I was filled with sadness learning of Senator Kennedy’s death this morning. Even though I hail from Boston originally, I didn’t know him personally. Yet, I felt a bright light had gone out, a light that has been there leading us out of the darkness for many years. I know, Kennedy had his detractors, his enemies and problems. He was a real human being, not a sainted Kennedy for sure. Not so much in the big gun of president. But rather, he has been working away on important issues for many years and really taking a stance on healthcare. OSHA, COBRA, CHIPS, WIC, all of these programs were spearheaded and created by legislation he wrote. He was passionate about this cause because he himself had a glimpse of the burden of extensive injury and care after an accident in the 60’s. I know that I have used several of these programs over the years, COBRA for one has helped my family make several transitions.
I had no idea of Kennedy’s influence till I had to do a paper on medical ethics and legislation when I was at Boston College in the late 70’s. As I sat in the Boston Public Library reading legislation, discourse after discourse, Sen. Kennedy’s rational, compassionate voice rang through. I was astonished at his knowledge, research and grasp of the medical. But moreover I first heard the real seeds of a Catholicism that spoke to my social activist roots, social justice and compassion that meant taking a stand for others, even when you might be well off and rubbing people the wrong way. Kennedy reached out from a privileged life to contribute real economic difference to others and to guide his colleagues to make a difference as well. He was a lightening bolt because he took his job seriously, and was so informed that he was able to hold ground that few could muster.
I was, and continue to be inspired by this man. He showed us what real democracy is all about. Democracy doesn’t work unless we have rules to go by. Rules that not only inform the larger society, but those that inform us personally and deeply. Rules that we wrestle with and make mistakes about and learn from those mistakes to make better rules. Self governance is what it is all about, and self governance is not an easy task. It takes tremendous courage to face oneself and shape opinions born out of experience, have a public face and take a stand. To make mistakes and to keep standing there. Not for the faint of heart! And yet why do we rely on the Kennedy’s of the world to do it all for us? Aren’t we all responsible for the shaping of our country? Why don’t we all have the courage to look inside and speak from our own experiences of lack or hard knocks?
Sen. Kennedy found a way to work within the system he was in to bring people together because his passion and vision to see a country that took care of the health of its people spoke so loudly to him and he listened to it. Having not only dealt with his own health, but having witnessed tremendous health issues in his own large family, like many of us, he knew of the preciousness of life and incredible power of modern medicine to deal with so many diseases and conditions. But he was also aware of the tremendous power of greed, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and forces within our own government who do not want an empowered and healthy nation. In the face of that, he was a formidable voice and worked tirelessly for change.
I thank Sen. Kennedy for his many years of service, struggle, leadership and compassion. I thank him for walking a line between ration and ideology, between what is right and what can be accomplished. I thank him for persevering through so many personal tragedies, mistakes and moments of humility that show us that you don’t have to be perfect to be a politician, you just have to keep doing your job. As an Irishwoman, I raise a pint in his honor, and I hope the winds of God blow gently on him and guide him to his next leg of the journey.
Full Moon and Prenumbral Eclipse in Aquarius (13 degrees, 43 minutes)
8:55 and 8:59 pm, Eastern Daylight Time, August 5th 2009
I thought it might be helpful for people to know about the natural energies available to us tonight as we do our Wednesday Night Clearings at 8pm EDT. For those of you who are new to this, I have been encouraging Reiki students, light workers, and others to participate in clearings my Reiki Master, Kathleen Milner, started over a year ago. Hundreds of people have been participating. It is a powerful way to heal yourself and heal the planet. Reference the Wednesday Night Clearings on the menu above for more information about how to get involved. You will feel an immediate boost in your energy by participating. You do not have to be a Reiki practitioner to do the clearings, they are for anybody to use. And you can use them any time!!
Just 55 minutes after we start tonight there will be a Full Moon in Aquarius (8:55 EDT), and 4 minutes later a Prenumbral Lunar Eclipse (8:89 EDT. This Eclipse is the third in a row in the past six weeks. So we will be feeling the overall effect of these three eclipses (2 lunar and one solar) for the next 2 weeks.
