All My Obituaries

[Cheerful Gore Alert. Probably not suitable for anyone who

has never watched t.v./movies/computer screens.]

I have been shot to death by an arrow, stabbed with a spear, beheaded by guillotine, bled out (twice) from postpartum hemorrhage, been shot by a rifle, and stabbed with an ice pick. Lest this begin to sound like the opening riff of an Edward Gorey alphabet, I’ve also died from old age in my sleep.

Funny thing.  People talk about reincarnation but they don’t necessarily compute all the deaths it necessitates.

In the interests of helpful disclosure, R. shall now reveal a few incarnational details she generally treats as private because to talk about them would be weird. Well, so much for that. “So, how’d you die so far?” “Oh, shot, stabbed, gored, starved, crushed, poisoned – you know.” – Cocktail party on the Other Side. Because it does get blackly funny. The more lives you live or recall, the more deaths you can recite.

But to be clear: in every one of the above deaths, once I was dying with no chance of return, pain died first: in flooded instead a state of gorgeous lassitude, calm, and peace which intensified until I departed my body altogether. In visionary experiences since, I’ve re-lived that sweet feeling: sent as reassurance when I’d been worrying that loved ones had suffered while dying. Instead I was given to feel what they’d actually felt as they passed. It was lovely. So what follows is only a series of preludes to something much better.

Notice however that the following is not a particularly flattering list of existences. That’s REAL past lives for ya.

Shot By An Arrow – in the throat by a bandit, on some dusty Middle Eastern road during the Crusades. I was a squire & had deserted my corrupt knight & only wanted to get home again & see my wife. Nice thing: as I lay dying, having drifted into calm & peace, I believed I was lying by the low light of an old fire in the stone hearth of my little home. I was in my cot, & from my bedside my beloved wife smiled down at me. God is generous.

Stabbed With a Spear – in the chest, by a Norse sailor who found me on the tiny rock atoll known for its freshwater spring where I’d been left to die by my community. I was a berserker who’d gone mad, and while they respected all I’d done for them as a warrior in the past, they really couldn’t put up with me once I began attacking them. My terminator had  landed to get drinking water. Surprised to find me still alive (even strangers had heard about the problem guy left there without food or weapons; but this was a very long time later), he ran me through casually with his spear. Like someone today might spear a piece of litter in their favourite park. I was neither frightened nor offended, & didn’t try to fight. My madness had been caused by a toxin I’d unwittingly been ingesting, and now, detoxed, lucid, gentle, and half my previous size, having survived on raw fish and spring water, I considered that I was finally a human being worth killing. Or that’s how I put it to myself at the time.

Beheaded By Guillotine – French Revolution. R. was the dissolute, genial, & witty ne’er-do-well wino younger son of a French noble.  He lived for the theatre. Addicted to satire, he didn’t blame the revolutionaries for arresting his class of people. “I’d arrest us, too!” he told them gaily as he was led off. Once imprisoned, tired of everyone’s whining & wailing, he spent his long languishment creating & mounting garbage theatricals with other prisoners whom he cajoled into roles. His wig served noble duty as recurring costume piece, prop, and once, memorably, atop a pile of infested straw, as the sole character in a one-man show for which he provided the running monologue from ‘off-stage’. His execution was just more theatre to him. “I bequeath you my most valuable possession!” he cried to the death-day mob. “My wig!” – and tossed the reeking object into their eager hands. I recall stepping down into the crowd even before the blade landed, just in time to watch my head roll into the basket. I was critiquing my final performance. I judged it to be middling. Funny what you remember.

