Death as a Part of Life

Recently in a forum I take part in, someone raised the question of death, asking why we so "value" human life is highly. I personally value my own life because it is a blessing. Even when I'm in pain, even when I'm miserable, there is always something to look forward to.

They mentioned that we "spend inordinate amounts of time, money, training etc on keeping people alive who would not have lived so long in normal circumstances yet we put animals to sleep." Most of those people have never been consulted, those in deep dementia or people who have been in a coma or speechless since a violent accident.

They added that we send soldiers off to war to kill in the name of the social freedoms, or for political or religious freedom. I have to add to that, that they are also ordered to die, too, not just to kill. And all without asking their permission.

They also said that we cannot agree about the killing of a tiny handful of prisoners who are such dangerous people that they cannot be released again because of the reasonable expectation that they will once again destroy or end other people's lives. I replied by saying:

"I have a stepson who has spent time inside. He took a hammer to the brainstem of a person who will never walk or talk again, and who is fed through tubes. He got one year in a low security prison, working with native animals, making art, and taking trade-courses. He not only had TV and better meals that I could afford to feed him before and after the sentence, but he had air conditioning and pay-TV as well! All at the taxpayer's expense." For my stepson, his life inside gaol was significantly better and more pleasant than it was outside gaol, either before or afterwards. He talked about viewing it as a reward, as a holiday.

It was pointed out that suicide is also frowned upon by our Western society and regarded as a symptom of mental illness, whilst other societies regard it differently. I see it as an honourable reaction to impossible circumstances. I am a Westerner.

If there is an afterlife, why are we so scared of death? Why do we not regard it as a natural and logical conclusion to life? Death is a part of life. It is a graduation, an acknowledgement that you have learnt what you needed to learn, that you have finished what you needed to do. It is a pat on the back, a congratulations card in the mail, the ultimate accolade.

I think we started demonising death in Euro-based society when we came up with the <sarcasm toggled on> brilliant idea <sarcasm toggled off> of separating the generations. Old people are ugly - we cannot sear our children's eyeballs with them. Take them out of the home and out of the community generally, Put them in retirement villages first, where they mix with "their own kind", then in nursing homes. When they die, don't let the family even see the body until it is made up to look "alive" (I've never seen a corpse that ever looked alive), must less, allow people who loved the dead wash down the body and dig the hole themselves as a final act of love. Cultures that still do those things don't have a problem with psychological problems due to death and extended grieving to anywhere near our death-sanitised society's extent.

I have picked out the music I want played at my ceremony (my body is to be scavenged for any reuseable living tissues, so hopefully there won't be much to bury). It is a negro spiritual performed by a defunct Australian a-capella girl group called Blindman's Holiday, the song is "dig my grave". It's a boppy, upbeat, rejoicing type of song. The lyrics are something like

Dig my grave, so deep and so narrow,
Make my coffin so neat and so strong.
Lord, if I do-do, and I do my head
And I do-do, and I do my feet
And I do-do, do it all, whenever I die.
Oh, my little soul's gonna shine like a star
Upon Mount Calvary.

- with lots of repeats. My funeral/cremation/ceremony? A bloody big, happy party! Absolutely!

As to suicide, I am pro-life. We deserve a life. We deserve a good life. And we deserve to be in control of our lives, and the time, place and manner of our death.

About two years ago now, I had a neurological incident. I recovered quickly, although I am still damaged or mentally incapacitated by it, and I've recently seen a slight deterioration. There was, however, a slab of time on that evening when I couldn't speak, couldn't move, couldn't even hear. I couldn't so much as move my eyeballs in their sockets or blink my eyes. If I hadn't spontaneously recovered, I could have spent the rest of my life in that state, locked in a body, thinking like me, but utterly unable to respond to anything.

Now, prior to that incident, I had believed I'd never want to live like that. I believed I'd want the plug pulled. But when it actually happened, if only for a short time, an unholy joy crept over me. I could see and I could think, but no one knew. I'd never be expected to cook or clean or earn money or pay a bill ever again. I wouldn't even have to wipe my own arse ever again! And at that moment, being "locked in my body" suddenly seemed like the greatest freedom that could possibly happen to anyone.

But then my hearing came back, and after it, movement. Immediately afterwards, I thought about that revelation, the ultimate freedom of being locked in an unresponsive body. Yeah, I would love it. Total abdication of responsibility, coupled with time to think - bliss! But what happens after a few weeks or months or even years, when I get bored? How can I then indicate to someone that I've changed my mind, I want the ventilator switched off? Answer: I can't. Which is why I'm a not-for-rescusitation patient, every time. And now that I don't have any economically dependent children, I really don't have to live for anybody else's benefit.

Death is not an issue for me at all. That nasty bit before it, where I could be horribly sick or in agony, definitely is. So yup, bring on the pain relief, bring on the drugs. And the last person out of the room gets to turn off the ventilator, thanks.

A Very Old Tarot Spread

I am an active member of the Aeclectic Tarot forum, where I take part in a number of remote reading exchanges on a regular basis, where we do readings for other members of the forum whom we haven't met and often whose "real" names we don't even know. And they work, and provide pertinent, relevant information, quite specific to people's individual situations. There are a few circles that I enjoy taking part in regularly, and just in recent weeks  have started taking part in a Tarot de Marseilles exchange circle.

In this exchange we use Tarot de Marseilles style decks: decks with older-style artwork reminiscent of woodcuts, with unillustrated Minor Arcana cards. And it was suggested this week that we use a very old spread.

To quote the attribution of the documentation concerning this spread, I go to a member of the forum that I know as Le Charior, who says: This spread comes from an essay called "Du Jeu des Tarots", published in 1871 in the eighth volume of "Monde Primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne (The Primitive World, analyzed and compared with the modern world)" by Court de Gébelin. The author is the given as M. the C. of M., and has been identified as Louis Raphaël Lucrèce de Fayolle, the Comte de Mellet.

The actual document being quoted reads:

"... VI
Way in which one proceeds to consult the Fates.