The effects we will be able to feel and use tonight to further our healing are interesting. Aquarius heralds the call for change, and we awaken to the fact that one small person can make a big difference. In true Aquarian fashion, this is a night to step into the role of mentor and renounce the attraction to focusing only on your own life. By giving to others we can bring the vision of upliftment for humanity into being. It all starts with us, in this moment.
The other planets are in places to support this kind of change. Neptune (compassionate intention) Jupiter (the benefactor) and Chiron (the healer) are also in Aquarius to help support humanity and get us out of ego/Mercury (thoughts and speech) in Virgo (service)/Pluto in practical Capricorn, Venus in compassionate Cancer/action oriented Mars in open-minded Gemini and Uranus in Pisces urging awakened consciousness - all invite us to rest deeply in the realization the we are not our egos, we are part of something so much bigger.
This is a full moon of speaking out, engaging in the politics around you and bringing an enlightened state into reality. One way to do this is to bring meditation into the forefront of our lives, and in the global community.
Tonight I’d like to encourage everyone to meditate after doing the clearings from 8:45 to 9:10 to help seal the energies released by this potent and promising astrological configuration. That would be a great way for us help.
Cathy joins host Angelina Diana for talk about the afterlife on Signs of Life monthly Mediums and Messages segment. Call in with your questions at 877-230-3062. Listen via the web at:
http://www.foreverfamilyfoundation.org/signsofliferadioLISTEN.htm
I am excited to have a whole hour to answer questions and talk with my fellow Medium, Angelina. It should be great!
Filmmaker and friend, Ashley Young, reposted these interviews she did last year. All 8 parts are now available on YouTube, or on the video interviews section above.
In this interview, I try to describe what I do as a medium and why connecting with the unseen world can help us in all kinds of ways. I’m really new at being in front of the camera, as I’m usually promoting others, but it was a lot of fun to do these pieces. I hope you enjoy them.
Check out Ashley’s other films on YouTube by searching doing a search for somedayfire. Or click on the link in the links section on this page.
Working with Spirit, The Unseen World
Shaman Healer Cathy Towle – Part 1
As a mom, meduim, shaman and ardent enviromenalist, I have been thinking of how to teach my kids about my beliefs without hitting them over the head with it. How do I impart my love for nature, it’s relationship to our souls, and it’s basis in spiritualism? How do I show them that the earth holds us in an embrace that allows us to soar as spirits as we live here on it’s surface. All that beauty and stillness that reflects who we are inside needs protecting. Are we are able to take little actions that help restore balance, even if it seems unimportant or even silly?
A few weeks ago my family and I drove upstate from NYC to visit friends for the weekend. It was a beautiful day and the kids were excited to be going to the country. As we drove, I started to notice wtih dismay a lot of road kill. I had never seen so many dead animals along the side of the road. Beavers, racoons, a possum, various woodchucks.
We saw four dead deer, a site I had never seen before. Something inside me was very disturbed by that. There is something magical about deer for me. Especially being a city dweller. Deer appear for a moment along the side of the road. If you are lucky, you see them, and then they are gone. Such regal, gentle creatures. To see them along the side of the road, some brutally mangled, was undignified and violent. Even the kids grew very somber as we saw the last one.
We spend a nice two days drinking in the outdoors. As we were leaving on the back country road, we pulled onto a busier main road to get to the NY State Thruway. We hadn’t goen very far when I saw something in the road. As I came up to it, and was about to run it over, I saw that it was a turtle crossing the road. I drove over it without hitting it, but just barely. Everyone in the car had the same thought, “Stop the car Mommy, we’ve got to save that turtle!” I turned around and drove back. My husband Tom, who is usually maddenly slow, jumped out of the car and shepherded the turtle across the road, completely stopping traffic. Interestingly enough, the cars that stopped waited until they saw the turtle reach safety, and then they moved on. Tom waited, afraid that having saved the turtle, it might head back onto the road (he had experience with this). It dissapeared into the tall grass and my kids and I all breathed a sign of relief. He’d made it! Tom got back in the car jubilant, as the kids and I cheered. I only hoped we had actually pointed it in the right direction!
