared, I saw an amazingly large flock of small birds, almost like a swarm, a cloud moving fast to and fro.  Suddenly I was in the middle of this avian dance.  Swallows!  Hundreds of them!   I watched, transfixed.  They gave me no mind.  

Swallows catch insects in flight, often seen swooping over bodies of water for a tasty morsel.   With the wind charging across the open plain the way it was, there was little chance of an aerial meal. 

 Two and two were beginning to make four as I was drawn into this phenomenon.  Swallows are not adapted to ground feeding like robins and sparrows.  But they were landing, or maybe dropping down from a place inches above the ground, with an odd gyration of their wings.   They seemed to be landing for a split second, just long enough to pick insects from the ground, using their wings in place of feet, a strange graceful twisted flap moving them a slight inch forward—wing walking!   Just as fast, one more charged flap and they were once again in the air.  One end of a wave going down, a rush of wing movement  across the ground, and the other end rising up—hundreds of wings but seemingly one mind, one flowing movement.  For the longest time, I studied this low-flying mass of swirling, dipping swallows moving in front, behind and around me, grateful that these aerial creatures were undisturbed by my presence. 

Of course there was a message waiting for me—yet another winds-of-change message.  These swallows were undaunted by these unrelenting winds.  They weren’t confused.  They didn’t fall apart because their circumstances suddenly changed.  They didn’t miss a beat…or a wing flap.  They went with the flow, and with such grace. Life changed.  They found a new approach, a different “feeding ground.”  

Can we be like the swallows?  Not confused, lost, or blown to pieces by the winds of the moment?  Can we be one with the change, using it to our advantage?   Using change to carry us forth rather than pummel us to the ground?The winds of change are strengthening.  The signs are everywhere.  It’s important to pull ourselves from our reverie-now.  It’s even more important to begin to prepare. 

How does one prepare?  Philosophies are many:  physical preparation, mental, emotional, energetic.

As the wind continues to roughen the surface of this small lake, oddly, I am suddenly seeing myself get on an airplane.  There before me is a flight attendant going through the emergency procedure talk.   Have you ever noticed how few passengers listen? 

Whenever I fly I always make a point of listening.  I take notice of where I am sitting, where the emergency exits are.  I get my bearings.  It’s a matter of being responsible.  Not only may I have to get myself to safety, I may have to help others.  Putting my own oxygen mask on first has always been the stand-out message—a metaphor.  Without preparing myself I jeopardize my own safety and that of others.  It’s prudent to be self-reliant, think on one’s feet, keep eyes wide open, and like a good hiker, always be tuned into changes up, down and all around.   I say with all seriousness: the only way to help others is to prepare yourself. 

A spiritually practical means of preparation is to address our fears, phobias, and insecurities.  The less fear the more our hearts can lead the way.  Hearts have the capacity to find and live ways that fear won‘t allow.  Hearts embrace adaptability, fear can’t. Let our heart guide our actions.

Be like the swallows.  Flock together, join hands and hearts, become one—a “we” instead of a “me”.   Together, the winds of change can bring the best out of us or to us.  In the correct wing position we can use the winds of change to propel us into a whole new paradigm, one that’s born of cooperation …and harmony …and peace.  May we all learn to wing walk.  The time is now!