Loved all of this stuff!!!
I've had 77 animals since early childhood to age 70. I'm practically a zoologist. Haha.
All the usual multiples of cats, dogs, bunnies, chickens plus more than a dozen birds, many, many reptiles (turtles, iguanas, snakes, lizards etc. plus spiders, rats, a scorpion (I kid you not and a tarantula) plus mice and rats my list goes on and on.
Many brought in by the mass of pet lovers sharing our dna to the max overload to how I might have otherwise chosen to live or share my home at the time. (
Many escaped (the little Houdinis) when I was the only one home to catch them, too! Well once a 75 year old college knitting instructor put on my leather rose cutting gloves and caught our 3 1/2' to 4" long iguana when she noticed him sitting on top of our living room bookshelf and put him back in his gigantic terrarium with his little missus in my son's room.
My husband and son were science majors and a daughter acted as a fill-in vet tech at a pet clinic for 3years and in my extended family we have 2 doctors, a nurse a veterinarian! Lots of science along with my and others arts and humanities!
So I've lived and breathed more animal science (and fur, feathers, fins and scales) than I can even remember over the years.
However, didn't know a thing about animal to human transmission decades ago-- a very good thing in retrospect now!
You're a veritable flowing fountain of awesome information! Love it, truly!
hahahaaa! I love it!!! At 65 , when I was little, I drug home every stray puppy,kitten,cat,dog,squirrel,racoon,snake,lizard,bird,rabbit I found...at one time we had 23 cats!!! My Daddy said... "If you drag home one more critter I will take you all and dump you in the river!!!!" As a hardworking father with 7 mouths to feed I am sure he felt overwhelmed trying to handle the pressure of feeding us all. I wanted to be a veterinarian but life and poor choices derailed that pathway for a good long time.. and.. being a single mom raising children on my own... I became a technician instead. I have had numerous animals over the years..still have 6 pets of my own and foster and place many more. It's all good!
Yes 7 human mouths and all those I drug home LOL. A Minature Pinscher I rescued from euthanasia as a 10 week old pup and gave to my daughter ended up living with her as her beloved child for 16.75 years. She (the dog) saved my father's life and his house from burning down when my daughter (who was living with him in his widowhood so that he wasn't alone) was at work. I like to think it was to reward him for all those waifs he left me take in and care for and re-home. I will always share my home with critters.... and help all of them I can. Kindred Spirits we are indeed!
Unbelievable synchroncities and godwinks.
I had a weird glitch and my huge long post on my family and all my cats and kittens and one alerting my brother to wake everyone up and saving everyone's life..poof..whole post gone.
So glad you had a chance to read it!!! But one more unbelievable- yet not- thing in common. Both of us with pets saving lives from a house fire.
Glad you joined us. My life long love of connecting with and finding things in common with others is vastly more interesting as a result.
Love love love it all ?
Collective sickness is my area of concern. I know that I came into the world at this time in order to work with globalized culture’s wetiko—the sickness of separation. As training for that work, I chose to be born into a body with NF2. NF2 inculcated the mindset of separation within my familial bonds and other personal relationships over the first 21 years of my life. I then chose severe depression and attempted suicide as part of my life contract. I also probably chose a number of potential triggers that would tip me into the abyss. I journeyed as deep into wetiko as I could possibly go while still being able to emerge intact on the other side.
@Coyote, my dear soul friend. For ten days, I've had a task reminder set on my phone, imploring me to log on and read your new posts as soon as I could. I've been swallowed by maximum workload, but equally so by the hit to my energy that happens to me whenever the collective is experiencing something chaotic, uncertain, and fearfully painful—as it is now with pandemic and falling markets.
Thank you.
Thank you for sharing yourself. For vulnerably and openly baring your experiences for us.
How grateful I am/we are that the knife wasn't appealing. That the train wasn't fast enough and you were tired. That the cliff face wasn't as sheer a drop as you'd thought. That, even though you'd planned and checked and rechecked, workers locked the pedestrian gate to the George Washington Bridge.
I've met too many spirits who had suicided to believe that no one is successful unless they're absolutely and entirely done with living. Add just enough despair and desperation to a sudden impulse, and not even the most stalwart guide or guardian can shut the gate in time. My point isn't to quibble the politics of the afterlife, but to say that I believe it is both a miracle that you're still here (and that I am still here)—and also that you had especially bold and orchestrated support from the other side (perhaps "stalwart" doesn't come close to describing it). And I'm convinced that there's a reason for that, which I see that you know, so I pray you never have reason to forget it.