It was amazing that such a small act made us feel so good. It’s as if we righted the wrong of all the dead animals we had seen the day before. The sense of helplessness we had felt seemed to vanish. Instead of continuing on, we all had connected with something inside us that said “act now.” Our intuition had reached through and we all heard it together. That was the lesson right there, just waiting for us on the highway.
Spiritualism is intertwined with nature in that it’s the simple order of things. In societies where spiritualism is revered, nature ceremonies and a shamanistic viewpoint form the consciousness of community. Most ritual takes place out side and requires a connection with the earth, with a rock, with water. It involves the elements, the sun, the moon, the weather. In nature based societies spirit is imbued in all things. Spirit is as real as everything else that our consciousness holds. The ancestors walk with us, spirit helpers walk with us. And our relationship to the earth is vital. The earth holds the dreamtime, the underworld, the unconscious. If we succeed in destroying it, we destroy all that too.
Lessons in stewardship find us if we are listening. And if we are willing to act, even if it seems small, we can find a connection to spirit in those moments. We can find a connection to our hearts and our souls that can sustain us and help us to take bigger actions, and before we know it, we are changing our selves and we are changing the planet. It all starts with holding it in our hearts to ask the question – How can we take care of our planet? The spirits around are waiting to hear us ask. And we will be shown the way.
Happy Lammas! The harvest season begins. Hmmm, let’s see what we are reaping right now…rampage in the middle east, more debt, less services, higher oil prices, heat waves, huge oil spills in Alaska, deadly typhoon in China. If one didn’t know better, we would think Shiva was on a rampage. What kind of seeds have we sown to get us into this mess???
I know, I know, lets not focus on the negative! But I just can’t help thinking, how have I contributed to this? I am a part of the shaping of this world. My thoughtforms count for something! How have I gone along with things I didn’t believe in, that paved the way for leaders to run rampant and become self serving? How many times have I not said what I was thinking because I wanted others to like me? How many times have I passed opportunities to be of service and left it for others to do? How many times have I left a mess for others to clean up?
Now, I am no angel!! I have a messy side, like all the other humans. But, like it or not, my behavior affects others. Cause the little things count. And they lead to bigger things, and bigger things, and there you have it! I guess that means that if I cleaned up after myself and didn’t leave messes, then it would free up all the others who have been cleaning up after me to do other things. Heck, maybe they would have time to clean up after themselves and wow, what a concept. You can see where this is going!
All that aside, I am really grateful tonight. My garden looks great this year. I have so much to be thankful for, so much I have sown has come to pass. Although my life is busy at the moment, I have time to spend with my children. I have time to think, time to speak, time to be still. There is love in my life. I had a good day at work today. I am happy in this moment.
The cool thing about the capacity to live life is that we can hold space in the good at the same time as holding space among the mess. Which makes us much more accessable to each other. I guess what I want to learn to be is “in the mess but not of it.” To not let the mess define me, or limit my thinking about the present. To be among the mess and be a part of it. So I can be a part of changing it. It’s good to recognise the mess we are in, so that we can see what we need to clean it up.
Well that’s enough musing for tonight. Happy cleaning!!!
You know, I just sometimes have to rant. The Guru thing really bothers me. Not that I think teachers are a bad thing, on the contrary. Teachers are most needed, especially on a spiritual path. But it’s how we relate to them that causes such distress. It’s the deification of teachers, the giving away of our power, the self doubt that flowers and blooms when we open ourselves up that allows others to take advantage of us.
It’s all very subtle. And in some instances it’s very sweet and innocent. When I found a teacher, the first thing I wanted to do was to give it over to this person to fix me. In that fantasy, she had to have a lot of power to pull that off. So I became small and messed up, and the teacher became savior and fixer up’er. I lost a lot of ground that way.
