An Improbable Life...

glitter-graphics.com

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? ... "

Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four (1890)

Someone I know made a comment yesterday (email) that made me think. He said:

I wish I could develop faith in things that I cannot see. That, I think makes life a lot easier.

I agree with him completely, I do think it makes for a far simpler life, but I have one reservation... when it comes to the realms of psychic phenomena I have more trust in those who question than those who accept blindly.

In my own experience all the real psychics I know have doubts. I imagine the truly spiritual and saintly do reach a stage of perfect trust and faith, but I suspect none of them started out that way.
To experience the inexplicable has to create a certain sense of, "Did I imagine that? Is this real? Am I crazy?" in a normal sane mind.

It took me two years of writing down my dreams and checking them against news paper dates and my own journal notes before I accepted the fact I was dreaming of things before they happened. It took me two decades to trust that I do see the odd dead person who has a message they want passed along. I suppose some might see that as a failure in trust, but I see it as merely being sensible.

In the end I had to go with Sherlock Holmes - only once you've eliminated the impossible can you truly trust the improbable.

Anyone who has experienced the inexplicable or paranormal, or has some psychic ability, knows exactly what it means to live with the improbable.

I know I live an improbable life.

Has it made my life easier? I have no way to know what a life without who I am now would be like (my imagination boggles!), but I do know it has made my life more complicated, sometimes frustrating, but also very rewarding.

...

Mother Nature - Mother Earth? Earth Mother :-)

...
As most of my friends/readers know - I sometimes get messages and see things beyond the normal seeing. Some are for sharing, some are either personal messages for one particular person or personal just for me. At first this recent one seemed to be just for me, but it hasn't turned out that way.

First one friend connected to what I'd seen/heard... so I told him.
Then another friend connected in a completely different way... so I told her.
Now today I shared with another friend who also connected to what I saw in another completely different way.

This seems to be meant to be shared!

After I came out of hospital in August I had a month of recuperating and doing nothing strenuous. Sitting at the computer was painful at first, so I had at least two weeks of not being able to do anything. It was during a long day of lying around doing nothing that a word kept popping into my head - MOTHER.

Eventually I realised I should at least try to find out why I was getting the word repeated over and over, so I asked for more information. I saw a woman's face. She had long silver grey hair, but her face looked younger. She was smiling and looked nice.

Some time later, in September, I was sitting in my bedroom (trying to write book 2 of the First Light Saga) when I started seeing her face again.

This time I tried harder to keep my brain quiet and just... look.

I saw all of her this time. :-)

She was an average woman of average to slim build. Long straight thick silver grey hair, oval face. Smiling expression and a very strong feeling of gentle tender love.

She was wearing a long dress, but I could see her feet were bare. When she came closer I realised her feet were actually tree roots. Her feet and toes were like the gnarled roots of very old trees. She even has some little seedling branches with leaves sprouting from her toes.

She lifted the skirt of her dress and I could see her legs were a deep darkish blue. Looking closer I realised they were water and there were whales and other ocean creatures swimming in them. Her legs were the oceans.

From there she showed me other bits of her body, as if her clothing dissolved away...
Her stomach area was molten rock and swirling fire, like the Earth's core or a volcano.
Her breasts were dripping bees instead of milk. This seemed really odd, but it kept being repeated when I questioned it.
Her throat was pale blue and full of flying birds.
Her eyes were dark and full of stars.
Her hair, up close, was actually heavy falling rain.

She was amazing. :-)

The first person I told was a friend who had sent me information on the goddess Durga - the ultimate Mother Goddess. After talking to him I realised that I was now getting two words - EARTH MOTHER. So I now had a name for what I had seen. :-)

The second friend I spoke to asked me why I hadn't seen her heart or why bees were coming from her breasts. I asked about this and was shown that her heart is a beehive, full of honey and bees. It is warm and buzzy and it holds all the seasons in it. It is female power.

The day I wrote to friend #1 I saw this on the Internet...

... and I knew I had a new set of friends to tell my story to. Particularly since I had already created my own "earth mother" for my Peace Globe...
So I told my next set of blogging friends - those busy Peace Bees working together to try to make our planet a better place. :-)

Now, today, I came across another friend talking about the power and strength of women. We were discussing female power and female animals that live in strong matriarchal societies like ants, elephants... bees.

Bees... the heart of female power hidden in a hive.

