Part 2: Lessons whilst sitting on a bench: "What if you just let yourself be?" he asked

A continuation of a number of intertwined stories from last week that lead to the answer to the question, including a short synopsis of Part 1

Last week I wrote a bit about death, “magic” as a word we use for things we don’t yet understand, photons and mitochondria creating new substances, and responses to prayers in the Chalice Well Garden. All surrounding a deeper quest to answer this wish:

Please help me

release

my

Resentment

to what

has

been

and…

My resistance to

What is

I hoped Dave, who introduced himself to me as ‘Just-a-Gardener” might have some ideas. And he did. You’ll read about that at the end of this. That should catch you up enough if you missed last week. Let’s continue:

And like Magick, the moment I really wanted to track him down, he disappeared and for the first time, I didn’t see him for days.

And I knew what that meant. I needed to look inside and go direct. But I still kept looking for him.

It wasn’t just those magic dowsing rods that interested me. I had a growing list of things to address. I was considering signing up for a workshop I had seen in Glastonbury, on scrying, which is pretty much like learning how to use a Pensieve.

You see, I never got over my curiosity about Grandma’s crystal ball.

And…(and now this feels a bit risky to say, but…”Why not?” I tell myself… “Why not?”) there have been times in all those many classes I have taken, when I have been sitting with a partner doing some kind of “activity” and I have let my gaze soften a bit. And once in a while, very rarely, their face will appear to change into other faces.

I first gave this a try when I was reading a book by a shaman and he mentioned an activity in which you gaze at your own face in a mirror. You needed to do it in the dark by candlelight.

At the time, I was still married and I was intrigued to give it a try. So I snuck into my yoga room in the middle of the night and lit a candle, softened my gaze, and looked at my face in the mirror in front of me. I was stunned when I saw various faces appear, where my own had been.

The shaman, (I think it was Alberto Villoldo), didn’t elaborate on what the faces meant, and I had wondered about it ever since.

Sometimes it happened with other people but it’s not like I could ever do it on purpose.

Then there was Bev and those years I studied with her. Bev would proudly announce she was a witch.

I would have had an aversion to that, except the only witchy thing she did that I saw was to teach us about the properties of stones, chakras, and energy in order to do what I think of now as “cleaning off our energy lenses” or those of our future clients.

Dense energy, anger, pain, and trauma were things that made people sick.

So Bev taught us how to help heal them.

But there was one time she brought in a black piece of something I think was obsidian and suggested we try scrying. It was complicated, in my opinion. She said we needed something black to gaze at, that it needed to be “cleansed” in the light of a full moon, that we needed to put a drop of gold tincture in the water we were to pour into it and that the water needed to be distilled or from a spring….

Now, since this didn’t involve casting any spells, or even sending a prayer up to heaven, I figured I had nothing to lose and decided to try it. (I never forgot about that crystal ball Grandma had).

To demonstrate, Bev pulled out a black piece of the something that looked like a flat stone and mentioned that this was for the same purpose and her’s had come from an obscure place only she knew, from a back room with objects like this intended only for trained people like her… (Again, I was intrigued when she let us look into it. I saw nothing but felt something I can only say seemed like a powerful energy when I gazed into it). Bev continued by warning us of a former student she had who had gotten addicted to looking into his (and this seems like that scene in Harry Potter where he spends hours in front of that magic mirror gazing at his dead parents…which again, is why I think JK Rowling has at least studied about magick, even if she doesn’t believe in it). Bev informed us that her student had to come in for some personal sessions with her to get back on track again. Then she warned us sternly again, to not get addicted to it.

All that is to say that I went through a process that involved purchasing a black ceramic plate on eBay, and hunting around for a copper kettle that I needed to boil water and gold foil in to make that drop of gold tincture. Then I stole outside and looked for a place to leave the plate where it could be cleansed under the light of the full moon etc… etc…

After all that, I made a futile attempt to gaze into the water I poured into it. I didn’t see anything, although like the open-eyed-meditation technique I like to use, I did feel altered a bit from staring at it.

So, after a couple more attempts, I gave up.

Which brings me to a few months ago, when I was in Mexico on a tour to visit the pyramids. Our tour bus stopped at a place that sold obsidian and one of the people in the courtyard was busy holding up a black piece of it speaking to other tourists in Spanish.

“What is he telling them?” I wondered. Because as far as I could tell, that piece of obsidian was used for scrying, like Bev’s had been. So I asked our English-speaking guide.

“Oh, you can use them to look at the sun,” he said. You should give it a try.

Now, I have already met a man in El Salvador who looks at the sun at any time of day.