What happened to our own inner teachers? Our inner compass? The discernment of right and wrong? How have we, in this culture, learned to relate to spiritual teachers and teaching in general?
I think the greatest secret that we push away is the enormous power and potential that each one of us possesses. It’s really awesome. And most of it is untapped, because we don’t know how to access it. Yet, when we are quiet, still, letting the magic of “nothing” wash over us, ahhh, we feel it!! It doesn’t take living in a monestary or extreme practices to make this stuff come alive. But it does take us noticing. And remembering, and noticing again. And just holding it for a moment. And thanking it for being there.
I’ve been thinking about something the Dali Lama said about teachers. He said something like this, “Test a teacher for 12 years before taking them on. Spy on them. See what they are like in real life.” Wow, 12 years. I guess there is no emergency there!! I am inferring that as you go about testing your teacher, that you are also listening to your own inner teacher. That if it takes 12 years, it might not be about handing my life over to another, as we so often want to do. Especially along the “bhakti” or “heart opening” path. Instead it might be about growing up alongside a teacher. Being human right next to them. It might mean that I take on some teachings and not others. Accept the dark and the light sides, as it points out my own. It means that I don’t give up my self, push away my ego, but let it get polished as I see what happens. And maybe I’ll pass my own test as well. For am I not also testing myself just as much?
Sometimes I feel that I have soooo much to learn. It’s overwhelming. And then, a friend calls for support, and the most amazing stuff just pops right out of my mouth. Wise, sage like stuff. Where the heck does that come from I ask? Oh…it’s that inner guru. My inner guru shmuru again! (I just like sayin that – guru schmuru!) It makes it’s presence known to me in crazy wild ways. And it keeps me humble, for I never know when it will strike, but it always does. If I remember to look for it. It’s a relationship. We are equals, partners, moving hand in hand. Looking for ways to connect with each other.
That’s how I feel about spirit communication. The spirit world is there all the time. Ready for us to reach out and ask it to be with us. The spirit world is amazing, it’s layered and luscious, and so much fun to be with. My mind keeps being blown, cause I grew up fearing the unseen world. Even though I was totally fascinated by it. Elves, faries, gnomes, earth sprites, all these beings of my childhood captured my imagination. Somehow, my christian upbringing put notions of evil and scariness that separated me from my spirits. It has taken me a long time to reconnect. They are my teachers, my guides, my helpers, my friends.
So teachers come in all forms, inner and outer. Seem and unseen. We need to embrace them all, but with a lot of room to grow. It’s a great journey.
Yes, believe it or not, I’ll be on the radio tonight (thursday 7/27) as a guest medium for the Forever Family Foundation’s radio show – Signs of Life. I’ll be doing readings for the last 10 minutes of the show. You can catch it at AM radio 540, or stream it live at this link –
http://www.foreverfamilyfoundation.org/index2.html
The show runs from 9pm to 10pm and it will be about research mediums. It shoud be interesting. The Forever Family Foundation is a great organization, supporting the idea of life after life. They participate in a lot of research and studies of this subject, and also do a lot to help people going through loss of a loved one. They are a great resource and very active in their organization.
Check it out. It should be a lot of fun. If you miss it, I’ll post a link to it and you can always listen later!!! Whoo who!!
Published on Sunday, July 23, 2006 by the lndependent/UK
Dying Forest: One Year to Save the Amazon
Time is running out for the Amazon rainforest. And the fate of the ‘lungs of the world’ will take your breath away
by Geoffrey Lean in Manaus
Deep in the heart of the world’s greatest rainforest, nine days’ journey by boat from the sea, Otavio Luz Castello is anxiously watching the soft waters of the Amazon drain away. Every day they recede further, like water running slowly out of an unimaginably immense bath, threatening a global catastrophe.
