Looking Back
My Life…. Looking Back From the Future
Standing on a mountaintop looking out, can provide clarity… it just may not be the sort of clarity one might expect. As surely as the past has formed the future, so does the present form the past. I accepted some fine challenges when choosing my parents. For Mom and Dad, I am truly grateful. You gave me worthy challenges. With the future sight of the present, I recount what I see.
My grandfather had gifted his daughter and Dad a quarter acre, where the next summer Dad built the family a rather small three bedroom house.
It was perhaps the following year that I began helping Gramps; walking over the hill to the big house, perhaps a quarter mile up the road. Often when we had visited before, he would let me ride with him on the tractor, perched on the toolbox on the fender, or sometimes standing in front of him and steering. Often I would jump off to open or close a gate when we went thru. When he had baled hay, we would go out with the tractor and hayrack. He showed me how to stand on the clutch to stop the tractor. After that he would put the tractor in low and slow as I drove while he pitched hay on the hayrack. When we had a load, I stood on the clutch till the tractor stopped in the thick stubble, and he would take it out of gear and drive back. I thought I got quite good at steering and standing on the clutch.
It was a warm summer day several weeks later when I walked to his place, then out to the a field where he was finishing combining oats. Perhaps I was seven, or eight. His Alis Chalmers pulled the combine thru the last strip of standing oats, then he alongside the little Ford, which was hooked to the grain wagon…. the hayrack frame now removed and the grain box installed on the wheels. Chaff flew in the slight breeze as the auger from the combine shifted its load to the wagon.
Gramps asked if I thought I could drive the Ford behind him back to the farm. Sure, I thought, eagerly. At last a man job. He cautioned me to stay well behind him, and that he would stop to open the gate when we left the field. He started the Alis, heading for a hard packed drive. I followed slowly, letting him open a gap of about 70 feet. Then I carefully moved the throttle to match his speed. The ride was smoother on the hard pack.
When he reached the gate, Gramps got off the Alis and came around to see how I was doing. Expertly I had cut the throttle, and stood on the clutch. Only…. the tractor kept on rolling. It was slowing, but still rolling on the hard drive.
“Step on the brake!” he shouted, “Step on the brake.”
I’d heard Dad talk about brakes. He was a mechanic. Cars had brakes.
Desperate, I stood with both feet on the clutch, standing as hard as I could, and steering as straight as I could. Straight for the back of the combine. The Ford banged into the back dead center of the combine. Gramps was grumpy. He reached over and shut off the ignition.
“Why didn’t you step on the brake?”
“Where is it?”
He pointed to the foot pedal on the other side of the tractor. Ahh. So that’s what that pedal was for.
Awakening
As we awake from our sleep of millenia, we discover items that no longer fit easily into our previous ways of thinking, of feeling. Perhaps it is our accustomed method to fight dearly for what is so familiar to us. Or, perhaps we can easily disolve an old mindset — put it on the shelf for a while — as we try the new. Life is about the new; about expanding our experiences and creativity.
I have long felt that my soul is enourmously knowledgeable; and holds a seeming infinity of love. Yet that was my soul. I have longed for the permanent conscious experience that I’ve experienced is there. As opposed to here.
Slowly it has dawned on me that ‘There’ and ‘here’ are something I have to bring together. It does no good waiting for Soul to share what it holds. I have to make the conscious effort during my days to know and act as if I am my Soul… as if there were no division… no “me” and “him”.
So, to let that old mindset slip away….
Forgotten Feelings
“Most of us have forgotten what it’s like to really feel. We know what anger, frustration, anxiety, stress, hysteria, jealousy, boredom, happiness, excitement, and embarrassment is. These are but a few of our human emotions. But they are not feelings. They are more like agitated states of mind. To feel is to move and to dance to the rhythms of our heart. To feel our lives, every inch of it, is to experience the divine. From the agony to the ecstasy, it’s all an expression of what is holy within. Our heart is the chalice that holds the sacred elixir of life. To drink deeply of its wisdom and its achingly beautiful grace, is to know God.”
and
“This is where many of us fear to tread. We think we won’t survive our feelings, our power, our worthiness. But we will. It is written. It is our destiny. The world of duality, the only one most of us have ever known, is coming to an end. And it’s ending in our minds. No, the earth is not going to explode and disappear. It is ending through the power of our minds to create something else. Something based on new beliefs about what and who we are. Something that feels more like oneness and unity, and less like fear and separation. As we move into this new awareness, like magic, our eyes will begin to see a new world. It is here the ancient prophecy of old telling of a new world, a new people, will come to light. It is US. It is WE. We are emerging from the chrysalis of transformation to a freedom beyond our wildest imagination… “
Read More
Life, Death…then what?
Sent to us by Patricia Diane Cota-Robles
A JOURNEY THROUGH THE LIGHT AND BACK
Near-Death Experience Story of Mellen-Thomas Benedict
Mellen-Thomas Benedict speaks:
In 1982 I died from terminal cancer. The condition I had was inoperable, and any kind of chemotherapy they could give me would just have made me more of a vegetable. I was given six to eight months to live.
I had been an information freak in the 1970s, and I had become increasingly despondent over the nuclear crisis, the ecology crisis, and so forth. So, since I did not have a spiritual basis, I began to believe that nature had made a mistake and that we were probably a cancerous organism on the planet. I saw no way that we could get out from all the problems we had created for ourselves and the planet. I perceived all humans as cancer-and that is what I got.
Read More