Now let us suppose that two men who want to consult the Fates, have, one the twenty-two letter cards, the other the four suits, and that after having shuffled the cards, and each having cut the cards of the other, they start to count together up to the number fourteen, holding the trumps and the lesser cards in their hands face down so that only their backs are visible; then if a suit card turns up in its natural place, that is, which bears the number named, it must be put aside with the number of the accompanying letter card at the same time, which will be placed above: the one who holds the trumps places this same letter there, so that the book of Destiny is always in its entirety, and there is, in no case, an incomplete sentence; then the cards are mixed again and again receive a cut. Finally the cards are run through to the end a third time with the same attentions; and when this operation is completed, it is a question of reading the numbers which express the accompanying letters. Whatever happiness or misfortune is predicted by each one of them, must be combined with what the card announces that corresponds to them, in the same way that their greater or lesser power is determined by the number of this same card, multiplied by that which characterizes the letter. And for this reason the Fool which does not produce anything, is without number; it is, as we have said, the zero of this calculation. ..."

I used this spread for the first time, not having tried it out first, in an exchange. My exchange-partner had requested a general overview of what they might expect in the upcoming year. As I was using a very old spread, arguably the oldest recorded, it tickled me to use the newest Tarot de Marseilles in my collection (I have several of that style of deck), one designed by Major Tom Schick, that I reviewed once here. It seemed to me that there was an ironic symmetry in doing that, combining an old spread with a new deck

I separated the Trumps, or Major Arcana cards from the Minor Arcana or pip cards, and placed both piles face-down on the table in front of me, the Majors near my left hand, the Minors near my right hand. And I selected my pairs this way: counting one-to-ten for the numbered cards, then eleven to fourteen for the Court Cards (practically, one to fourteen), I turned over the cards one by one with my right hand so that I could see if they matched the numbers I was counting aloud. At the same time, with my left hand I'd move one Major Arcana card at a time from the pile on the left into a new pile.

Four times through the deck, I found that the Minor Arcana that I turned was the same number as the number I was calling, so I would put it aside as a part of the reading I was about to do, along with the Major Arcana card taken at the same time from the other pile.

Four pairs, eight cards, each, comprised my reading for this person. I don't propose to tell you what I said to them in any detail because all of my readings are between the client and myself only, but I'm happy to discuss how I came by what I said to them. I was laying them out with the Major of each pair to the left, the Minor to the right, the first pair on the top, then below it the second, etc, until the fourth pair was the one on the table closest to me.

The first pair was Strength and the Nine Cups. I was struck by how tranquil the Nine Cups looked, and how both the lion's and woman's bodies were pointed towards it, but how the woman's eyes seemed to be looking elsewhere, and how I felt about her glance on that particular occasion. I made some quite specific statements about how I felt that these impressions related to the life of hte person I was reading about.

The next pair of cards was the Devil and the Knight of Wands. I was immediately struck by how the Knight, whom I felt symbolised my client, and his horse, were moving towards the Devil, but how the heads of both the horse and the Knight were turned away, as if suddenly considering other options. And how smug and self-satisfied the two minor minions harnessed to the Devil were, as if some unpleasant, dangerous entity actually made its victims feel as if they were being protected by it. From this I drew inferences about forces in the client's life that might have tempted them into feeling safe when they were anything but safe, and how if they looked at other options they might find a path forward that was a much better option for them. I also felt that I should relate this to a particular area of their life.

The third pair was Temperance and the Two Swords. Immediately, the Two Swords looked like an enticing option again, with bright colours and interesting curves, but very hot and fiery and with sharp blades, whilst Temperance, involving pouring water, bare feet and muddy earth, looked like childhood games involving mud and water. Here, I related my impressions to the client again, with advice to consider whether the dangers of more glamorous alternatives (the Two Swords) were worth it, compared to the safety and child-like simplicity that Temperance seemed to offer in their situations.

The last pair was the Fool and the Five Swords. The Fool was walking towards the Five Swords, on a journey, whilst the configuration of the card made me think of a gateway or passageway towards the future, guarded or possibly blocked from conventional approach. All the unconventionality of the Fool card, I suggested, would be needed for the client to be able to move freely to their future direction.

A lot of people I know, some whose reading abilities I respect very greatly, don't seem to be able to read easily with unillustrated pip cards. I can. I found them hard initially, but these days I find them as easy or even easier than reading illustrated cards with all sorts of visual cues on them. Why?

Largely because they don't have a lot in the way of visual cues. They have colour and basic emblems, which can set mood and tone, but they leave your mind free to follow an intuitive path instead of being nailed down to the mindset of the artist who designed and illustrated the deck. I find if I have a lot of mental activity going on, such as may be triggered by strictly "memorised" rigid meanings for cards or by images that presuppose one major quality for each card such as family happiness, dishonesty etc, these ideas forced on my mind can overrise the intuitive urge to find individual meaning in a card as it falls in that one reading that one time.

So I have learnt to trust my impulses and follow that tiny inner voice, which is much easier with decks that have little or no visual imagery and symbolism to work with. And I believe that I do highly individualised readings specific to each and every client's situation, looking not only for the pitfalls in their situations but the actions they can take to avoid them, and looking not only for the potential in their situations, but for the affirmative actions they can take to make the most of them.

I believe every reader should do that for every client, to the very best of their ability. And this very ancient spread worked so well when I was so inexperienced at it, that I will be using it a lot and mastering this new technique of having no positional meanings for cards at all, but relating a Major Arcana card to a Minor Arcana card in locked pairs, as many or as few locked pairs as the "random" system of counting produces after a good shuffle.

I have done many fulfilling readings recently, where I have seen face-to-face clients sit down with anxiety in their faces and leave with relief and gratitude in their faces, but this one reading, using so unusual a way or laying out cards, was the most personally fulfilling and exciting reading I have done for a long time.

Giving Back

There is a lot of talk in the community generally and the spiritual community in particular, about giving back.

Our parents tell us - and we in turn tell our children - that it's not enough to expect the community to support us, we need to work, we need to give something back.

The environmental lobby tells us that the environment cannot support multiple billions of people, and we need to lessen our demands and give something back.

We tell each other that if we expect others to help us out and do us favours, we must be prepared in return to either do them favours when they ask, or at least pass it on and do other people favours. And we tell each other that if you borrow something, you must return it.