Further, I honor your story and find a lot of my own in it. To wit:
"Collective [trauma] is my area of concern. I know that I came into the world at this time in order to work with globalized culture’s wetiko—the [trauma] of separation. As training for that work, I chose to be born into a body [that suffered every type of ongoing abuse from earliest childhood, and into a deeply traumatized ancestry]. [This multigenerational trauma] inculcated the mindset of separation within my familial bonds and other personal relationships over the first [35+] years of my life. I then chose severe depression and attempted suicide as part of my life contract. I also chose a number of potential triggers that would tip me into the abyss. I journeyed as deep into wetiko as I could possibly go while still being able to emerge intact on the other side."
And here we are.
The last time I set out to end my life, I chose to walk alone into a dilapidated area in midtown Atlanta. Here and there on the sidewalk there were homeless men, teetering in an attempt to walk, or curling up with a bottle in a paper bag. Women with listless eyes were walking back and forth along the curb, calling out to passing cars. The backdrop to all of this was my destination, a 5-story concrete parking structure which was in the process of being demolished; crews had been blasting the site that day. I planned to enter that crumbing stone carcass and never leave.
I'd stopped for just a moment on the sidewalk to look at my fate. I didn't feel anything. Hadn't felt anything—not fear, not curiosity, certainly not anything positive or pleasant—in months, maybe as long as a year. But as I stood there in front of that immensity of collapsing concrete and dust, thinking only, "This is what the end of the world looks like," I became suddenly and acutely aware of a feeling. That feeling was an energy, and it was streaming directly toward me—and now all around me—from someone who had quietly stepped beside me to my right.
There hadn't been anyone else nearby when I stopped, but when I turned to look, a man was now standing only inches from me. Just standing there, facing the demolition site, as if we were two old friends staring pleasantly over the dystopian landscape together.
The man was a tall, slender Sikh of perhaps 32. He was wearing a white kurta (a long tunic) and what I remember as a beautiful turquoise-colored turban. (Though sometimes in my memory it's orange or reddish.) I remember the whites of his eyes being the whitest white, and how his beard and skin and everything else about him seemed to shine.
Because there's little room for logic in severe suicidal depression, I happened to be holding my camera. He smiled warmly down at me and asked if I'd like to be in one of my own photos (he was offering to take it for me). I declined, which he seemed to anticipate, but then he turned, gestured forward with his arm, and asked me if I wanted to walk with him for a little while. It was the tenderest invitation.
We walked slowly in silence, for no more than a block. When we reached the corner, he pointed across the street and said, "This is my stop." It was the MARTA station hub.
He told me goodbye and I watched him cross the street and board an empty train. He immediately came to stand at a large window inside. When our eyes met again, he broke into an enormous smile and waved his arm broadly over his head, as though he were greeting (not departing from) a loved one he hadn't seen in ages.
My heart still heaves with the memory of it.
As the train and its single passenger pulled out, the Sikh kept waving until he was out of sight. At that point, I realized I'd been smiling and waving back, and that tears were streaming down my face. That was strange enough, but when I looked around me—and there is no description that could do this justice—the very particles in the air and sidewalk and street and bridge and buildings were rippling, glittering.
Every surface in midtown was covered in graffiti and suddenly the colors and forms were blowing me back in their genius and beauty. The homeless men, the working women, paper trash drifting down the street, that collapsing concrete structure I'd chosen for a coffin—absolutely everything was alive with startling perfection. "Awe" is an impossibly small word to describe something so vast as the feeling of suddenly being taken into the arms of the omnipresent Divine.
The backstory for how I'd gotten to that sidewalk is too long, but suffice it to say that a recession had recently hit the country, and via a series of corporate collapses and inexplicable personal accidents, I'd rapidly found myself jobless, homeless, auto-less (due to a massive flash flood just days before), and physically sick with no means of getting well. What's more, I had no family, no support system, no where to go. [Not incidentally, these were the very symptoms being expressed all across the country, by America in toto.]
And yet, somehow, miraculously, I walked out of there, away from that demolition site. A stranger had appeared out of nowhere, and because he did, I chose to live. I chose the hard work of re-membering my soul's purpose, reclaiming my sovereignty as a spirit, and stepping into service for the collective. Twelve years later—the time it takes Jupiter to orbit the sun—and here I am, blessed to live that purpose everyday.
It would be untrue for me to say I haven't felt the lull of the abyss since then. As everyone here knows, it's hard to be exquisitely sensitive amid so much suffering, volatility, and change. Due to my early experiences, I'm wired to prefer solitude and isolation, even though I recognize it will take connection and relation to heal ourselves and our planet. I reckon these puzzles are for you and your generation to help sort, Coyote, and I know you are distinctly suited to the task, for which I am most grateful.
