"Welcome."
"Where am I?"
"You are here. How do you feel?"
"Good enough, I imagine."
The landscape stretched out before him. Looking around he could see he was in a small cabin in the hills overlooking a desert on one side and a small town on the other. The cabin was small and warm and he recognized it from dreams he had of it over the years. The voice that addressed him came from a woman he knew well.
"It all changes so quickly here," she told him.
"I imagine it does," he said. With that the woman was gone.
There was a time where it was possible to exit with all the cards on the table, turned over and reflecting positive qualities on every level. It was May of 1999 and a night he will not forget. What he had been asked to do had been done. The three queens had been met and what needed to happen between himself and them had happened. He had given Tina the inspiration she needed. He had given Christina as feeling of value, highlighted on that night when they were at their ends and they met them together. He had given Tammy the manuscript and entrusted it to her, knowing she would know when the time was right to reveal it.
The words startled him, coming in a vision as he sat in Christina's truck, his head in her lap, looking up at her and seeing beauty in its purest form.
"You can leave now, it is your choice, but this is the end. If you stay, the time to come is going to hurt like hell."
I chose to stay.
I'm reminded lately of that chapter of my personal mythology in recent days as I have taken stock in my position amongst the stars of my personal sky, the one that quite rarely, but often enough turns to gold. Yesterday I did not sleep. I was in the grasp of an insomnia that I haven't known for many months.
It began with appearances of an angelic form in the places where darkness meets light, the shadows where nothing is truly certain and what doesn't make sense is often cast off as illusion. This is a form I once saw regularly, usually at a time of change, or where I had lost my way on the path I am sworn to travel.
Back in 1998 I was sitting in the bar I still call my church. It is now 1,500 miles away and I haven't been there in nearly two years. At one point in 1998, I was puzzling over my need for a word of definition for this experience I knew as losing my way along the path. At the time I was trying to understand how my journey had led me to Orlando, Florida in order to find a waitress who seemed to want nothing to do with me other than conversation. As I drove to my church, I struggled to come up with a term that would simply saying, "I lost my way along the path and now I'm in the forest and everything is overgrown and I can't find my way back to the path without help." This was an uncomfortable mouthful to shove into the middle of a sentence. When I walked into the bar, I saw Tina, who as usual made sure I was not put off by her reluctance to stop and talk with me immediately. She walked past me at the bar and said, "I'll be with you in a while. I'm in the weeds right now."
She had given me the definition I was looking for the moment she saw me. Sometimes we forget the weight of seemingly random moments in our personal history. And now, once again, I find myself in the weeds.
There are many strange things about me. One is the strange way in which I remember my past prior to June of 1994. When I remember things that happened before that passage in my life, they all seem like a story I've been told by someone else. There are many holes in the memories and I'm often unable to make the connections between a person and an event that seems to have been significant. Only by writing stories of the times in my life before my experience with death can I explore them as anything more than abstract concepts. Often I am not sure how much of what I remember is true, in the sense that it may be the story of someone else's life that was close to me then that I integrated into my own. Sometimes I have to talk to people who knew me then in order to understand what parts of what I remember are actually my disenfranchised memories.
Doing this has helped me piece together stories I know that I "translate" which are told to me by the angels that sometimes manifest themselves in the shadows. When I am in the weeds they appear to me in a blinding light. When I accept the nature of my personal faith and believe in them they come to me in waking dreams. I close my eyes and listen, but I do not hear voices, I simply feel and speak words. And then I am driven to write them down, and I write amazingly clearly and neatly, my handwriting far more legible than it normally is. The thing is, I write this clearly and legibly and do it in complete darkness, yet I can see perfectly. The blinding light combined with the total darkness of the room moderates into a golden light in which I see everything. And the sky will turn to gold.
Which brings me to remember why I have found myself in the weeds these past few months. Sometimes I let go of my faith. Usually this doesn't happen because I renounce it or reject it. Most of the time it is because I simply wander off the path, either because the darkness is too powerful, such as when becoming nearly homeless and destitute drove me to focus all my energy on escaping from that fate for the next two years, or because the light becomes too strong.
I had been translating a new book of Anastasia's teachings, this one called The Book of Zealots. Unlike many of the other books, which teach a way of living that parallels the teachings of the great prophets of the past, Zealots is a kind of prophesy and an explanation of our times. It tells of the rise of zealotry and how it will be the undoing of our era, as those driven by righteousness will begin a war that will continue throughout the lifetimes of those being born tomorrow. The killing, hatred and violence will destroy so much of our potential that it will bring about a new era, rising from the ashes of this one's complete self-destruction. I started translating it in 1997. Often these books are translated in bits and pieces along the course of my journey.
The translation drove me to anger and impatience, as I sought to try to point out and scream about how this could be averted if only we would open our eyes. And then I realized that is impossible. No one is truly listening any longer, not on those fronts anyway. They are simply trying to be the one who yells loudest. In what became the perfect irony, in trying to fight against the zealots, I descended into zealotry myself. This is, of course, the trap that makes the War of the Zealots unavoidable. You cannot try to stop it without becoming a zealot yourself and in doing so you join with them and help drive the flames of this war that can neither be won nor ended peacefully.
Seeing and feeling the vision of this and understanding where the principle players have gone wrong in igniting and continuing this war with out end... Amen. It cannot be stopped. It will be the destruction of this era of human history. Not the end of us. Not the "Apocalypse" as it were, but the end of this era. In order for us to continue as human beings sharing a highly populated world with diverse cultures and philosophies of living, our current course, armored in zealotry, will only bring an ending. The final end of the War of the Zealots will create ashes that will settle onto the fertile ground upon which the next era will begin.
The sword so many now carry out in front of them, whether it is a weapon of war, or a weapon of the tongue, will take so many in the coming years. We can join the battle in the vain belief we can win the war, or we can begin to plant the seeds of the era to come.
I have gone back to the translations. I have rejoined with my faith. I have sworn off zealotry, and I will find my way out of the weeds once more. I can only hope it will be sooner than later.