Some of us are told - or tell our children - that giving to charity is important.

All these things are based on keeping the larger community and the structure which supports it in balance at the very least.

But then, what happens when we move into an explicitly spiritual context? The major religions tell us to pray, to ask things of their various gods, even if the thing we are meant to ask for is forgiveness for being born human, something which these gods, you would think, had banked on. Spiritually we ask. We ask for worldly power or success in our spiritual life, or for spiritual power and success. What Judeo-Christian is happy to pray to go to hell to make more room in heaven for others, after all?

And we Pagans are just as bad. The vast majority of Pagans that I know - or know of - with a few select exceptions, begin and/or end our rites by "grounding", expecting the earth-mother to give us energy, strength and healing. If we do healing rites, we take the imbalance out of the person and give it to the earth to deal with without a second thought, or expect earth, the sun, the universe or whatever, to supply a limitless stream of healing energy to our client through us. There isn't often an effort to set up a two-way flow.

An example: in recent times (recent in my personal language, is quite a flexible concept!) I asked two shamans I know and trust to investigate the Otherworldly connections of an issue I had. Both of them were gracious enough to do so, and to report back to me. Both of them used animal-helpers and spirit-helpers as a part of what they did for me. And both of them were pleased (and, I think, a little surprised) when I thanked them, and offered to feed the physical analogues of their spirit-helpers in the flesh. The most recent example, for instance, involved a spirit-crow, and afterwards I kept smelly little tidbits on me for a few days until I came close enough to the next physical crow, whereupon I gave them something they thought was delicious as a thank-you to their spiritual equivalent.

Recently in my last three or four solo rituals, I have had a turn-around. I still see the Earth Goddess as powerful and unbounded - but where has my sense of right-doing been, all these decades? So I've embarked on a series of rituals designed not to take universal energy and focus it for my own ends (selfish or unselfish), but I've taken to concentrating my personal energy, and making offerings back to the Earth, my most frequently used deity, as a thanks and a blessing for the energies I have in the past used. And I intend to continue to do this.

And I'm finding it extraordinarily satisfying! In fact, I'm finding a lot of giving satisfying, at the moment. For example, I read Tarot for money. Recently a person rang me and asked what I charged, I told her, she said she was the organiser of sheltered housing for disadvantaged people, and she was organising a fund-raising weekend, and would I like to read for them. At all times she was negotiating on the basis of my getting rewarded for my time whilst her fund-raising drive also got something out of it, but specifically because she didn't ask me to donate my time for free, I ended up suggesting that. And so on a weekend in a few months, I'll give them a day of my time and effort. No, it won't make me more prosperous, but it has already made me feel much more positive and that will increase when I'm actually doing it.

Making money is one thing. We all need money. We need to pay for accommodation, food, power. When our clothes fall apart, we need to pay for new ones, or the material to make them ourselves. And I had a decade when I was on a very generous income indeed. I wasn't worried about money. Brand-new cars and expenditure on luxuries happened. And I was happy. Well - I was entirely free of the financial worries I was to have later in life. Nowdays, my income is much smaller than it used to be, but these days, I am much more inclined to share what I have, buy meals for friends, help out someone on the bus who doesn't have enough change, give my spare coins to every charity-collector I pass. And I can honestly say that with lesser money and an ethic of giving, I am a lot happier than I was with more money and the ethic of saving that had been taught to me in childhood.

And this works in my spiritual life, too. Magic, contemplation and worship is less about what I can get out of it - and even aiming for spiritual growth is ultimately selfish - but more about what I can give back to the deities, on however small a scale. One individual human can, logically, make no difference at all to a deity large enough that the entire universe fits into one cell of their "body", but if I continue, I am less of a drain on the spiritual organism that sustains me. And if I can spark one more person to behave likewise, and they spread the idea to another, a ripple effect will, in time, pass through the community, even if it takes thousands upon thousands of years to become significant.

I think that is well worthwhile, don't you?

Sanitising Your Tarot Deck

Someone recently asked if it was a good idea to sanitise the Tarot deck before use, to remove "negative" cards. The following represents my thoughts on the subject:

Nope. Not for the very young, not for the very old.

As to "sanitising" the deck to make all the readings happy-happy-joy-joy, well, you might as well buy a Doreen Virtue deck and have it done for you before purchase, if that's all you want from a reading.

I've had a number of traumatised clients (and seen a number of internet discussions from people who had been throught the mill), who uniformly said they didn't like happy-happy decks that didn't reflect reality.

Every time I read for somebody, I set about discovering people's problems and bringing them to their notice - then set about finding potential solutions so that they can repair their lives. With a deck that has had cards like Death, the Devil and the Tower removed, I simply couldn't function to help people. I'd have to talk meaningless puff, as some other readers I know do.

This means that, in the absence of being able to truly identify people's problems, I can also truly identify no cures, no courses of action that they can take to change things for the better.

I did a reading just today for someone in late middle-age who had very severe problems. If the only cards my deck had to offer were all happy-happy-joy-joy cards, I wouldn't have been able to detect what was really happening for them in their life, nor the emotional impact that was having on their inner world. Without that information, I would have been able to make no constructive suggestions, specially as so many of these so-called "negative" cards hold within themselves hints to their own solutions.

Do people really want readings that change nothing and don't help them? I don't think so. At the end of the reading, this person left, giving me a hug and promising to come back and let me know how things play out after they put into action some of the suggestions that the reading brought out. I simply couldn't have said anything important or helpful today if my deck had had its teeth pulled.

Generosity

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine earlier today, and we touched on the subject of generosity.

She felt she was generous because she gave to the Red Shield Appeal and gave all her second-hand stuff to St Vincents to be sold cheaply - helping someone who needed cheap goods and raising money to help others. She also felt she was generous because she tipped poorly-paid wage-earners such as the girl who served us our lunch today, and because she bought my lunch and was randomly prepared to do things like that for various people at different times.

My experience of her is that she is a generous person - she is generous to me and to others around me, I see her generosity. She also knows what I was doing in the 1980s and early 1990s, when I was much more affluent than I am today, and I felt a little bit - ambivalent - before I changed the subject after she said: "Perhaps one day you'll be earning enough again to be able to be generous".