Over the weekend I tried to draw what I saw. It's very rough, but it gives a visual idea. If you click on it you can see it large with more detail.

Feet - old roots with new growth.
Legs - the deep blue oceans teeming with fish, dolphins and whales.
Stomach - Molten core of the Earth.
Heart - the hive and female power and all the seasons captured in the honey itself.
Throat - the sky and birds and the voice of every bird as one.
Hair - rain.
Eyes - the night sky and the Universe.
What better way to see in this year's Blogblast for Peace than with the essence of the planet itself as a powerful yet gentle loving all-embracing mother. :-)
...

Blogblast for Peace 2009 - Peace Starts Here.

My Surprise. :-)

Video Credits

...
I'm hoping to add the names of the photographers who shared the pictures I used in my Blogblast for Peace video.

So far... Thank you to:

Dani Simmonds for the photo of the child's grave.

...

Busy Doing Nothing

...

glitter-graphics.com

I've been sitting here trying to think what to write about, but lately days seem to vanish on "busy doing nothing".

I am busy on one "something" - I'm plotting and building my Peace Globe Day speech and surprise.

But beyond that life has been dull here and it seems I'm not the only one. Usually I get at least 15 emails a day, but over this last weekend I had 3. Three? :-\

So... I'm guessing I'm not the only one busy doing nothing?
...

Peace Day countdown!

...
Not long now till Blogblast for Peace Day, the marvelous idea of one very inspired blogger - Mimi.

If you haven't yet signed up to join us there still is time to get your Peace Globe badge ready before Movember 5th.

Get your templates here: http://mimiwrites.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-to-get-your-peace-globe-2009.html

For those interested, but not wanting to participate, there will be loads of Peace Themed blog posts and "hand made" Peace badges linked through Mimi's blog on the 5th of November. Last year I spent eight hours reading some of the most moving and amazing blog posts ever. This really is an event to look out for.

I'm still busy working on my own Peace Day post (and a surprise *grin*), but my badge is now ready to out up. :-)

The lovely photo of the pregnant woman came thanks to Nate of Morguefile.com
...

Another Brilliant TED Talk

Moments of Mud

...
When I was little I used to eat mud. Actually, according to my mother I ate pretty much anything and everything. - flowers, grass, dog biscuits, but mud was one of my favourites. Later mud would have its revenge, by giving me some of my funniest and most embarrasing clumsy moments.

Kind of a mud-karma thing?

glitter-graphics.com

My first mud moment was during my first year in high school. I was 12 and a year younger than the other kids due to a difference in the age of starting school between South Africa and Rhodesia. Being a year younger seems so enormously important when you're a kid and being a year younger in high school made me the youngest person in the entire building. I spent my first year of high school trying to act cool or stay invisible, but mud had other ideas...

Our School started a project to raise money for charity. It was called the “Cape to Cairo” race. Every class had a map of Africa with the route. The idea was that for every sponsored mile a pupil ran you marked off ten miles on the map. Each student had to run at least five miles. If you didn’t finish the miles by the end of the first two weeks you had to stay back after school and run them under teacher supervision.

Some older kids had a plan to try to get it over with as fast as possible. They figured that if we ran every lunch break, on the sport’s field we could have it done in a few days. Of course we weren’t allowed onto the sport’s field at lunch break, but that didn’t bother the older kids and I went along as well... trying to be cool. The field was to the left of this photo, behind the school swimming pool.

Thinking back I now wonder why we didn’t just lie and say we had run when we hadn’t, but I wasn’t that smart (or devious?) at 12, unfortunately.

The problem was that this was in the middle of a wet African winter. The rain had been pelting down for days and the sport’s field was a squelchy green swamp. At lunch break we sneaked over the back fence and started running around the field. I had almost finished a mile when the bell for end of break rang. Everyone dashed for the fence and in my hurry to turn for home my feet went out from under me.

*SQUELCH*

I fell back flat on the ground right in a huge muddy puddle. I was mud from the back of my head to my heels. Fortunately almost everyone had left by then. A few friends helped me up and pointed out that there was no way I could let any teacher see me without giving the game away. My friends managed to wipe a bit of the mud off my hair and back, but basically I was cold and wet and disgusting.

For the rest of the day I made sure I never turned my back on a teacher. I even managed to take a book up to the front of class and return to my desk walking backwards without the teacher noticing. Of course everyone in the class knew and the stifled sniggering was very clear to me even if our teacher never seemed to notice. So much for cool and invisible!

