Prague: <\/strong>We are excited to announce that we are resuming holding gatherings outside the US! In collaboration with our friends of the Czech translation team, we opened the Prague Law of One Gathering from Aug 12\u201314. More information here!<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Coming Home Gathering: <\/strong>Opened in the previous BW cycle, registration still open<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Channeling Circles:<\/strong> Our small group continues meeting regularly to receive messages from the Confederation. Semi-monthly we meet in Jim\u2019s living room for our Intermediate Circles, and though we have hit a delay this past month, we plan to continue also meeting once a month for our C\/C channeling circles. And thanks to our amazing transcription team, a number of transcripts have gone up these past weeks:<\/p>\n\n\n\n RC Youtube: <\/strong>Trish and Austin (mainly Trish) continued on with the Ra Contact Youtube project, inching ever closer to the finish line:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n **************<\/p>\n\n\n\n **************<\/p>\n\n\n\n Personal Sharings<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Gary: Celebrated Jim\u2019s 75th<\/sup> birthday in this period. He is still full of vigor and energy for service and seeking. I think we have two basic fundamental choices regarding how we relate to our suffering. Do we dig in and face it in order to learn, grow, and be better than we were, thereby transmuting the misery into expanded being? Or we do resist, run away from, and avoid our difficulties, thereby extending their duration and increasing their intensity?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of us vacillate between these two, I believe. My dad often chose the latter path. Whether through alcohol or a cocktail of pharmaceutical numbing agents, he spent a lot of time not facing himself. I don\u2019t judge him for this, particularly as I see similar threads in me\u2014my dad just didn\u2019t have the tools or the wherewithal to really dig into those things that troubled him in the deeper layers, and to face the fears and pains buried there. Instead I want to share my admiration for what he *was* able to accomplish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beginning sometime in the late 2000s, sometime after the divorce when his own long dark night got underway, when he began to turn increasingly to prescription medication for some kind of solution, some sort of false release from pain, he made a conscious, intentional vow to himself to release his anger and \u201cnegativism.\u201d For him, this meant to no longer complain, to not speak ill of others, to not waste an extra minute of his life in anger, to see the positive, and to be grateful for the blessings that life gifts all of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the very difficult subsequent years\u2014driven in large part by his deep well of guilt and self-punishment for perceived wrongdoings\u2014he held onto that vow tightly. And from the trenches he somehow managed to fulfill his promise. Gradually he transformed. He released his anger. He became such a soft, gentle, and kindhearted man. He expressed love and gratitude so often. As suffering has a way of doing, he was humbled. Underneath the daily game of running from pain, his chief wish in life seemed to be to relate to others with love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the stroke and onset of vascular dementia, that process of opening his heart accelerated. As dementia stripped him of his memories, he became so innocent, so much more in his heart. He seemed to express even more love and gratitude. He was a light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And what few memories he could hold onto he cherished. Endlessly he loved showing everyone his \u201cmemories\u201d in the form of pictures hanging up around his walls. And in every conversation he cycled through the handful of memories he could recall. (He seemed to have a different set of for everyone he talked to. His favorite with me was remembering how he and I marched in our hometown Memorial Day parade together in our military uniforms.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Due to his years spent self-medicating and then the dementia, it feels like we\u2019ve been losing him for a long time such that the actual passing feels like a formality, an official confirmation and graceful close to the long unfolding separation, like seeing the boat you are watching grow smaller from the shore finally vanish over the horizon. So there is great peace in my heart with his transition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the tears come thinking that that great and proud man who I called \u201cdad,\u201d who as a little kid was a giant to me, is no longer here with us, at least while we live and breathe on this side of the veil of forgetting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For all your human imperfections, and the inadvertent pain you brought to others, you did your best, Dad. Of this I have no doubt. I admire what you were able to accomplish in this life. I see your perseverance when you were at bottom and wanted to end it all. I thank you for those gifts which are too many for the counting, among which includes the gift of life, the gift of your years and long hours of hard work to provide for us, the gift of giving me the protected space in a difficult world to grow into who I am, and even, in the end, the gift of your vulnerability as you became a portal into innocence for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I thank my brother Adam for the mountains he moved to offer that fatherly service in reverse to our own father, and my sister-in-law Lori who so lovingly carried that weight alongside of Adam, and to my Aunt Sue for the selfless love of a sister that sheltered and sustained my dad\u2019s heart through challenging times, and my mom who underwent her own hard times with my dad but put aside her suffering to stand by him in mutual service to their four kids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dad. I love you. We will meet again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 4\/22 \u2013 5\/26 Search Engine: One of the principal goals of L\/L\u2019s new library website is to create more \u201csurface area\u201d for a virtually endless library of information. That is, to make it more accessible, useable, researchable, and helpful. Toward that end, we are VERY HAPPY to report that on May 25, L\/L’s new search… Continue Reading 2022-05-27<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bring4th.org\/blogworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bring4th.org\/blogworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bring4th.org\/blogworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bring4th.org\/blogworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bring4th.org\/blogworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/bring4th.org\/blogworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":469,"href":"https:\/\/bring4th.org\/blogworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions\/469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bring4th.org\/blogworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bring4th.org\/blogworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bring4th.org\/blogworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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And then on a less celebratory note\u2014unless the completion of the incarnation is celebrated, which seems appropriate on the metaphysical level\u2014after a few years of advancing dementia, my father passed away peacefully in his sleep on April 27. We will hold a service in June to say goodbye as a family. In the meantime I wrote a little piece.
About My Dad’s Closing Chapters<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bring4th.org\/blogworthy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/My-Dad.jpg\")
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