 |
About Us
Yea or Yay? & The Shadow of Death
November 22nd was the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States of America, back in 1963, an event that I believe was the first crack in the opening of the door to the Age of Aquarius. I also believe that door swung wide open on September 11th, 2001.
I was a teenager and not yet an astrologer back in the 1960's. At that time the immensely popular and positive song "Age of Aquarius" was as new as the equally surprisingly popular feeling that the USA was in an unjust and wasteful war that must be stopped. Since I was not yet an astrologer I didn't realize that every sign of the zodiac, like everything under the Sun, has its negative and positive ends, from magnets to military force.
I didn’t realize that the Age of Aquarius would bring us 9/11, the latest rise of violent Islam that has produced yet another bloody crusade to bring peace to the ancient lands of the Middle East, tsunamis, epidemics, possible pandemics, genocides, at the very least the appearance of potentially catastrophic changes in the Earth’s weather pattern, and a whole host of equally traumatic, sudden, out-of-the-blue events exploding onto the scene to bring revolution to our conscience and our consciousness.
Amy and I pray that we may all come through these fiery events having used their heat and light to forge a better life for ourselves, those we love, and all of our neighbors here on Earth including all races and species, at least the ones that aren’t trying to end our lives and our way of life.
The 23rd Psalm of the Judeo-Christian Bible contains the famous line "Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil," a beautiful way to describe the meaning of “The Fool” card in the Tarot and, ultimately, the deadly walk we are all making to our certain eventual death. In Buddhism, the ultimate meditation is on one's own death because for a spiritual (by which I mean "kind and thoughtful”) person seeking some kind of peace here in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, remembering that we are all going to die eventually – maybe in the next moment! - immediately puts things in perspective, brings you back to your center, makes you appreciate the moment, and gives you compassion for your fellow travelers on this road from which no one escapes or returns - even the ones whose fear of the shadow of death drives them to do things that are hurtful to others and, ultimately, to themselves.
Thanksgiving comes once a year but Amy and I give thanks for our love and all we have in life many times each and every day, a practice that I believe is as important as compassion, forgiveness and, of course, the meditation on the mortality of all things. We found each other back in October of 1974, me at 24 and she at 23 years of age, and were somehow able to see each other as the person with whom we’d like to spend our life. Her dear mother, Jessie Spicer Zerner, was certainly a great help to us in every way but especially in her gentle way of helping us to see what is really important in this life.
We weren’t looking for true love or our soul mate, just working on ourselves and our art and trying to enjoy life, yet we found it and lot more. We are painfully aware of how lucky we are and of the many people who are looking for love and having trouble finding or keeping it. When you have a great treasure, whether it is the kind of love and life that Amy and I have together or any kind of treasure, the best way to ensure that you will continue to have it is to share it with others. This is what we’ve tried to do with all of our previous works, especially “Love, Light and Laughter: Relationship Secrets of The Enchanted Couple.”
If you’re looking for love, take heart! (pun intended!!!) Amy and I take great pleasure in announcing that this coming February 14th, St. Valentine’s Day of 2006, the equally saintly Thomas Dunne of St. Martins Press will publish our “True Love Tarot” book and tarot card deck set that we have designed to help people find and keep true love or improve their relationships through the use the power of the tarot and all that we have learned from over 30 years of living and loving and working creatively together.
Love does seem to make life worth living. But remember the Age of Aquarius and magnets with their negative and positive ends. Once you've attained your goal - any goal, but especially true love - the idea of losing it (Tennyson and his “Better to have loved and lost than ever to have loved at all!” aside) can be seen as worse than not having it, worse than the idea of death, believe it or not. That is one of the positive sides to your not having found your soul mate yet, if that is where you find yourself now. The grass may be greener on the other side, but it, too, will die when the seasons change and change they will.
I don’t mean to seem like an ungrateful depressive trying to creep everybody out. I just want you to know that even soul mates get the blues when they think of losing each other and the odds are that, unlike in the movie “The Notebook,” one person is going to survive the other. Amy and I would prefer to die together and never have to see each other suffer. That’s one of the reasons that we spend as much time together as we can – life is short - and, more to the point, we drive and fly together most of the time.
Yes, as you can easily tell reading this, here in The Enchanted World we certainly do the meditation on death a lot every day, but that’s not the reason I’m sharing these thoughts with you in this blog. For the last few weeks Amy and I have been surrounded by death in the lives of close friends, mostly their mothers.
One of our closest male friends lost his mother on November 23rd, as Frank Sinatra's "Come Fly With Me" played on the hospital sound system. Another male friend lost his mother a few days ago. Three of our dearest female friends lost their mothers over a span of two weeks, one in her eighties and the other at 103 – it still came as a shock to our friend, her daughter! - I don't know the age of the third woman, but I know that she'll be missed. We never, ever want those we love to leave us, but leave us they do. And no matter how old you are when you die, you are usually ready for more life - it's the ultimate addiction, no?