And in a sense, she is right. My income is only just adequate to support me, and has no room for largess to others. But does that make me mean? Her comment took me aback, because I feel like a generous person, no matter what my material circumstances.

I give people my time. I give people my laughter. I'll give people a hand with anything I can do for them. I give people my considered opinion. I share whatever resources I have. I'm always happy to help a stranger out, remembering times when people have helped me out, and thinking that perhaps they will one day help someone else out. I don't count favours: those I ask for, or those I do for others. I'll help the old lady down the road, whom I know is in constant pain althugh she never, ever complains. I'll routinely let someone with only a few items line up in front of me at a supermarket checkout.

And most importantly of all, I smile. I smile all the time, to everyone. As I walk down the road (and I walk everywhere), I smile at everyone. The way I look at it, every morning that I wake up still breathing has got to be a good day. Why not smile? It brightens someone else's day, if only for a moment. And it gives your own spirits a lift.

If I had a large income again, I'd probably do what I used to do, which was to have around 12% of it automatically deducted and forwarded to the charity of my choice. These days there are two: in NSW I give all my spare change to the Guide Dog Association, and in Western Australia to the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

But when I had the kind of income that allowed me to give $50 per payday to charity without even noticing it, I wasn't anywhere near as happy or as fulfilled as I am now, living on scraps. And I didn't see any happiness or joy coming from my acts of giving, so if I were able to give like that again I would. But I'd still keep on giving way at checkouts, helping the old lady down the road, doing favours for strangers, sharing my food, sharing my laughter, sharing my opinion, sharing my emotional support, and most of all, smiling.

Financial generosity helps with the mechanisms of life, but it is a strictly short-term help. Emotional generosity, generosity from the heart, doesn't pay the bills but it can touch someone and leave them changed potentially for a lifetime.

I Am She

(slightly damp, 14th/15th July, 2011)

I am She who is the ground beneath your feet. I am She who is the Moon above your head. I am the heaviest stone, and the whitest light.

Upon my flesh do you walk; upon your shivering skin do I look.

It is Me who is the weight of your body; it is Me who is the most fleeting of dreams.

Every particle of you, every particle of your body, every particle of your world and even every single hydrogen atom lost alone between the galaxies is the stuff of My body, because I am She who is All. Look well to treat your body and your world gently - never forget Whose body it truly is.

And on this darkest night, with My waters suspended in the Air as clouds, and My silver wheel behind and between them, I look down upon you, tiniest of creatures, on the flesh of the Earth. It is I who see you when you sleep, and when you wake. It is I who know your fears, dreams and comforts. It is I who bathe you in my love and my indifference.

It is I who flood your sunless world with light so that you can most truly see your own Shadow, and I who take My light away and plunge you in darkness so you can most truly reflect on what you have seen and on your own darkness. It is I who bring you the hardest, most painful lessons.

Embrace these! Your own turmoil is your only chance to expand into your own divinity; your own turmoil is your only way to access your own dignity, poise and inner power.

Reflect well on the twenty-nine and a half days of the Turn of the Moon: as My light waxes and wanes, as I become the thinnest cradle and the most gibbous swelling, so your life, your allotted time, your mind and your body wax and wane also. There is Growth, and there is Death. There is the Light, and there is the Darkness.

And tread you the earth beneath your feet gently. For remember, it is Mine, and in fact it is Me in my fullest self. My body is all things solid everywhere, My mind is all things intangible everywhere. Treat both with the greatest respect. Compost you everything, meat, bone, paper; and feed this to the Earth Myself as a daily offering. Feed all silent Green Things, uproot none without giving their death back unto the Earth.

Tread lightly upon My flesh: never forget I am here, I see and feel everything. Eat no plants that you would refuse to grow; eat no animals that you would refuse to kill. And as you kill, and cultivate, and eat, be always mindful of your food, and how I and My Little Ones are harmed to give you succour.

And with all that you eat, your fuels, your shelters, your clothing, be mindful of where it came from before it came to you, because it came through that source and from Me. And be mindful of where it shall go after you, because no matter how harmless or toxic you render it, it ultimately returns to Me.

I feel all. I know all. I watch all.

And in my inscrutable silence, I remember.

Tomato Soup

There's something very seductive about tomato soup, and I don't mean in any sexual sense. No, it's deeper than that.

The other day, I was eating some tomato soup out of a Chinese blue enamelled rice-bowl, with a friend of mine. It was fairly standard smooth, rich, slightly salty tomato soup. My friend ate it with toast, I ate it by itself with a dessertspoon. I ate it very slowly.

I am not a huge soup fan, and when I do eat soup it is always made by one of my own recipes, perhaps my spicy pumpkin and coconut soup, or a chunky vegetable soup I make, with or without red or white meat.

Because the tomato soup was in a deep-blue bowl, it looked slightly bloodless, more towards the orange scale than a pure red colour, and it was as smooth as silk in my mouth. To me, tomatoes are to eat fresh in salads or sandwiches, or dried (when I dry them I preserve them in olive oil, not the canola oil commercial companies use, and I include garlic cloves and home-grown basil leaves in the jar), or grilled, or cooked up in chunky pasta-type sauces or chunky mixed-vegetable soups.

This was smoother than silk - the pieces of cracked pepper I added were the biggest objects in it. Yup, not even a single seed. It was quite voluptuous in the mouth.

And it tasted of the Distant Past. It made me think of childhood memories in general, knowing full well we never ate the stuff when I was a kid and it didn't link to any of my own childhood memories. But there was just something about the taste that evoked the idea of nostalgia for a past that never happened.

Tomato soup may be healing because there is something about it that makes us tap into our own inner child, and creates in our mind the idea of a happy, nurtured childhood that in at least some of our cases, just never happened at all. Tomato soup is more than warming and more than nourishing - it delivers us a promise of emotional comfort as well as physical comfort.

It is just my luck that the way it does that, through nostalgia, immediately sparked my suspicion. In a word, I caught it in the act of playing with my mind and heart, whereas many people would have accepted the nostalgia as real.