Though...perhaps even the wound of separation has a purpose. As Murakami wrote in your beloved Kafka on the Shore: “A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.”
?
(p.s.,not sure why it appears in such a skinny format when i re-posted it here?)
Another gem from @vestralux. Posted 3/15/2020 in Thank You: Now Everything Changes:
I've said that I research and write about the science and contemporary mystical spiritual perspectives on collective trauma—what it is and ways to integrate and heal it. The purpose, of course, is to assist in human healing, reduce hyperpolarization, and illuminate our potential for unity consciousness and higher developmental world stages.
The primary goal, however, is to address the ecological crisis.
Our climate emergency and the mass extinction event we are living through is the direct, instantaneous manifestation of the traumatized energies in our shared internal field. That means there is never enough external tasking—reducing, limiting, altering—that we can do to adequately address it.
There is no such thing as a personal shadow or individual unconscious because we cannot actually be separate, however isolated or apart we might see ourselves to be. And the stunning fact is this: our Collective Shadow holds both our wetiko, but also our gold. Our highest dreams and visions and creative energies—our untapped potential is all there, not just our demons.
It's a matter of alchemy, of turning our lead into light.
We heal and develop psychologically and spiritually a great deal on the contemplative path. When we meditate and enact mindfulness and embodied practices. But those things happen alone, so that only one corner of the Self quadrant is being developed and integrated. The full Self contains not only the I, but the We.
We need practices that bring us into unity and resonance and coherence together. Some of that is done externally, by learning how to be in organizations or communities and shared spaces. How to organize around shared goals with a unified purpose, without allowing our individual egos to seize power or sabotage our efforts. How to do this with love and truth and fairness and trust—and also how to get back to love when we falter, because we always will. These things are vital.
But another part of it is learning how to go inside together.
When I'm in meditation or dream space or visioning, I'm listening to/entering presence with an interiority, an internal sphere. And since there is no separation, you and I can learn to be inside together. We can sit across from each other and presence that field with a lot of coherence and beauty. We can do this even at a distance (absolutely any distance) from each other. We can travel in dream space together, or simply meet there. We can remote view a chosen space together, with a sense of one another as we do.
And not just you and me, but several people together. Eventually, I believe there's no limit to how many.
I started learning this a decade ago in lucid dream space, but I've practiced it many times since in different forms with groups. And absolutely every experience has opened more and more clarity for me that we are a collective being, not a scattershot race of singulars.
This is our evolutionary nature.
In unity fields, you maintain your individual distinctness and particularity—your "you"—and yet you are simultaneously part of a vaster beingness. You and I make a third, and that third has a consciousness that is beyond either of us. That third consciousness is emergent, something we can't predict or expect. It comes from the future. ...Though it's already here.
And what I've glimpsed in humanity's collective Third is a stunning, glorious, green, glittering, whole and vibrant world. There are still challenges and problems and puzzles, but those are growth fibers, not entropic seeds of disaster, like we experience in the current iteration we've manifested. The difference is in coherence and presence and intention, which are all potent in the word "design."
Climate chaos is a symptom, an effect. The inverse of presencing is absencing. And we have been doing nothing but unconsciously separating and absencing one another for too long.
@vestralux That was a spectacular. I read it in a state of awe. Every phrase is worth pulling out and re-reading. It takes us to a higher awareness. @coyote, thank you for pulling it out and posting it here.
Thank you so very much, Jeanne. ❤️
Every word is a truth that speaks from a deeper place, beyond the little "I," the me whose (current) face you've seen on Zoom or whose words you've read on your forum; the me that writes overly long posts, and cusses sometimes, and tends to stay home too much, even when we're not in a pandemic.
I believe the words in that post come directly from the heart of the We that you, and I, and @coyote, and every other beloved here (and outside of here) are together—which I believe is why it resonates for you. It's your song too.
It's been said, "The next Buddha will be a sangha," which I'd describe as a loving community of co-awakening hearts and minds. It feels as though we're forming a sangha here, just as we were meant to.
And my heart runs over with gratitude and love and something like, "Hey, it's so beautiful to see you all again this lifetime!"
@vestralux I was taking my dog outside in the dark just now and you suddenly popped up on my inner screen. I knew that what you had written was a channeling, a Higher part of you that is the tribal Sangha heart warrior speaking. Then I returned indoors to see you saying just that. We are syncing.