A soy plantation is seen near Santarem, in the Amazon state of Para, Brazil, May 2, 2006. In recent years, soybean farming has overtaken cattle ranching and logging as the biggest factor contributing the rainforest’s destruction. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)
He pointed out what was happening on Wednesday, standing on an island in a quiet channel of the giant river. Just a month ago, he explained, it had been entirely under water. Now it was jutting a full 15 feet above it.
It is a sign that severe drought is returning to the Amazon for a second successive year. And that would be ominous indeed. For new research suggests that just one further dry year beyond that could tip the whole vast forest into a cycle of destruction.
Just the day before, top scientists had been delivering much the same message at a remarkable floating symposium on the Rio Negro, on whose strange black waters this capital city of the Amazon stands. They told the meeting – convened on a flotilla of boats by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of the Greek Orthodox Church, dubbed the “green Pope” for his environmental activism – that global warming and deforestation were rapidly pushing the entire enormous area towards a “tipping point”, where it would irreversibly start to die.
The consequences would be truly awesome. The wet Amazon, the planet’s greatest celebration of life, would turn to dry savannah at best, desert at worst. This would cause much of the world – including Europe – to become hotter and drier, making this sweltering summer a mild foretaste of what is to come. In the longer term, it could make global warming spiral out of control, eventually making the world uninhabitable.
Nowhere could seem further from the world’s problems than the idyllic spot where Otavio Luz Castello lives. The young naturalist’s home is a chain of floating thatched cottages that make up a research station in the Mamiraua Reserve, halfway between here and Brazil’s border with Colombia.
Rare pink river dolphin play in the tranquil waters surrounding the cottages, kingfishers dive into them, giant, bright butterflies zig-zag across them and squirrel monkeys romp in the trees on their banks. And an 18ft black caiman answers, literally, to the name of Fred; gliding up to dine abstemiously on sliced white bread when called. There is little to suggest that it may be witnessing the first scenes of an apocalypse. The waters of the rivers of the Amazon Basin routinely fall by some 30-40 feet- greater than most of the tides of the world’s seas – between the wet and dry seasons. But last year they just went on falling in the worst drought in recorded history.
In the Mamiraua Reserve they dropped 51 feet, 15 feet below the usual low level and other areas were more badly affected. At one point in the western Brazilian state of Acre, the world’s biggest river shrank so far that it was possible to walk across it. Millions of fish died; thousands of communities, whose only transport was by water, were stranded. And the drying forest caught fire; at one point in September, satellite images spotted 73,000 separate blazes in the basin.
This year, says Otavio Luz Castello, the water is draining away even faster than the last one – and there are still more than three months of the dry season to go. He adds: “I am very concerned.”
It is much the same all over Amazonia. In the Jau National Park, 18 hours by boat up the Rio Negro from here, local people who took me out by canoe at dawn found it impossible to get to places they had reached without trouble just the evening before. Acre,
extraordinarily, received no rain for 40 days recently, and sandbanks are already beginning to surface in its rivers. Flying over the forest – with trees in a thousand shades of green stretching, for hour after hour, as far as the eye can see – it seems inconceivable that anything could endanger its verdant immensity. Until recently, scientists took the same view, seeing it as one of the world’s most stable environments.
Though they condemned the way that, on average, an area roughly the size of Wales is cut down each year, this did not seem to endanger the forest as a whole, much less the entire planet. Now they are changing their minds in the face of increasing evidence that the deforestation is pushing both the Amazon and the world to the brink of disaster.
Dr Antonio Nobre, of Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research, told the floating symposium – whose delegates ranged from politicians and environmentalists, to Amazonian Indian shamans and Roman Catholic cardinals – of unpublished research which suggests that the felling is both drying up the entire forest and helping to cause the hurricanes that have been battering the United States and the Caribbean.
The hot, wet Amazon, he explained, normally evaporates vast amounts of water, which rise high into the air as if in an invisible chimney. This draws in the wet north-East trade winds, which have picked up moisture from the Atlantic. This in turn controls the temperature of the ocean; as the trade winds pick up the moisture, the warm water that is left gets saltier and sinks.