Bled Out With Postpartum Hemorrhage – #1. R. was a breeding slave in the American Deep South. Yes, they sometimes really did that. How many pregnancies can be forced on you, then the children taken away, before you disassociate permanently? Eventually they had to take them away as babies. Finally she bled to death on about her 15th childbirth. An odd white man who’d sort of befriended her (they never talked), the rejected ineffectual son of the plantation owner, loved the slaves and their music much more than anything to do with the family business. He attended her deathbed helplessly &, sick of his own uselessness, decided to be a doctor. I met that guy in this life. He still remembered shaving outside his Civil War tent, & how he could amputate a soldier’s limb faster than any doctor in the field. Sounds gross but relatively, he was kind. #2. R. was a U.S. Southern belle who married her sweetheart, then bled out after giving birth. Angry, frustrated at such a privileged but empty existence, this was the one life I gave up on. I just let myself bleed out. I didn’t care: not about my grief-stricken husband, not about my newborn baby. I drifted away painlessly but overwhelmed by distaste for life’s meaninglessness. I became a ghost for a while, haunting my own rotting corpse in the family crypt. Think this was what you’d call PTSD Hangover – since it had actually started with the other life in which I bled out. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. You GOTTA get over stuff.

Shot With A Rifle – Civil War sharpshooter got me. Notice I was back into that conflict with both feet. R. was a boy of 9 or 10, and he was a running fool. Not even sure which side was which and certainly too pleased by all the drama to care, he ran messages back & forth across the Confederate-Union line in West Virginia. Could run like a demon, tirelessly, and knew those wooded mountains in detail, having grown up there a poor backwoods kid in rags. The sniper had realized the boy was a messenger; he just didn’t stop to wonder which outfit I worked for. Too bad, since it seems, that day at least, we were both on the same side. At that time a sniper ball would explode a head like a melon, but his shot grazed a branch and hit my midsection instead. So I still had my eyesight. I lay peacefully drifting away, gazing up at the treetops. Green whispering woodland tracery against blue sky; trees, my dearest lifelong friends, leaning over me lovingly, rustling encouragement, waving See-you‘s. It only took seconds.

Stabbed With an Ice Pick – Lied, wasn’t an ice pick. It was some kind of steel surgical probe used by a Nazi doctor interested in neurological experiments. He operated on French Resistance fighters and Jews sans anesthetic. Once done mutilating in the name of ‘science’, assuming she was dead, they pitched her onto the heap of other emaciated corpses behind the hospital building. I remember small lazy snowflakes, drifting down from a grey sky. They landed on the skin of her face in points of ice like fire. She lay on the heap of frozen bodies, not dead yet; she wasn’t even unconscious. She’d just left her mind & body during the worst of it. Now, a sadistic halfwit O.R. assistant appeared & engaged in his own little pretend science. He plunged the purloined steel probe into her eye-socket and up into brain, poking, poking. Blinded, she left there at last, straight into the beautiful lap of the Christ, who only when I revisited all this a few years ago, asked me very gently: Can you forgive them? “I don’t even know what that means,” I said after a long time, head in His lap, unutterably weary. “But I would never, ever, do the same to them.” Sometimes forgiveness equals the best we can manage at the time.

Well. Cheery stuff. Those aren’t actually ‘all’ my obituaries, of course. Don’t have room. But you see what I mean. Once the passage into ravishing peace is known; and return to this world a given (one has work in need of doing); the cumulative deaths become almost cheery, more entertainment than real horror, like the gore scenes in teen slasher movies. Or like when your avatar dies in your favourite x-box game: your character bites it; you regret the last game for a second or two; then you press Start & begin again. You’re armed now – or you hope so, and you’re probably right – with experience to help you play the next round better.

Olympic Takeaway

So the Winter Olympics are over. Daily t.v. sports-fest, nail-biting suspense hangovers: done. What’s left?

It happened at the medal ceremony for Women’s Hockey. Remember that? The Americans were receiving their silver medals. A long string of more than a dozen athletes in blue hockey uniforms… and every single face wreathed in seething displeasure, gloom, depression, anger… We HATE that we came second, those faces howled. We’d rather be anywhere but here.

I know I know,  t.v. can be cruel, but stay with it: one athlete after another is wreathed with that elite neck ribbon and that big craved medal, and what we got was dizzying variations on – Sulk.

I did try to drum up sympathy. But pretty soon I felt like an idiot. They’d just won Olympic Silver. In a closely matched and well-played game that they had no call to be ashamed of. They were there with the honour of representing their country. They were being hung with elite medals for all the world to see and for their country to celebrate. And they were mad cause they hadn’t Dominated. Who the heck coaches those gals and what are they thinkin’?