And once I recognised that, about a third of the way through the bowl, I was freed by the knowledge I had been searching for, and for the rest of the bowl I was able to relax into the luxury and comfort it gave me, knowing the echoes of "memories" to be false, and freed by that knowledge to accept the experience of voluptuous pleasure that it gave me as paradoxically real, and a great gift from the tomato soup to me in that moment.

Probably next winter some time, or the winter after that, I'll make a point of having tomato soup again, just for the indulgence of it.

The Dream

Last night I went travelling, and when I looked around, I found myself in some sort of dormitory-type homeless shelter: a huge room with steel-blue synthetic carpet of the easy-clean variety, single beds everywhere in rows with a small three-drawer cabinet next to them, and a kitchenette at the very end of the hall furthest from the entrance. In one of the beds that were closer to the kitchenette (and thus, more sheltered from the world) was a person who in the dream was a friend of mine, but looked like an older, thinner, sicker, more bearded version of the New Zealand actor Roger Oakley.

In the dream I knew he was dying of liver cancer, and in fact his skin had that same deep orange-brown colour that my father's skin had when he was dying of liver cancer many, many years ago, a colour that still makes me cringe when I see outdoor advertisements on TV or billboards done by pretty young models who have been spray-tanned with exactly that shade in an effort to look "healthy", which has only resulted in them looking as if they are close to death from liver failure.

And I knew he was dying. I have seen the image of energy of impending death occasionally: it looks nothing like a ferryman or a hooded guy with a scythe, but it is irremediably what it is. And death was with him. It was only a matter of time. He was bedridden, drifting in and out of consciousness, and muttering occasionally. I had a great deal of concern and compassion for him (after all, in the dream he was a friend), so I took off my shoes and, fully-clothed, slipped into the narrow bed beside him. He was lying up in a foetal position, and I curled up around him, resting my arm lightly on his hip. Through his many layers of clothes I could feel the pointy ends of his bones, and I could feel the coldness of his flesh despite a lot of clothes and bedclothes. I was happy to share my healthy warmth.

I passed the time by dozing, waking every so often to check on him. Over a very long time he drifted further and further away from life, rousing and muttering less often, weeping for painkillers less often, even moving slightly in the bed less often. He became colder, but I knew he felt my warmth and was grateful for it. I was the only person who was prepared to give him the closeness he needed on this last, most important journey of his life.

And when it was over and I woke up out of the dream, I knew what I must do. I've been getting hint after hint for decades, but the pressure is really piling on, now.

13th May, 2011

This video aired on 13th May, 2011, on ABC-1, an Australian TV station. It was a part of their regular programme, "The Collectors". We had enormous fun filming it - the whole story from the very beginning can be found here.

Feeling Rapturous, Anyone?

Well, it's that time again. Every eight years or so, yet another fool predicts that, based on mistranslations of mistranslations of mistranslations of the Bible or else based on mistranslations of Nostradamus, our world is going to end.

Here is what I wrote elsewhere on the net before the latest so-called Rapture was supposed to happen. It was in response to someone asking whether we were all preparing for the end of the world.

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Last night at my regular weekly meditation group, we did a tree meditation. Trouble was, for some reason I manifested as a frangipanni tree, and as it is winter here, it/I had no leaves or flowers. My friend was leading the meditation this week so I was free to sink right into it, and as she told us to grow our tree higher and higher, my frangipanni said "Are you kidding?" I'm a frangipanni. Three metres high is about my limit in these soils!" And as she told us to unfurl leaves and flowers, it replied "In winter? I'm deciduous! Who does she think I am?" So I left it bare, and climbed up through the structure of its branches.

Pretty soon I ran out of tree. Now, it just happens that I have bought some lengths of green plastic ivy for a particular purpose and haven't yet set it to work, and when I ran out of tree, the plastic ivy (still very, very plastic!) came up beside me and said "Here - you can climb on me". So I did. Unfortunately, I had only bought three two-metre lengths which isn't very much (a metre is slightly longer than a yard), so when I got up to the stratosphere, I ran out of plastic ivy, too, even though it had been very accommodating.

We were also at my friend's place with a woodfire in the fireplace, and as I ran out of plastic ivy I noticed a tendril of smoke next to me, so I grabbed that, and continued climbing up on the fluid, graceful smoke. In the distance I could still hear my friend leading the meditation, and she asked us to look back at the earth, and really *look* at it, and notice if - and where - it needed healing. Well, I turned around on my tendril of smoke and looked very hard for a painful, discoloured Japan, but all I saw was this glowing blue/white/green/brown jewel swimming contentedly in space, like a cosmic opal. So I kept climbing, and after a while I ran out of smoke.

But now there were stepping-stones beside me, lovely solid round ones, all glittery and swirly, so I stepped onto one of them, and found they were a perfect distance apart for my individual stride, and I kept walking through space on these glittery, white stepping-stones. After a while, I realised they were all spiral galaxies, not with the gorgeous colours you see in Hubble Space Telescope photos, but with an even more beautiful-for-being-simple white-on-white sparkly look. And they were good and solid and safe to walk on.

Now the family whose house this was held at have two dogs, both part-malamute. One of them is considered by everyone to be intelligent and deeply magical, and the other one is considered by everyone but me to be a dumb blonde <grin>. Guess who was keeping me company? Right, the dumb blonde, loping alongside me in spirit-form easily and comfortably, as if I took her on dog-walks through the sky every day of her life. After the meditation she stuck to my side like glue.

Her owner eventually led us back down, so I turned around on the sparkly stepping-stones, then climbed down the smoke, then the ivy, then the tree. We all went inside our trees to receive a gift from the tree-spirit, and once again my frangipanni muttered-and-complained about the season and being inconsiderately woken up in winter, and eventually gave me a tiny parcel of its white sap smaller than a game-playing dice, still liquid and living, and holding the promise of future growth in the spring-to-come, and thus, a commitment that the world would continue to exist. Then my friend led us back to our bodies.

The frangipanni thought it was going to grow, and unfurl leaves and flowers next spring - it didn't think the world was going to end. The planet floating in space felt all beautiful and calm, and wasn't even bothered by the whole Japan thing very much - it certainly doesn't think it's going to end tomorrow. So no, everything will continue.