Deforestation disrupts the cycle by weakening the Amazonian evaporation which drives the whole process. One result is that the hot water in the Atlantic stays on the surface and fuels the hurricanes. Another is that less moisture arrives on the trade winds, intensifying drought in the forest. “We believe there is a vicious cycle” says Dr Nobre.
Marina Silva, a fiery former rubber-tapper who is now Brazil’s environment minister, described how the Government was finally cracking down on the felling by seizing illegally cut logs, closing down illicit enterprises and fining and imprisoning offenders. As a result, she says, it dropped by 31 per cent last year.
But even so, it has only returned to the levels it was in 2001, still double what it was 10 years before. And it has reached far into the forest after the American multinational Cargill built a huge port for soya three years ago at Santarem, some 400 miles downriver from here.
This encouraged entrepreneurs to cut down the trees to grow the soya.
The symposium flew down en masse to inspect the damage this had caused – vast fields of beans destined to feed supermarket chickens in Europe, where until recently there had been lush, trackless forest.
Priests and community leaders who were campaigning to protect the forest told us how they had received repeated death threats.
So far about a fifth of the Amazonian rainforest has been razed completely. Another 22 per cent has been harmed by logging, allowing the sun to penetrate to the forest floor drying it out. And if you add these two figures together, the total is growing perilously close to 50 per cent, which computer models predict as the “tipping point” that marks the death of the Amazon.
The models did not expect this to happen until 2050. But, says Dr Nobre, “what was predicted for 2050, may have begun to happen in 2005.” Nobody knows when the crucial threshold will be passed, but growing numbers of scientists believe that it is coming ever closer.
One of Dr Nobre’s colleagues, Dr Philip Fearnside, puts it this way: “With every tree that falls we increase the probability that the tipping point will arrive.”
Brazilian politicians say that the country has so many other pressing problems that the destruction is unlikely to be brought under control, unless the world helps to pay for the survival of the forest on which it too depends. Calculations by Hylton Philipson, a British merchant banker and rainforest campaigner, reckon that it will take $60bn (£32bn) a year, less than a third of the cost of the Iraq war.
The scientists insist there is no time for delay. “If we do not act now”, says Dr Fearnside, “we will lose the Amazon forest that helps sustain living conditions throughout the world.”
Wow, the new moon in Leo is heating up the world stage for some real fireworks!!! For more on this, check out Barbara Handclow’s Astroflash at the link on the right hand side here (Barbara Handclow). She really gets into some political analysis there!
Here we are focusing more on the personal side of the new moon and how we can use the energies to help us. For awhile now, I have been setting my intentions at the new moon. This has been very helpful in directing my energies and focusing my attention on being in the “now” of my life. It’s hard to maintain that with all the things going on in the world around me, so I find it particularly helpful. Give it a try and you can see how it works.
Working with the moon’s energies is a very practical thing. The new moon is the begining of a building of energy that culminates in the full moon. Perfect for starting projects or birthing new ideas. After the full moon (August 9), the energy recedes, so we can look at what we are working on, see how it grew and make adjustments and refinements to our energies. Tagging along with the moon’s waxing and waning energies, is like a skateboarder grabbing on to a truck to pull them for a distance. The moon is going there anyway, why not use the energy?
When framing your intentions, it’s best to state between 3 and 10, as it keeps the energy focused. Try to get from yourself what you really want.(As I go through my list, I ask myself “Do I really want this?”). Also, start each intention with the phrase, “I want…”. It’s best to act within 8 hours of the moon, which is exactly new at 12:30 am Tuesday morning (the 25th). So get crackin!!!
This month with the moon in Leo, the focus is on love and romance, creativity, generosity, celebration, play and fun, dignity, being center stage, determination, leadership, self confidence and tempering arrogance. Also, in the body, the heart, back and spine, inflamations and exhaustion. So that is a lot to work with!!!
Have a great new moon everyone!