Call it, ref. Beat the drums slowly. The Official Death of Good Sportsmanship.

Towards the end of the line a player scared up a stiff smile for the medal handler. Grains of sportsmanship in there somewhere? Coach saw a PR blunder & gestured to her to lift the corners of her mouth? She’d eyed the Jumbotron & realized they looked lame?

Images hit me. The Canadian speed skater who gave up his own elite spot so his disqualified teammate could skate – and place. Another top-ranked speed skater who fell – and shrugged in a gracious post-skate interview. The team that rolled their bobsleigh (gotta be mortifying) and climbed out and trudged back uphill; how everybody cheered them. The Peruvian cross-country skier who skied across the finish line dead last with broken ribs, carrying his national flag, to be embraced by the race’s winner who’d waited 30 minutes to greet him.

My Olympic Takeaway is now wrapped one layer deeper. I’ve realized it’s as interesting to witness how people lose as how people win. The difference between the Culture of Domination and the Culture of Graciousness deserves full and avid attention. It’s encouraging. It’s instructive. It’s moving. It reminds the armchair appreciator of the actual value in appreciation. Because trite & annoying as this will sound, life actually isn’t made up of how well we win but also of how well we lose – and that’s where armchair athletes suddenly have something active either to learn, or to contribute.

So I’m waiting for an Olympic Games that rewards with medals both athletic determination and the spirit of sportsmanship.

Oh wait. I think they already exist. They’re called the Special Olympics.

And – hang on. Haven’t we just had a taste of them at these Winter Games?

Hm. Going purely on visible spirit, who would you elect for Best Sport?

Olympic Overload Cure-All!!

Right now we’re all following the Winter Olympics whether we intend to or not. Right? The heartwarming stories. The tales of defeat. The cocky or tremulous athlete interviews. Fit young people still breathing hard from elite competition, panting out noble bons mots rinkside/hillside/trackside.

…& the cheerful, conscientiously well-read, dude Olympic-speak CBC Regulars our culture can’t do without.  Ron McLean!

Jian Ghomeshi!

George Strombolopolous!

Don Cherry!

(My teenager: ” Isn’t he DEAD?!?” – Our post-modern national icon, dead?!)

Yesterday, watching skating,

[Patrick Chan!]

I realized we’ve had enough. Suddenly the only voice I longed to hear, only commentary I could imagine worth pondering, the only Olympic-long, daily, talking head I could actually imagine running to the t.v. to turn on every day was….

Yes.

Red Green on the medal-winning skier whose coach fixed her broken ski boot buckle 5 minutes before her race. Fixed it with…. you-know.

Red Green doing in-depth Olympic commentary.

Running info-fillers on Highly Technical Athletic Equipment

Exploring Highly Specialized Athletic Clothing.

Discussing International Relations.   – Pro –

– Con –

How ’bout it folks? This –

Or this?

Let’s start a campaign.  Write the CBC. Beg. Telephone. Send  links to live podcast rants. Act now.

Or just copy this photo & title, and drop it into the email form here: http://www.cbc.ca/help/contact/programming_feedback  –

RED GREEN FOR THE 2014 SUMMER OLYMPIC GAMES.

And…. Believe.

Tiny fine-print disclaimer you should imagine read at rapid-fire speed in a monotone as if offered at the end of a pharmaceutical ad: No, I didn’t ask Red Green’s creator Steve Smith. He’s retired. It’s not nice to bug retired people. We are Canadian and Canadians politely leave the famous, the retired, and the obviously corrupt alone when we don’t know them personally. And even if we do. However Red Green is still alive online so we can at least try mass coaxing because stranger things have happened and in fact they already are and they’re not only strange they’re way more boring than they have to be. That’s why we need Red Green covering the Olympics. NOW.

NOTE: Turns out the CBC email form blocks photos. Send the title anyhow, at least. I’ve written them and explained so they can be ready for our deluge.

 

Church & Cayce – Friends or Foes?