My second mud moment came a few years later. It was during the summer holidays and a bunch of us had pooled our money to hire a large canoe for the day. There was me, my best friend, her two brothers and their friends which included a guy all the girls in our small town thought was gorgeous. He was a year older than us and had a motorbike AND a leather jacket.

We all had a wonderful time that day. The river ended at the sea and main beach. We stopped in the shallows to buy ice creams at the tea room before heading back up the river. It was a perfect day and I felt I was wonderfully sexy in my new red shorts with little ribbon ties on the sides and matching top.

At the end of the day we took the canoe back to the jetty where we’d rented it. When we’d left it had been easy. Everyone got in, the last person undid the rope and hopped in... and off we went. When we got back it wasn’t so easy. The tide had gone out and no matter how we tried we just couldn’t get close to the jetty. Someone was going to have to get out and wade to the jetty with the rope. Wanting to impress I volunteered loudly. The water was crystal clear and only about a foot deep, so it wasn’t as if I was making a grand gesture.

I hopped over the side.. and vanished. Yes, the water was only a foot deep, but the river bottom that looked so solid was actually a four foot layer of soft slimy mud. I sunk up to my waist in the gooey stuff. My friend’s brothers tried to pull me out, but I was stuck fast. The cool guy managed to jump from the canoe to the jetty (why didn’t he offer this earlier?) and pull the boat in. And me? In the end it took everyone there to pull me out. They were all laughing their heads off by then. I came out with a really loud “SHLOCK” noise. My lovely new outfit was covered in stinky river mud and no one wanted to go near me. Mud Karma once again. :-\

On to mud moment number three... Although this one was more humiliating/funny than embarrassing.

I was the only girl in all the grandchildren of my family. As a result tended to be a tomboy who had to keep up with the boys. It got harder competing with my cousins as we moved into our teens. As kids we’d all been equal, but whilst they all would eventually zoom up to the 6 foot level in their mid teens I barely made it past 5 foot. When I was 16, we all went to the beach for the day. This photo was taken of me with my youngest cousin, about ten minutes before I had my mud moment.
On the way home we decided to do a bit of exploring and instead of following the path back up to the houses we decided to follow a smaller path that ran along a nearby stream to see where it went. It was a great time actually. The stream went on into woods and farmland and there were even little waterfalls along the way. Very pretty.

After a while the path petered out completely and the only way to travel on was to cross the stream. It wasn’t very wide and my tall cousins simply stepped across. My one cousin held out his hand to help me across. Refusing to be “the girl” I ignored his offer and jumped... slap bang into the middle. You guessed it. Once again I was to discover that a foot of sparkly water lay above three foot of soft sticky mud! Short legs just aren’t made for leaping streams. It only took two of them to pull me out this time, but I smelt just as bad as the time before and even after a bath and a change of clothes the smell seemed to hang around me like an aura.

Mud moment number four was actually a mud and gravel moment.

I was about 18 and it was a rainy day. My mom had stopped by the post office to pick up a parcel. The entrance to the little post office was across a semi-circular gravel parking area. I leapt out the car and sprinted inside. No problems, but the queue was long and I was in there for ages. By the time I left it the sun was shining, but I was in a hurry to get home and so I sprinted back to the car again.

One moment I was looking at the car...

...and the next I was looking at the sky.

I’d slipped in a puddle and the mud-gravel had acted like ball bearings. I’d slipped neatly under the car like a letter in a post box slot. All that was sticking out was my head. An elderly man with a walking stick came over and asked, “Are you alright?” I assured him I was fine whilst wishing the ground would swallow me up. Everyone going in and out of the post office gathered to stare at the talking head sticking out from under a car. My mom hadn’t even seen me vanish and was sitting in the car puzzled at why everyone was talking to the ground beside her car.

I have learnt to respect mud since then and so far I've remained mud free. It has seemed to have worked as the only time I walked through a bog in Scotland I managed to leave the scene with only muddy shoes and socks. That was because this time I had a large Scotsman holding my hand and making sure I didn't slip.
The funny thing is that large Scotsman, my hubby, is as clumsy as I am. He has a long list of crash-bump-fall stories himself. But although we are a disaster seperately together we manage to stop each other from tripping/falling... which is perhaps what a good relationship is all about? Being better together than apart, especially in the muddy moments of life!

...