I was told as a child that looking straight at the sun will make you go blind, so I wondered, not for the first time, if what I have been told to believe may not be 100% correct?

I still don’t stare at the sun for long periods of time and I am less afraid of it than I used to be when I and my classmates headed outside with a piece of paper with a hole in it to watch the shadow of an eclipse on the ground.

But I am pretty sure most people haven’t met that guy and most people are still afraid to look at the sun and sometimes, it is bright and hurts my eyes.

So this little disk was a good way to sell some obsidian.

But I also suspected the disks were used for Scrying and on a whim, as I didn’t have much time to decide, I got in line and bought one.

I brought it home and showed it to my uncle and demonstrated how it could be used to gaze at the sun and watch eclipses. Then I left it with him.

Rocks in my suitcases tend to trigger security searches at airports. I learned that the hard way. And I was sure a disk of obsidian would confuse anyone who saw it on an x-ray machine.

So my little disk, back in bubble wrap, stayed in Tucson.

Now here I was in Glastonbury, thumbing through the free paper of weekly events and workshops when I saw it. A workshop on how to use what they called, an obsidian mirror.

“A workshop…” I thought. “Hmmm….”

I texted the number in the advertisement and asked for more information about the facilitator who I learned was a Toltec elder from Mexico. It seemed like someone like that might know something about my piece of obsidian.

I have seen witchy people here in Glastonbury. The kind I don’t feel good about. One was a man dressed like a woman wearing black and busy in a place called The White Spring drawing shapes called Sigils into the water with his finger. Ever since, I have avoided both him and the White Spring.

The walled garden of the Chalice Well remains my haven.

My mind told me the workshop might be witchy in the way I don’t like.

But, six year old me bought that mirror that was sitting back in Tucson and six year old me thought the workshop might be fun.

I wanted to ask Dave about it. He told me he has lived here a long time and I figured he might know something about it. Plus, I had begun to see “I’m-Just-A-Gardener” as a mentor. And its been a long time since I’ve had one of those.

I don’t want “teachers” anymore. I have been scalded by too many which has led me to do what in the end is what I believe we are meant to do eventually…to go “inside” and ask for wisdom, to trust myself and my own connection to the divine, whatever form or shape it may take. But a mentor?

There was one person I asked once to be my mentor, and that was Sean Stephenson. Of course, he mentored businesspeople and charged a lot for his wisdom and his PhD backed psychological services. And I never ended up officially hiring him. But he has mentored me none the less. The moment I went up to talk to him before he gave a speech to a group of business people that I felt highly intimidated by, and he looked at me and said, “Why are you acting so timid when you are a Tiger?” I knew this was a man I wanted to work with.

Since then, despite Sean’s passing away a few years ago, I have carried a little snapshot I have of us together. It is a tiny polaroid of me standing next to him. At the time, he didn’t know who I was. It was just something he did for people who had signed up for his public speaking workshop. I think if he knew how much that little photo would mean to me and how I would carry it with me like a talisman, he would have been touched. I hope so.

Now I was on a hunt for my newest unbeknownst-to-him mentor.

I didn’t know what to do about that workshop. I wanted to see if he knew the person giving it. The last thing I wanted was to show up with the man-dressed-as-a-woman wearing platform shoes sitting next to me.

Meanwhile, ever since I decided I wanted to clear my energy field of Resistance, it had been coming up in the form of various memories as I sat in the garden asking about it.

The Garden responded of course. And I would write down the response in my little hand made paper notebook which I have been having a tremendous amount of fun with. Sometimes the words were simple things I had heard before, like “Just Breathe,” but this time they were in response to my question.

And I am not just sitting there asking a question and moving on to stroll through the pretty plants and trees.

Oh no. When a question comes to me, I am serious about receiving an answer.

I feel my way to the spot that feels right to sit and I stay, usually for hours, and wait to hear a response and the garden, as a form of God, sends images through my mind and brings up exactly what I desire to work on.

I figured there were a few reasons I wasn’t seeing Dave.

The main one was that it is good for me to listen inside and find my own way.

After a few days of contemplation, and using my inner compass, I signed up for that obsidian mirror workshop. I told myself if I didn’t like it, I would stand up and leave. That would be good for me as well…another lesson I could embody, if needed. I could walk away from something if it didn’t feel good, just like I could walk away from a jealous woman.

There was a way Dave had shown us in the dowsing class, to find what he called, a dragon point, in the garden. One day I had taken out my rods and practiced a bit.

When Dave had done it, they led the way to a large tree, the wood point in the garden, and he had explained that the dragon energy lay underneath it.

