True Beauty and Valentines

Happy Birthday, John!
Story People

“As we acknowledge the continuity of life and living, we begin to see a bigger picture of our chosen reality going on within us and around us, which opens our mind to new forms of thinking and being.” (Kathy Oddenino, Feb. 10 seminar, 23)

This morning I felt energized after a bit of a slow start. When I woke up first, I felt a little low, tired, then I began to read the handout from Kathy's Sunday seminar on Hidden Memory as Cellular Memory. I had been up late, after rushing home to a new writer’s group meeting this time at my house. The rain was slanting, turning some into sleet, so street and car lights were bright, scattered reflections. Three of us talked, read poems, and when the others left, my mind was busy with phrases from the poems, images of Amy Winehouse, her knees knocking, those Cleopatra eyes and tattoos, a little girl and her princess. I’d been thinking a lot about Robert Oppenheimer, and the awful bloom of the atomic bomb. Before I went to sleep I thought more about cellular memories, and how the rain lingered, how the firewood held it and gave it off.

In the morning when I began to read the handout, I began to think about what it means to “streamline” ourselves. (“The more we expand our thinking mind, the easier it is for us to ‘streamline’ our physical self.” 23) I read about how our thinking mind, loving emotions, and Spirit senses that we use every day are the essence of us and the true beauty of who we are. I read about how once we begin to understand our eternal pattern of hidden memories, we will trust ourselves to look within our hidden memories to find the answer that we have been searching externally to find, and how our hidden memories become more valuable as we store our memories of truth.

As I got ready for work, then drove the country roads into Siler City, I looked into the fog and saw craggy hollow trees, brown grass, and wisps of leaves on thin branches. Beauty lingered. During the day I felt the energy intensity of physical frustrations build, and at times that lingering sense of beauty, in the energy of the words I’d read and the images of the trees, came back to me. My building physical frustration was palpable, and I felt its sharpness in my voice, in my chest. Impatience hurts.

Then, some moments are especially memorable as truth. Here is a trinity for today:

Later in the day I called my Dad to give him some travel details, and his voice was welcoming. As he mentioned my mother’s “hard time,” he told me he had bought her a Valentine’s card, and a box of (16) chocolates with cherries inside. As he read the card to me, I cried and told him how beautiful it was. The words were all love, how his promise is to be there for her, to kiss her hello each time he sees her. She’s a wonderful woman, he said, and I want her to know. I agreed. (It doesn't matter that she doesn't like chocolate-covered cherries, and that he returned the candy.:)

Once this afternoon another friend and fellow student called to say, in her loveliest voice, I realized your book is my Valentine! (She bought my book a few days ago.) It’s about love, about memories, about change, she said, and it has a lot of red on the cover. She chuckled, and I felt our smiles.

As I listened to Kathy speak with a client as her client got ready to leave, I heard the love stream in the air, wisps of it as permeable as the beauty of the fog I’d seen in the morning trees. I felt the effects within the client/friend, the way the energy all around was smoothed the way a mother might smooth a child in, under covers, before light’s out for sleep. I felt my own heart energy change, my own ruffles smooth away.

I looked at my list of things-to-do, and I let the air out of them, for a few moments. I felt my cells expand, breathe, and I let my mind go, from its desert trails to the winding streams to the beautiful grey fog and how it wraps the trees. I felt the eggs of my thoughts incubating, remembered the tiny bird’s nest a friend brought me, Must be a hummingbird, another said.

Truth is the essence of knowledge, I read. This is why the love I feel, that I recognize, permeates me, my cellular being, softens the edges, as I remember that I Am love, designed that way, to think and to remember. As energy, I remember, and sleep will help me dream myself awake for tomorrow, a new moment, day. Each cell has its own life. Imagine.

“Once we realize that we are eternal human beings as our internal Spiritual energy, with the power to create matter as a physical lifetime, we will understand how to heal ourselves and how to enjoy life as a true learning experience by living the Ethical Values of our Spirit Consciousness as our daily lifestyle.” (26)