Some of life’s apparent contradictions are only apparent. It’s human to be contradictory, but I don’t mean when one actually is. When my daughter wants her snowboarding to last all day but won’t get up before noon; when I love the two small rescue dogs I’ve ended up with but think owning pets presents the ethical danger of letting them replace emotionally complex relationships with human beings. When I’m told I should go on holiday so often that it becomes a sort of harassment robbing my meagre downtime of Holiday.

No, I mean apparent contradiction. To belong to a church, for instance, and to be a Cayce Christian.

Cayce’s stories of the life and incarnations of Jesus, and his dissertations on the Christ whom Jesus embodied or on the Universal Christ vaster than Time: those fill in, plump out, enrich, and whisper through every story or hymn or sermon I hear at church. Like an underground stream rising in whirls and pools and sinking just below green rushes again. This isn’t an experience of church’s inadequacy or the superiority of Cayce’s Source but a living of Truth as it weaves through everyday life.

“What do we really know about Mary’s life?” asks an Advent minister rhetorically, since the agreed-on church response is Not much.

And while that minister proceeds to speculate, my mind fills with the rich tapestry of Mary’s life which Cayce’s Source did fill in. Her solid roots among the Essenes, banned sect of Judaism then persecuted both by Jewish government and by the Roman occupiers. Mary’s own immaculate conception (a form of conception which, Cayce said, does not violate natural law but accords with it under certain very special if rare conditions). Her unmarried mother Anna bringing Mary at age 4 to the leadership of the Essene temple at Mount Carmel, Elijah’s original holy place, to be dedicated as one of their trainees. Mary being found ‘perfect in mind & body’ for acceptance into the rigorous physical and spiritual training which nearly three centuries earlier, the Essenes had begun for special young girls hoping to prepare a mother for the Messiah. How Mary was chosen, by the Archangel’s very public surprise first visit, to be indeed as Cayce called her:  ‘the Little Mother’.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

So I sit and warmly contemplate that Mary, because at some point years ago I made the intellectual’s considered decision to leap in faith. To trust Cayce’s Source as loving, reliable, and clearly pretty awesomely informed. It wasn’t an irrational or ill-considered leap. The Cayce history stories, including the Life of Christ, appear in discrete ’tiles’ or bits over many life readings given for all kinds of different reasons to all kinds of different people. But the tiles fit together seamlessly and remain consistent over years with only a couple of minor factual conflicts. Those who correlated and critiqued admit that the inconsistencies likely had to do with these bits being in a lost language the stenographer didn’t know how to represent.

I sit in church not in a bath of contradiction, but in joy that there is a church to sit in. And I celebrate as the wonder of the Cayce Christ stories are evoked there and crash over me. Those stories tell richly of real people. They affirm the miraculous in calm metaphysical mini-lectures. Above all they affirm that the spirit in which we do anything at all is what matters most. In fact  Cayce’s Source points out that the spirit in which we do things is what determines ultimate outcomes – outcomes we may not live to see in this life… but may witness joyously in our next one.  Look where that got the Essenes.

 

Magic Carpet

When I think back, life without integrated psychic insight was a bit like the sterility of the Little Lame Prince’s  tower life.

He couldn’t walk. He needed glasses & didn’t know it. Life Without wasn’t his fault  -it was just what his culture did to children naturally.

But life enriched by the depth experiences and imagery of past lives, by the lovely tools & wisdom of that Still Small Voice within – is like receiving delivery of a beautiful carpet.

Intricately woven; cunningly patterned.

And then you embrace all that beautiful, cunning patterning  –  and you realize it’s alive. It has force.  It will kindly take you places in ways you once thought impossible, and it will give you what you need so you can really see.

Because your beautiful carpet is magic. It’s a Flying Carpet.  And suddenly a Flying Carpet isn’t just a story you wish were real, it is real; and it’s uniquely yours;  and it always has been; and it always will be.

Hold onto your Seats

I’m a professional psychic counsellor & also a professional writer.  I’m not a Psychic who dabbles in writing: I was a full-fledged intellectual/literary writer whose career Becoming Psychic forcibly interrupted.  Subsequent years at life readings means I love the depth & texture that only knowing the stories & karmic mesh of our previous incarnations can possibly infuse.  But the rest of the time I’m writing literary poetry & fiction, & drama after years of it for CBC Radio, the Toronto stage, and for both screens (film,  t.v.). I’ve also done time as a culture critic.