When I did it, it led me to a point not near any tree and I figured I was off base again. But as far as anyone knew around me, I was just standing in the garden with some dowsing rods and my eyes closed. And here, that is not such a strange event.

I stood there for a time and felt how deep down under my feet, lay the dragon’s cave (Dave taught us how to use the rods for that as well). I discerned it was at around 16 feet underground, and I imagined myself going in and asking it a question. It was another question I had for Dave, “I’m-Just-A-Gardener” , in addition to the one about the obsidian workshop, but like I said, he wasn’t showing up to answer things lately.

So, “How do I clear my energy field of Resistance?” I asked the dragon-in-my-imagination.

(Dave taught me to keep things simple when working with the rods and I figured it was good to apply the same strategy with a dragon as well).

That is when a few simple words came into my mind.

“Use your Discernment to Clear Your Field of Distortion.”

I thanked the imaginary dragon, opened my eyes, and added the words to my book.

I’ve been thinking about them ever since.

Then there was the day I found a bench under a giant Beech Tree. I had never sat there before.

The day was rainy and the garden was almost empty.

I loved it.

I pulled up my hood and asked the Beech Tree how to get rid of my resentment? (As I was still gathering information and had yet to be free of it).

After patiently sitting for sometime, gazing at the gentle rain and the leaves dancing in the wind, some words came to me again:

Just sit

my darling

Your lesson for

today

is

to allow

simply

allow it to be as it is

—lesson from the Beech Tree

Later I tried to sketch its branches in my notebook. They seemed to intertwine with one another and one reminded me a lot of a human, softly leaning in and embracing the other branches.

The Beech Tree continued with another lesson after I told it what I had recently learned from Martin, the maintenance man, and the tree that had dropped a branch that had just missed my head.

“I’m delicate…” I said. And the Beech Tree replied, “You are delicate and you’re infinite. Both are true.”

I took out my notebook again with my gold and copper pens and added the Beech Tree wisdom to it.

Then, finally, after yet another memory of resentment arose (this one about giving birth in the hospital, where I never really wanted to go, and the nurse who would not let me hold my son after he was born but put him instead, in a plastic bassinet nearby despite my pleas to everyone in the room to “Please, please, give him to me! I just want to hold him!!!!”) and I was sitting on yet another bench, gazing at a canvas of sound, light, and color, “I’m-Just-A-Gardener” appeared in the distance and waved at me.

When I arrived earlier, I suspected he might be back.

I had seen a place on the path that had been swept. It smelled suspiciously of ‘I’m-Just-A-Gardener’.

I, and my questions had been patiently waiting on a bench ever since.

I had three by then.

He came over and invited me to a concert he is giving for his friends, at a local place called Timo’s. I was sure his lovely girlfriend, Sammy, would be there as well. I liked her too, but had only seen her a few times. She worked in the Chalice Well orchard with the sheep on the other side of the fence…a place off limits to visitors.

“Thank you so much,” I said. “I would love to come… And I haven’t seen you for a while. I have a few questions.”

“Go ahead,” said ‘I’m-Just-A-Gardener’ as he sat patiently waiting.

And dang. Dang. I had waited for days for this moment. I had gone and asked an invisible dragon. And suddenly those painful memories were bubbling up along with all of my Anger, Resentment and Resistance.

Finally, I had someone besides God and myself to ask. Someone who I thought would know how to get rid of them. Because so far, my own efforts and prayers had been helping me a lot. But still…my lenses felt less than clear when it came to freeing myself from those so-called “low frequency” “unhealthy” emotions.

I desperately desired to see the world with more love. I didn’t want to waste my energy on memories of the past, or in fear of what I imagine coming in the future…I didn’t want to be bothered by chem trails, or governments, or whatever-state-of-the-world I see that troubles me at times.

But I couldn’t respond. Once again, (as this has happened before) tears rose up, my throat tightened, and I couldn’t speak. I was frustrated. Feeling touched and becoming tearful is another part of my personality I find troubling and shameful at times.

‘I’m-Just-A-Gardener’, untroubled, continued to sit patiently next to me until I could form some words into a question.

“Dave, I have been working with my Resistance and Resentment to things. I am better with the Chem trails and they still bother me. And memories have been coming up that I still feel angry about. You mentioned something you could do with the rods. I was wondering if you could show me? Sometimes I feel like I am living in a Lucid Dream here on this planet.” I told him about the story I had been reading for fun until it got to a part where they wouldn’t let the character hold her baby after she gave birth to him, and how still…after thirty one years…still, I wanted to rip the head off the nurse who wouldn’t let me hold my own son.

He reflected my words to me while he moved his fingers like the dowsing rods.