And everyone else in the goup, although they all had individual journeys, had a sense that the planet didn't really need all that much healing, and that it was here for the long haul.

Humans are such silly creatures - if they are worried about the planet, why don't they just go and look?

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And now, post-rapture, I stand by my comments. The world wants to keep existing, and it will keep existing, It is up to us to exist with and on it. Take responsibility for your own existence or non-existence, people - don't blame an ancient book!

To Kill or Not to Kill?

I was just arguing with a friend of mine about the ethics of killing, and it was an interesting discussion, so I thought I'd bring it here. I haven't asked my friend and thus don't have permission to quote them, but I can reveal my own ideas.

I am a mostly-vegetarian, not a vegetarian-through-conviction, although I see the suffering of many of the animals we raise for consumption and do not think it is a good thing. I choose to eat meat only occasionally because I simply think to eat meat only occasionally. I might go a few weeks without buying meat or meat-based products - there is plenty of protein in the legumes I love to eat, and plenty of vitamin B-12 in the mushrooms I love to eat, so there is really nothing meat supplies that is necessary to health that I don't routinely get from the rest of my diet, anyway.

When I eat meat I generally eat meat that has come from a butcher or supermarket. Someone else has killed the animal. Someone else has gutted it, and removed all the stinky-bits. Someone else has skinned it, and sold the leather. The stinky-bits, the shed blood, and structures like feet and heads have usually been sold off to fertiliser producers, making most of the so-called vegan products people buy not animal-free at all.

However. Much though I dislike fishing, I have had a partner who enjoyed it, and I killed fish that I later ate. I also once shot an emu with extensive truck-related injuries, which I then dismembered and ate later - emu meat is redder than beef, richer in iron, protein and B-12, and lower in fat, making it far healthier, as well as far less damaging to the Australian environemnt than any lifestock animal. After all, it is designed to be here, they aren't. Also, because the animal died suddenly rather than being carted around the country in terrifying trucks for many hours then chased down a race to its death, its flesh's flavour hadn't been tainted with terror-hormones.

If you are going to eat meat at all, it is much more ethical to kill - or be prepared to kill - your food yourself, than to pay someone else to do it for you so that you don't have to face the realities of the sacrifice that another living creature makes for your meal, so that you can pretend you had nothing to do with its death, and so that everything can be "nice" and you can lie to yourself about not being a killer. If you are not prepared to kill, don't pay someone to kill on your behalf, soullessly.

I have a friend who doesn't believe in killing. Mutual friends have told me that since their conversion to Buddhism, a conversion that is perfectly fine to me, they now spent a lot of time and effort chasing mosquitoes out of the house instead of slapping them against walls, because "mosquitoes have souls too". Do they refuse to take antibiotics, or herbs, or even refuse to get better and fight off infection through their unaided immune system, because microbes have souls, too? Do they examine the ground carefully instead of just walking, to make sure that every step doesn't take the life if an ant? I have seen them walk, and no, they don't look down and clear every foot-sized piece of ground before they tread on it. So there's hypocracy straight away - why is a mosquito's soul and life-force more important than an ant's, when mosquitoes prey on us and are our natural enemies, and ants don't and aren't?

Then, this same person still eats meat. The same mutual friends have assured me that this is okay, because he doesn't kill the meat himself. All that tells me is that he doesn't have the honesty and integrity to look the animal in the eye and face the reality of the impact that he is having on the life of that animal. Without killing it, he doesn't have a chance to own the impact he is having on the life of that creature, to breathe a silent apology to it as he kills it, to make the killing as clean and painless as possible, to go into trance and guide its soul to the afterlife. Instead, he condemns it to terror in a cold and unfeeling abbatoir where nobody gives a damn about it.

Strangely, as an unenlightened non-Buddhist, I have a big problem with this!

"But you Already HAVE a Tarot Deck!"

Some time ago, a friend of my teenager stayed with us for a week, and during that week her mother, a friend of mine, took me out and bought me a carload of groceries - her way of saying thank you, I suppose.

While we were at the shopping centre I went to the post office there, because I was expecting a parcel crammed full of Tarot delights from these people. Actually, I wasn't - most of the delivery had already happened, but one deck had been omitted and sent on later, and that was what I was waiting for.

So my friend M. and I went to the post office, she waited outside and the smiling guy there handed over my parcel to me. As I walked out of the post office to met up with her again, I was jumping up and down, saying "My parcel's arrived! My parcel's arrived!" And before I was even two or three metres (yards) from the door of the post office, I was chewing through the tape at the corner of the package - it was very, very well taped up indeed - trying to get into it.

My friend laughed at me. "Calm down," she said, "you'll soon know what's in it."

"Oh, I already know what's in it," I told her, "it's a Tarot deck."

She looked at me, completely confused. "But you already have a Tarot deck, don't you?" she asked. She simply couldn't wrap her mind around my wanting another one.

I was floored. Didn't she understand? As a Portuguese Tarot collector and friend of mine said, and I quote: "Ive already got a book in my house, but - oddly - keep buying more too. Insane isn't it? Ive also already got a CD and keep buying more of those too. Just can't control myself."

M. is a literate, educated woman, and has plenty of books. She also has more than one outfit that she wears - I've seen her in several, over the years, and I'm willing to wager she owns more shoes than I do: I have one pair of sandals, one pair of runners and one pair of black shoes "for good". She probably has several pairs of earrings, too, or necklaces, although I've never really noticed jewellery on her - I know I have a lot more jewellery than I ever actually wear. She probably even has more than one saucepan, or more than one knife, fork and spoon.

So why should one Tarot deck be enough?

Another person I know in the same discussion, said that her husband used to ask her why she needed more than one Tarot deck - right up until she asked him why he needed more than one camera. Apparently he shut up completely, and hasn't bothered her since.

Different Tarot decks have different artistic styles, and let's face it, the more diverse the collection of art you feast your eyes on, the more content and developed your inner self is. They also have vastly different feels, and put both you and the client in different moods.

A Tarot deck is like a book: every time you pick it up, it tells you a story, a story of greater or lesser complexity. A collection of Tarot decks is like a library: a book for every mood or stage in your life, each one another step on the path of your enjoyment in life and your quest for self-education. And they are things of beauty: a Tarot collector can be both a serious reader and a butterfly, flitting from one glorious flower to another of a different colour, size and shape, and with a different perfume.

