Thursday, March 25
An e-mail from Diana with an update on the graphics for We Meet in Dreams: “Last night I worked on the starry night sky imagery for We Meet in Dreams and made significant headway. As soon as I have a sample ready to show you, I’ll send it. This technique is going to be SPLENDID.” When I receive her cover graphic I will post it.
If Diana says this technique is splendid - then it is.
Earlier today JF took me to a few shops and I bought my first pansies of the year. Put some floppy yellow and purple ones in the four front window boxes. The new bits of color are pleasantly and delightfully - shocking. Undoubtedly someone will come along and rip the flowers out of the boxes and throw them on the sidewalk, they usually do ... And then I replant them (the flowers not the vandals) and everything is fine again.
Our front flower boxes are right on the sidewalk, and it seems exceptionally tempting to an occasional high school student to uproot what I have planted there, especially in the spring. The front of our house is really the back of our house - the true front door leads inside from the back gardens, through and under the grape arbor. So in essence we have a secret front door ...
I have been working with someone slogging through the Dark Night of the soul, by e-mail, for the last six or so months. She is almost through it to the other side, and has learned to stand in the soul a good deal of the time - and when she is not, she is able to fairly quickly realize that she has fallen back into the ego, i.e. fallen back into her personal thoughts and perceptions that can then lead to difficult personal emotions. She is a fast learner. One of the biggest difficulties we all face is catching the wily ego while we are caught in it. During the Dark Night it is so painful to stand in the ego, we are alerted more quickly and more emphatically than at other times - which is a part of the blessing of the Dark Night. At those ego times, I asked my student to remember that she is the soul, and through her various spiritual practices she has attained the ability to then stand in the Light and Peace and Joy of the soul once again. I gave her the simple practice, “I am the soul”, and told her to also image herself as Radiant Light as she repeats the phrase. A simple exercise with unimaginable results.
Sloshing through the emotional darkness of the Dark Night, even as we approach the Illuminative Period of the Interior Life, we are bound to fall back into the ego here and there. The trick is not to dwell on our failures but to remind ourselves that we are the soul, not our thoughts and emotions and personal perceptions. Our Lady in Medjugorje told one of the visionaries that we should use our personal failures as a way of building true Humility.
I have another new e-mail friend who contacted me some months ago through the Distant Healing Network. Usually I just send healing and angels, but this beautiful woman keeps having illness after illness, in fact she has just begun chemo therapy. I wrote her this week to ask if there might be emotional causes underlying her various physical conditions and illnesses - and she could not think of anything. I wrote her today with some possible emotional causes and added: just remember, if personal emotions are involved, it is good to feel and acknowledge them - just remember that you are the Radiant soul as they come up and you will be fine. This woman has enormous Love, and it could be she does not want to acknowledge any negative emotion that might arise within her own personal heart or mind. However, burying or suppressing these negative emotions is not a good idea, and they can become quite destructive if suppressed. If we remember that we are the soul, then personal thoughts and emotions can pass through us easily, without leaving a trace, leaving us refreshed and more Radiant than ever.
I am making a distinction between the personal thoughts and personal emotions and their Higher octaves because the Higher Emotions, such as the Divine Love and Compassion, do not belong to us, we do not produce them - they come through us, given to us by the Divine Itself. None the less we must all strive to keep our vehicle, the physical body and personal mind and psychology, healthy, and learn to sort out and transform the personal emotions.
Friday, March 26
An e-mail from Diana:
“One of my colleagues at the Art Institute teaches Adobe InDesign, the software that I have switched to using for Visits with Angels. It's a complex software... and a different one than I've used on your other books. The other two books were designed and produced with Quark Xpress, so transferring to a new software means learning new processes for the efficient production of large documents. InDesign has automated features for large documents that I am just gradually discovering. It's rather slow-going, learning as I'm in production. Last night my colleague and I met at the White Rock Lake Coffee Shop. I took my laptop with me. I also took the star strip graphics that I'd been working on to show her. She loved the graphics and wanted me to open up the manuscript & layouts on the computer. Next thing I knew, we were immersed in an intensive head- to-head involvement with InDesign and the books.... She wanted to see if she could set up a system that would be more efficient for me as I enter the text of the manuscripts into the layouts. Amazingly, we spent FOUR HOURS doing this. We didn't leave until 11:30pm. One more curiosity: last night I had a dream that there was a clue about the books awaiting me at Crush Lake. An important detail here is that I have never heard of Crush Lake! I had no idea where it was. So when I woke up I googled it, and to my astonishment it is an hour and a half's drive east from where I live here in Dallas, Texas!! The lake appears to be a tiny speck, and there seems to be no information about it except for its location. I know no one who lives near there. And seriously, I have never, ever heard of Crush Lake. But I am guessing it would be very wise of me to go there, sit beside the lake and meditate to find out why it came up in my dream, which left no details for me other than there's something I might be able to find out there about the books.
Soon: sample layouts of the section title pages!! ”
I found Diana’s dream about Crush Lake very interesting. Diana dreamt about Ithaca before she came here, and her dream about Ithaca is one of the stories in We Meet in Dreams. Diana had never heard of Ithaca - nor had we met or ever heard of each other. However, we both had a ‘dream’ about the same party on one of the lawns at Cornell before she moved here, which we both still vividly remember. So I am curious about what she will discover at Crush Lake.
Friday, April 9
Another e-mail from Diana:
“ I'm sailing through the assembly of our Chapter Title Pages for We Meet in Dreams. Here is the first title page, for section I. I am attaching two files: a PDF for you to print and a JPG for you to put on A Mystic's Journal. Best not confuse these files' specific purposes, since the PDF is high resolution (suitable for nice, sharp prints) and the JPG is low resolution for the web (NOT good for prints).”
I wrote Diana back, thanked her - and told her I was very pleased. Which I am. Her title page for Section I is posted at the beginning of this Journal entry. Diana is so creative and so gifted that she has managed to reflect the contents of the section of the book in her star graphics - this will become more apparent as I post more title pages.