You won’t likely have heard of me though. It’s been a long time since anyone actively gave a hang. I Left Toronto, you see. This is an Ontario Career no-no. (Heck, for writers,  it’s a Canadian Career  no-no.)  I think I also left behind a number of ticked-off people, though I can’t be sure about that. I think while I was integrating psychic loads, I sometimes came off as a bit unbearably odd.  I also suspect that even when nobody was technically ticked off, I had already been stashed in what we called then the Development Ghetto: where “up-&-coming writers of promise” were sent to conform or die while earning grant application points for arts institutions.

So the demands of psychic life erupted and interrupted my earlier writing life, which was flaring its way in the big city, &  I had to leave town. I really mean “had to” – it was a call; a soul directive. I’d tried to avoid it and then one night, back in my apartment at Broadview & Danforth from a stint on the farm where I grew up, I had this dream: in my apartment’s galley kitchen tottered a frail, starving, young white horse. Stricken with remorse at its neglect, I  poured & set down for it – a bowl of milk.

I woke & knew I was screwing up and that my needed course correction was not obscure.  Having grown up caring for horses I knew perfectly well that you don’t feed a yearling horse a bowl of milk like a cat. You don’t keep it in a tiny urban kitchen. You take it to the country & you turn it out to run in a pasture and you feed it grass & hay & oats and water. Then, for pity’s sake, you train it.

That horse was the Dream Giver’s image of my spirit. “Psychic” means “of the soul” or “of the spirit”.

Now after years of smalltown and rural scrabbling, of unusual effort to develop and a realization that keeping my eventual two professions apart was somehow deeply trivializing to each, they’re integrated: which is why Robyn has spent the past year contemplating a Psychic Blog and sighing with misty boredom at the prospect of creating yet one more New Agey pronouncement for any medium at all. My boredom only disappeared when I recognized that if my blog didn’t reflect the peripatetic musings of a writer whose literary views happen to be altered by the depth experiences of years of metaphysical encounters & gob-smackingly fascinating life readings, it was always going to bore me. And it would’ve bored you silly too. Or should have.

The illusion of the Net is that everybody’s being watched & everybody’s a star. The more common reality is that nobody’s watching & nobody’s a star – which isn’t strictly true, but in the biggest sense of human trajectories, is true enough.

So hold onto your seats. There will be no limits here.

Biography

Spiritual Affiliation
Robyn’s column “Diary of a Smalltown Psychic” appears regularly in The Open Road, national magazine of Edgar Cayce Canada. Formerly a culture critic and journalist, she’s an award-winning poet, professionally produced & published playwright, radio and television dramatist, humourist, and fiction writer, and spent several years as a live public radio personality.

Robyn and her seven brothers were raised fairly traditionally in Woodstock and Oxford County, Ontario, Canada, within the liberal Protestant United Church of Canada. She’s a parent & remains an active lifelong member of the United Church, even as her spiritual work and studies have carried her beyond the ordinary teachings of Christianity to a deeper level of understanding about the Christ’s message.

As a psychic worker, Robyn seeks to serve the good of the collective and individual soul under the guidance and protection of the Christ. She feels a high degree of comfort with interfaith dialogue, affirming that no spiritual association worth the name will foster divisions between or among people.

Robyn trained for two years intensively with a spiritual teacher using the Edgar Cayce Search for God Study Group method, and for a further year with that teacher part-time. Psychic since childhood, her gift came strongly to the foreground during her years of metaphysical training, meditation, personal disciplines, and dream study under the Cayce format. Her training continues through dreamwork, study of the Cayce material, and lessons received in altered states.

For enrichment Robyn writes & produces dramatic works as charity events for local churches and community service providers. She recently completed a seminal book of bridging spirituality, The Dance of Yeshua – Christ In a Psychic World. Rich in personal and client anecdote, this revolutionary work takes a daring look at how the traditional Christian/New Age split came about – yet need not exist. Fascinating & enriching, clients have begun enjoying the content of this book in Robyn’s readings & public talks. Publisher enquiries welcome.