But it's not just people who are not involved in Tarot themselves, M's attitude can also be found in people who are involved in Tarot. I have a local friend whom I occasionally swap readings with, not because I really need her to give me readings, but because she needs the practice adn doesn't get as much opportunity as I do, and I'm very happy to give her the chance as well as giving her a reading. She reads with quite a well-known deck, the Mythic deck, which was the deck that was used in the Tarot course she took many years ago.

The teacher of that course taught her a number of things that are hard to un-teach: that Tarot is dangerous and you need "protection" from it in the form of Christian prayers (Tarot is just cardboard and ink - any "danger" is from your own mind and in your own mind), and that no other decks work, the Mythic is the only one that works, and if you use other decks your bond with it will weaken and you won't be able to read with it any more.

This is completely untrue, and almost as laughable as the "dangerous" thingie. Like everyone, I bought one deck first, and learnt on it, But I found that every time I bought a new deck and familiarised myself with the new images and the new ways of thinking and feeling that those images triggered, my knowledge of general Tarot got deeper and more complex. I have around a hundred decks now, and I know and love all of them - and can tell you at a glance what deck any randomly card came from - and each of them have added to me, to my knowledge and abilities.

The last couple of times this friend and I did a swap, she commented on how deep and incisive my readings for her are, while she seems only to skate on the surface of my life when she reads for me. And how do I manage it, seeing as I (deliberately) use a different deck for her every time? It's because a wide range of decks has given me a greater opportunithy to develop and grow as a reader.

And aside from all of this, there's another strong reason in favour of collecting decks. Imagine you were vsiual, and you liked to look at lovely and/or interesting art, art that engages. How many pictures could you fit on the walls of your house? Five? Ten? Thirty-five? Maybe fifty if you're in a biggish place and they're smallish pictures?

A single Tarot deck contains (usually) seventy-eight images, and in many decks they are high art, complex art, satisfying art. I routinely carry two decks in my handbag, and often a third or even a fourth. I keep another half-doxen or so in my Tarot Readers Kit Bag. Which means that at least eighty sit in a large wicker basket on a small shelf. I go through the basket regularly, pulling out decks and revisiting their images with pleasure and delight.

If every deck had exactly seventy-eight images (they don't - some have one or more extras) and I had exactly a hundred decks (I don't - I have either ninety-eight or ninety-nine), then that is seven thousand, eight hundred individual works of art that I manage to fit into a very small house. Many significant public collections of art don't contain as many works of art, and most don't display all of their possessions, keeping much of their collections in storage and rotating it pretty well as I do.

So for those of us who are not billionaires and don't have houses as long as shopping centres to hang paintings in, Tarot collecting is an economical and space-efficient way of collecting art, collecting satisfying visual treats that will give you joy for the rest of your life.

My collection

A little bit of local press coverage can be found here. And some pics can be found here as well. Have fun, people.

It's funny how things change: you talk to a journalist, the years you've been reading get changed (I would have said around thirty) and there's just a slight twist in tone. Still, c'est la vie, c'est la guerre, c'est la pommes de terre.

Collectors Program - ABC1

On Friday the 6th May at 8.00pm. ABC1's Collectors programme will be featuring me and my Tarot collection, a good ten months after filming! The crew ended up with over four hours of good, useable footage which will have to be cut back greatly to fit the segment, so it will be interesting to see what made the cut - even I'm not allowed to see the spisode until it airs.

Next Monday I will also be interviewed by the local newspaper, as an editorial to be run locally before the episode airs. That will be exciting, too!

The paper in question runs an internet version - I'll post the URL for the interview here, when I know what it is.

Being Lucky

I was sitting and thinking to myself today: how lucky am I? And the answer is that I am very, very lucky. And just as I was thinking about this, a friend of mine rang up. Now, he lives in a much nicer home than I do, has a larger income than I do, and yet he is still envious of my luck. Why, I wonder?

Well, he wakes up depressed more mornings than he wakes up happy. Me, I see every day I'm alive as a gift, a blessing, so I tend to be thankful as soon as I open my eyes. Little things happen to me: A bill turns up that I'd have trouble paying, and suddenly some unexpected income turns up, too, usually about right to cover the bill. I miss a bus and have to catch the next one: next thing I know the bus I should have been on is on the side of the road broken down, passengers milling around waiting for a substitute bus which hadn't arrived yet and would have got me to my destination much later than the "late" bus. I turn up to the local Farmers Market in the rain, people are cursing and going away, and I find that unique item on a stall that's being packed up, not boxed yet, which will make a perfect birthday present for that difficult family member. 

How lucky am I! But back to my friend. As I suggested, he is materially better-off than I am, yet he considers me lucky. Why? Well, when he drives the two of us anywhere, he's constantly frustrated by other cars on the road. When I drive us anywhere, I'm humming under my breath with the pleasure of driving. His face is blank most of the time: when I'm doing blank-faced stuff like walking down the road or through a shopping centre, I usually have a smile all over my face. What can I say - I am lucky, the sun shines on me or the rain falls on me with equal blessing.

He reads this blog, and at the end of our phone call, he said I could write about being lucky some time. But how do you write about being lucky? I agree with the experts, that luck is not arbitrary, is not something that  "just happens". But while I accept without question that I am luckier than he is and I feel as if I know why, I'm not sure I will be able to describe it in a meaningful way. However, I'm just about to try!

Luck and happiness are sisters - they stroll arm-in-arm through the world, smiling at those around them. It is those who look them in the eye and smile back who are lucky, who are happy. Don't get me wrong: they aren't in a constant state of bliss night and day, they are not protected from every misfortune. It's about general trends, and about how people feel about their lives. Probably my friend has more actual good fortune, materially speaking, than I do - I just happen to be more appreciative of my life than he is of his.

I cannot turn anyone into a happy, lucky person with my words. How each person lives, and the feelings they have about their circumstances, is entirely down to themselves. But I do have a few hints you might try to use in your day-to-day lives, that will have an effect on your perception of your luck.

