And I told her, “You have to make a choice. You can’t go around looking for something or someone to tell you what to do. Where to go. Especially in your spiritual life. That’s why you left the church. You didn’t want anyone telling you what to do.“
“See, some deities and forces of nature will always be the same thing. Like how a cat will always be a cat, until it dies and become something else. A corn stalk will only be the various stages of corn stalk. But us humans, we can be anything. We can shift our consciousness and explore. We can create with our minds. We can meld as we yearn. This intelligence is what makes us special. But, because of this, we are also vulnerable. This is what I am talking about. Our openness makes us easy to entrance, to seduce, to be tempted away from the path we have been treading on when we are not sure if we really want to leave it. So we have be careful.“
“Don’t be fooled, my friend.”, I said. “That there are many deities that are like the corn stalk. If you go to an applesauce maker and you start asking him about peanuts, eventually, you are going to find yourself talking about apples. If you go to the Mother-mother Goddess, she will bring out the mother goddess in you, no matter what the topic. The Mother Goddess force will make you want to stretch your love for anyone, whether it is good for you or not. And then if you go see someone else about the same matter, say Aphrodite, she will show you something entirely different, but very Aphrodite-like.
“It’s prisms upon prisms. It is hard to know which is what. That is why we keep in close contact with our teacher guides. They have been and still are, shamans. They know this special skill of blending and yearning and twisting and turning around the rivers of energetic influences in the cosmic and real life scenarios. They know how to come back home for respite and leave those influences outside the door. The teachers, they stay outside the drama and they give really good advice. They tell us how and whether to deal with new spirits. They don’t ever get up on the throne or give commands. They rather inspire and speak sweetly. And if they yell, it is out of concern for us. It is never an admonishment. We still have to make our choices.
“We are taught the craft of discernment. Of gratitude to the various beings and forces around us, of the ways of merging, detachment, respect and incorporation. If we can keep our heads, we really can have it all. It’s fun and it only works as we learn to stay in our center. Yes, it’s important to have great respect and honor for our Spirit helpers, but the relationship is reciprocal, not hierarchical. Yes, they are vastly more powerful than we are, but they are not interested in bossing us around, and don’t have life plan for us either. Their agenda is to help us come closer to our own center. How that is manifested on our physical plane is up to us.
“If you are actively looking for spirit to tell you what to do, you are looking for another prison. You are lying down when there is work to do. You are letting your fears take over you. The final answers to what we are looking for are not going to come from the lips of a spirit guide. They are going to come from the realizations we have when encountering the pressure, the currents of life. Well, the spirit guides might tell us those things, but we won’t understand them until life teaches them to us in spades.
“All of the helping spirits are talking about love. While some are committed to supporting our discovery process, others have their specific way to get to it. Kind of like a relative keen on ‘helping’ or a friend obsessed with a hobby. No one can tell you your way. Only you know your way. Maybe your way is through another prison, I don’t know. Maybe I was giving you this big speech because I was just hoping for some company along my own path.”
~~~
She had stopped listening and was receding, I could tell. This frightened me and I became angry.
I shouted, “As Above, So Below. It’s not a celebration every day in the spirit world. There’s a lot of work to do, beginning with ‘Why am I so afraid?’. Can you have a relationship with spirit without giving your power away? Can you accept the love that these great beings have to share with us without feeling unworthy or tremendously better-than-anyone-else worthy?”
I told her that there wasn’t enough room in the boat for everyone when we are all off on our own, looking for the perfect boat, which only seats one, or maybe two, or maybe enough room for a handful of friends. We didn’t even have to go anywhere. We could stay right here and focus on the shadows in the room. And our friendship.
“Let’s do this together”, I said. “Let’s do the great adventure. The one where you fall down and then you wander around wondering why that happened, and then you meet someone new, and then you lose yourself, and then you find yourself again except that you are different. Then you relax into yourself as much as you can with having been changed, and then you get used to it, until it becomes too much and you have to hit the road again. Another growth spurt. See who’s still around from the last round.”
~~~
But she wasn’t around anymore. She had gone back to her search and I was left alone, with my shame and anger. The raven was hop, hop, hopping outside my window and the glass of water next to the sink was once again, my only friend. My truth burned at me through the vanity mirror and my eyes looked away.
“Dammit”, I said, “Why can’t you just be nice?”