Another of our closest male friends found his partner of 45 years dead in his room during a horrendous rainstorm. Amy and I were driving out from New York City and made a beeline to his home to be with him. Comforting the grieving and the dying is holy work and should never, ever be avoided, even though you don't know what to say. Don't say anything, but show up and be there for those you care about. It's part of being spiritual (read "kind and thoughtful and compassionate.")
The mother of another of our dear friends just had a stroke. I think she’ll recover thanks to the wonderful strides that medicine has made in dealing with stroke victims.
My own dear uncle, a great man who was more of a father to me than my own father, is terminally ill with pancreatic and bowel cancer. Yes, we are walking through the Valley of the Shadow of Death lately and it's casting quite a long and dark shadow over us.
For another of our friends this shadow manifests as depression, also seen as “rage turned inwards” and, to me, the death of hope. Given our mortal circumstances, I think all of us have a good reason to be depressed and I told him so. He has even more reasons. He is quite sick with, among other ailments, bladder cancer and gout - the most painful of conditions and one that Amy's dear departed mother, Jessie Spicer Zerner, suffered from before her death in 1996. We miss her ever day and it is a struggle to stay possitive when you realize that her life is not longer with us, though her light still is.
It was Jessie's death that cut loose the last cords that prevented me from accepting my psychic gifts and now every day I communicate with her and thank her for this exciting new chapter in my life. I am not certain that I communicate with her and the other dealy departed souls that I seem to have contacted - that would be unscientific of me - but it sure seems that way.
So why am I ever sad or fearful about the death of anyone if I truly believe that I am able to contact those who are considered dead and gone? Beats me! It's as if I haven't fully digested the ramifications of my psychic gift even though I've studied such things for decades and practiced for others with it for almost a decade. Writing this blog certainly helps me to clarify my thinking, since I don't want to appear ignorant and I hope I succeed in that attempt! ;-)
But when the shadow of death causes my friend to be depressed I am hard put to know what to say. For one thing, I, too, am quite angry at the way we must all suffer and die. I have nothing but compassion for anyone who is depressed. It certainly seems sometimes that life sucks, that no matter what we do or how well we do it, we're going to suffer and die and watch many of those we love suffer and die. I'd like to speak to the Grand Designer and suggest a Product Upgrade!
In the writings of the great Zecharia Sitchin he points out that the Sumerian writings of over five thousand years ago say that the Annunaki, our creators who made us in their image, did not give us the genetic makeup that would make us live for tens of thousands of years like they did, though humans at first lived for hundreds of years, like Methuselah in the Bible.
Like so many things from 5600+ years ago, including science and the "occult," the understanding of the genetic manipulation of life has devolved greatly among the wisest among us. If I were as wealthy as some of my friends you can bet that I would be spending whatever it took to enable genetic scientists to unlock the genes in us that would give us long life and enable us to repair ourselves when we got sick or even when we got killed, the way the Annunaki were able to. Don't take my word for it, read Zecharia Sitchin's work and you'll learn that these things are literally etched in stone, the stone or clay cunneiform tablets of the Sumerian culture.
But you will also learn that even these "gods" eventually died after living hundreds of thousands of Earth years on their planet, Nibiru, a planet that is part of our solar system but with whom we’re unfamiliar because it only returns every 3,600 years.
Gods or mortals, we're all whistling past the graveyard. However, some of us are doing it more elegantly than others, helping other people to endure this wonderful, terribly short and precious thing we call life.
Those of us who are not depressed may be seen as ignorant by the depressed but we are not ignoring death, we are enjoying ourselves in spite of it because when it comes down to it, the choice is yours. Is it going to be "Yea, though I walk in the Valley of the Shadow of Death" or is it going to be "Yay!" I can walk – those of us lucky enough to be able to do so – or otherwise interact with my surroundings and be aware of the gift of my life and do all kinds of wonderful things as I move through the Valley of the Shadow of Death."
Please Note: I realize that many of those reading the previous words are relatives, friends, or caregivers for people who have health conditions that make them incapacitated to a large degree or unaware of our world and make my words exclusive of these dear challenged people in their care. I admire and thank them for choosing to help these people. I do not presume to know or state that anyone alive has chosen to experience their challenges, though many otherwise intelligent people do.
However, I do know that those of us lucky enough to be able to take care of ourselves have the ability to choose between the abovementioned “Yea” and “Yay!” The choice is ours and choice makes us gods in our own right and in our own life.
One of our god-like powers comes through the power of prayer and intention and affirmation to change our reality. So here goes:
May we all remember how fortunate we are and find ways of sharing our good fortune with those who are alive. May all these dear and sweet souls I've written about tonight find peace and comfort in the hereafter, if there is one. And may all of us in the exclusive club called The Living find reasons to live and love in the face of death and, by so doing, honor those whose lives and sacrifices have given us the opportunity to do so.
|
|
|
  |
|
 |
ShareThis