* When you feel unhappy, depressed or worried, take a moment to think about people worse-off than you are. There are people who are in jail. There are people who are paralysed. There are homeless people. There are people in a coma with little or no realistic chance of recovery. There are people with no limbs. There are people who belong in more than one of these groups. If you wake up in the morning and you are still breathing and thinking, you are ahead of the game compared to other people - start your day appreciating that, and smiling. It will make a big difference to the rest of your day, if you recognise and acknowledge that piece of luck. Luck chases luck.

* Live in the moment. Forget about that past bad luck you have had - it's gone, it no longer exists. And stop comparing the present to some golden era in your past when you felt luckier - that's gone, too.  And why worry about that future problem? Events may never play out the way you imagine. In fact, imagining how they will play out, you make yourself behave in a way more likely to let misfortune into your life. It's like the ex-criminals I saw interviewed once, who said they selected people that used the body-language of victims, and would never go near anyone walking tall and with no hesitation, even if they were tiny and it was night-time. Your attitude shapes your future to a great extent. All you have is the now, so live in it, don't whicker it away worrying about what is not the now.

* Allow the world to be a friendly place. People who think the world, and strangers in it, are out to get them, coincidentally have lives full of bad-luck stories. People who think the world will support them if they support it, and that every strange face is a potential friend, have lives peppered with frequent bits of good luck. Your environment is only full of danger if you expect it to be. So don't expect it to be! Ah, but what about all the grim stuff that happens in the news, I hear you ask. Well, let me tell you something about the news. For something to become newsworthy, it has to be vanishingly rare. If it happened commonly, it wouldn't be reported. In Australia, for example, you have one-thousandth the chance of being murdered than you have of dying of pancreatic cancer. They don't throw front-page items about pancreatic cancer deaths. Don't be afraid of night-time or empty streets: at night many of the bad guys are home, too, and in an empty street there is no one to harm you. Trust your environment and you will be lucky.

* Be awake, be aware. If you take a lively and a friendly interest in the people, places and things around you, you will be more likely to see opportunity. You cannot take an opportunity if you are blind to it, nor can you take it if you are fearful. So be engaged: be engaged in the moment, in the world around you, in your community, even in your family. Paying attention will bring benefits as various as noticing a business opportunity or a job that needs doing in your employer's company leading to financial advancement, to putting your foot on the brake a split-second earlier, avoiding that "unavoidable" accident at a corner or a traffic light. Lucky people are curious and open-eyed.

* Listen to your intuition, your gut-feeling. We have two sources of information in our lives: reason or intellect, which is informed by our five primary senses, and the intuition, which has no logical source and is linked into subliminal perceptions that cannot be measured but our current level of scientific technology. Over the decades there have been two really big, major business decisions I've had to make at times when my intellect was saying one thing, and my gut feeling was saying another. The first was in 1987 when I had been a hypnotherapist for a fairly short time: I had the opportunity to rent a room in an inner-city clinic. On paper, even the fine-print looked fine. My intuition was disturbed and uncomfortable, so I went over everything with a fine toothed comb, and still the paperwork looked okay. I went into the clinic against my gut-feeling, and I and two other practitioners there were driven out of business within six or seven months. In my case I was lucky - I was able to set up somewhere else. The second occasion was twenty years later, and involved the acceptance of an interstate job-offer. My life was at a standstill at the time, so I accepted, even though I had misgivings I couldn't account for. The offer of work turned out to be not real - the person had a track record of dragging people from all over Australia to her town just to make her feel important, to make her feel as if he wasn't totally powerless. Again I salvaged the situation: I found other work in the town, and ended up being very happy there. But the position I was "hired" for just didn't exist, and I would have avoided losing thousands of dollars worth of furniture and so forth if I followed my instinct and hadn't moved. Trust your intuition - it is on your side.

* Decide what you want, and go for it! Every millionaire I know, every person who is "lucky in love" and quite possibly every person who is generally lucky in other ways, works at it. Make up your mind what kind of industry you want to involve yourself in, or what qualities you expect in a life-partner, and go out and look for it. Once you have found it, work day and night, work hard and work long - and your luck will come to you. When my daughter reached the minimum legal age when children can have paid work in Australia, she went out looking for a job, I told her my philosophy of work. I told her that the employer she signed up with was not well-thought-of and wasn't paying her a huge hourly wage, but if she wanted to do well, she was well-advised to work harder than her workmates, far harder than she needed to work to avoid being fired, learn everything she could about the business and the industry, and be strictly honest. I said she wouldn't get paid a higher hourly rate than her peers, but as her employers recognised her abilities, they would give her more and more hours, and she would end up a lot richer than the other kids working there because of it. She put that philosophy into action enthusiastically, and both in that first job and the subsequent one she left to go to university recently, she was very highly valued indeed. In fact, her most recent employer told me that in thirty years of running businesses, she had had only one other employee as good as my daughter. Now, there's a young person who is always lucky at work and lucky in her bosses. She makes her own luck by working at it - so can you. If she can, anyone can.

As you can see from these points, there are definite techniques and approaches to the world which result in luck. I'd like to make one last point about luck. As an expectant parent, would you feel lucky if you gave birth to a happy, healthy baby boy? Okay, would you feel lucky if that baby boy, though healthy, had no arms or legs - would you feel lucky then? And what if you had been a baby just like him, born without arms or legs, if you were an adult now, and never had arms or legs? Couldn't walk, dress yourself, feed yourself? Would you feel lucky? Well, Nick Vujicic was born without arms or legs. And yet, he comes across as an emotionally healthy, life-affirming, happy and above-all appreciative person, who honours the luck he has in life. Watch this video of him talking to people with the normal number of arms and legs, and decide for yourself how unlucky you really are. If you are physically better-off than Nick, you really have no right to allow yourself to be unlucky. Watch the video, and do something about your own luck now!

As a qualified hypnotherapist, I can offer meditation/self hypnosis recordings, tailored to the specific issues and needs of individuals. These are much more effective and life-changing than the one-size-fits-all mass-produced recordings that you can buy on the market for a few dollars, designed for a non-existent "average" person. Contact me to discuss your individual needs, the areas of your life where your luck needs tuning up, and I will get back to you with a quote for your individual recording.