“As you were speaking Terra, I felt this” (and he crossed his fingers in front of him), “but when you mentioned a Lucid Dream, the rods felt like they did this” (and he opened his fingers). “Maybe I can help you with Lucid Dreaming? We can get some Mugwort…and put it under your pillow…”

“Thank you,” I said. “I have tried some of those things…” and I continued to explain my failed attempts at Lucid Dreaming. “But Dave, what about my Resentment and my Resistance? What do I DO about them?”

And “I’m-Just-A-Gardener” calmly responded, “What if you allow everything to just be, Terra?”

“But, but…” I said. “It can’t be good to have Resistance stuck in me. It doesn’t feel good. I know when I work through things, they lose the energy they used to hold. Some things even become hard to remember, Dave. But there are things that despite all the things I have done, are still with me, and I am angry about them. I want to let it all go. I just don’t know how.”

“Well, for me, when it comes to things like chem trails, that are out of my control, I do my best to not give it my attention. It is not that I don’t care. It is simply that I can’t do anything about it so I don’t want to spend my energy worrying about it. Worry about things like that keeps so many people from being present, from experiencing Samadhi. Then, like the Buddha did, I just let the rest of the things be.”

“But Resistance isn’t serving me!” I argued. (I didn’t go into discussing frequencies and illnesses that I think come from holding less-than-ideal emotional states for long periods of time that are mentioned in a book Bev had us read, and recently by people in various workshops I have taken here…I only considered that later).

“Terra, just think about it for a minute,” said ‘I’m-Just-A-Gardener’ as he gazed at me with copper eyes that seemed to sparkle with flecks of real gold.

“If you had not gone through those things, we would not be sitting here together on this bench.”

“You’re right,” I said.

Because he was. I could feel it.

“And Terra,” he continued, “your anger and resistance are some of your strengths. They make you who you are.”

(And this I did not fully understand except that later I remembered hearing that after drugging me in the hospital and trying to force me into a CT machine against my wishes, I had fought off eight men…and as I remembered that after our conversation…I did feel a bit proud. If that nurse in the delivery room met me now, I don’t think I would have held back. I would have ripped off her head.)

“You know Terra, I think when we meet all these characters after we die, we will all laugh together.”

(I wasn’t so sure about that. I still think I might try to rip the etheric head off of that nurse, but I didn’t mention that to Dave.)

The Garden has been telling me many things, along with the Gardener. And I have been writing them down and sitting with them…doing my best to take them in as best I know how.

There are these words that came to me at the well head one day. At that particular time, the well was speaking to me in rhyme:

Through

Love’s

Eyes

Everything is a gift

Love smiles

and

asks

“Now what will I do with this?”

“Rip off the nurses head” seems like a less-than-enlightened response, but I have to admit that in some cases, that is where I am at and as the Garden told me another day:

Truth

is

Love

I’m doing my best.

I gazed at all the flowers and insects from where we sat. I saw patterns of light and shadow dancing amongst the leaves. I knew my body was only here for a moment. That all those faces I recently saw my own morph into for a few moments, when I took a moment to soften my eyes and gaze into a mirror one early morning, were like a waterfall of lifetimes, all beautiful, all Grace. A soul wearing different forms and loving them as they came on and off again… just as everything physical I saw with my eyes in that moment would change and be gone. Even the stones. It was simply a slower process when it came to the stones. Everything was moving and changing all the time. Even when I couldn’t see or sense it.

And that includes what I call, my Resistance…my Resentment…my Anger.

Nothing is fixed and there is no death.

I am working with the lessons in my little notebook, sketching things, and wondering, a lot.

I looked over at the gardener.

“I signed up for a workshop. I’m not so sure about it…it’s about how to use an Obsidian Mirror and I don’t want to be around any witchy stuff…” I trailed off.

“I’m-Just-A-Gardener” looked at me and smiled.

“Oh! That is one of the Toltec’s! They’re amazing. They’ll be coming to the garden while they’re here,” he said.

“And I have to head off now Terra. This is actually my day off…”

“Thanks. I appreciate the feedback. I hope you get some rest,” I said.

And I meant it. I knew “I’m-Just-A-Gardener” shows up quite often to tend people and plants, even on his day off.

After he left, I wrote some more words in my notebook and look at them now and then. I think if I add color to them…and play with my pencils and pens, it helps me take them in even when I still find, I don’t actually know the answer to the question.

What if…

I stayed on the bench for another hour or so. A man appeared in front of me and began to do some slow movements that looked like chi gong. I noticed the softness of his hands. The gentleness.

For a moment, I was letting things just be. And it was perfect. No one was in danger of becoming headless.

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