CELEBRATING ETERNAL LIFE: August's Eclipse Cycle and Lions Gate

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

So said John Lennon in his song “Beautiful Boy,” a favorite of mine since it always makes me smile with how much love for his young son is so imbued in it. And the words are very true. Life does take its own course, no matter what we may have planned, and the only way to survive the unexpected twists and turns that so often result in major course corrections for us is to learn to flow with all that life offers up to us and not resist what we cannot control or change.

And I’ll be the first to admit that so often that is much easier said than done!

I’m sure that anyone who knows me, either personally or through what I share in my writing, knows that my own life has been far from average or ‘normal,’ whatever that word may mean anymore. Last summer I was very appreciative of having my phone call picked up for a “two minute reading” with Steve Rother during a monthly Lightworker broadcast. Steve has been channeling The Group for quite a lot of years and more recently a number of its individual entities as well. I have been tuning into the warmth and love and light exuded by Steve and his lovely wife Barbara for many years. In my brief reading with him, Steve succinctly stated that I’ve had the rug pulled out from under me on multiple different occasions but affirmed that I am doing wonderfully well in continuing to do what I came here to Earth during this incarnation to do. He said I’m most definitely a “lightworker” though I’m going about that lightwork in a very different way than most other lightworkers are. What he said certainly rang true and I continue to be grateful for that affirmation.

The rug being pulled out from under me on all those many different occasions has created the theme of my life and the path that I’ve followed to reach the place that I am standing in today on this 8-8 Lions Gate of 2017. And this theme is that death is the greatest illusion that there is. All the deaths that I’ve experienced in my life, each one pulling the rug out from under me once again with the next transition of someone I’ve loved dearly here on Earth, have taught me that death isn’t real. It is a change but not an ending. It’s actually a birth and a new beginning.

After I posted my last blog back in December of 2016, I intended to dive back into writing and sharing with renewed interest and enthusiasm. Yet life is what happened while I was busy making those plans. What an incredible time of transformation this is on our planet! I know I am not alone in having felt squeezed like a tube of toothpaste offering up its last dollop at times or as if my life was happening in a pressure cooker…or perhaps in a blender at its highest speed. This has continued often seemingly without ceasing or mercy, and yet finally as we walk through this incredibly powerful month of August with this year’s eclipse cycle coinciding with the Lions Gate, I feel like this is shifting. I feel as if I’ve been holding my breath for months, in spite of my continual reminder to myself to breathe, and now the blessed relief of a long, deep, slow exhalation is upon me. Hallelujah for that!

It’s not important that I share all that’s been happening in my personal life that has kept me so busy simply trying to maintain my own balance. What IS important is that I have, and now I feel myself coming out on the other side of a very long dark tunnel, one that I actually entered at age 10 when my mother was diagnosed with colon cancer. She desperately wanted to continue living and stay here on Earth with the family that she loved so deeply, but alas back then there was no real understanding of what created disease, “dis-ease,” or what is necessary for living and enjoying a holistically healthy life.

My mother lived with cancer for 6 years before exiting her ravaged physical body when I was 16. The rest of our family lived with cancer too since it affected virtually every aspect of our lives. It was during those cancer years that I realized how different my life was from pretty much everyone else I knew. My reality was worlds apart from all of my friends and that only became more so when my father died 2 years after my mother from what I’ve always known was a broken heart at losing the love of his life as much as it was from the Parkinson’s Disease he had struggled with since even before my mother was diagnosed with cancer.

I married young to a man I dearly loved and then delighted in giving birth to 3 beautiful children. And then that rug was pulled out from under me again when I was 34 and the amazing man who was my husband also left his body after much struggle with what I’ve come to see were old ancestral patterns that most humans have to grapple with at one time or another. It’s simply part of being human.

There’s another song lyric that I have always loved since it has so aptly described my own life. It’s from The Eagles’ song “My Man” and the refrain is “And we who must remain go on living just the same.” Then the last line of the song adds “And we who must remain go on laughing just the same.”

So true too and aptly so! So my little family and I kept on living and laughing. And then 23 years after my husband’s departure, the unthinkable and unbelievable happened. My 27 year old son Tim, the baby of my brood, suffered a heat stroke on the eve of the 8-8 Lions Gate after working outdoors all day during a brutal Texas heat wave. We marked the 4 year anniversary of that very surreal day yesterday with the August 7 full moon lunar eclipse. In 2 weeks’ time we will mark the 4 year anniversary of his transition to the Great Beyond on the ‘black moon,’ the month’s 2nd new moon in Leo, which is also the rare mega total solar eclipse of August 21. Tim left us on the night of a full ‘blue moon’ so this year’s date coinciding with a black moon…as well as this powerful eclipse…feels very significant to me.

One would think that nothing else could possibly happen to change my life so drastically and irrevocably, yet just a few months after Tim’s passing yet another rug was pulled out from under me when my soul companion of the previous 9 years, Ziggy, was diagnosed with a massive spinal tumor that turned out to be malignant. He too left the planet 15 months after Tim’s departure.

What a painful life theme my soul seems to have chosen for me for this lifetime! And yet inevitably, “We who must remain go on living just the same. We who must remain go on laughing just the same.”

It’s taken me a long time to rebound after these last 2 losses in my life as it was of course quite necessary for me to experience all the emotions that go along with losing someone we love from our physical human reality. I’ve had to go even further and deeper within myself to survive these last few years than I ever have before. Grief is so often cumulative. Each individual experience of loss brings up the memory, often viscerally, of the losses that came before it. I honestly wasn’t sure I would be able to stay here on Earth myself after having to say goodbye to my much loved (by many more than just me) son and then so soon afterwards to the very unique man who truly ‘got me’ in all my seeming weirdness and unusual sensitivities to energies that were quite unfelt and invisible to pretty much everyone else. He loved me because of these things rather than in spite of them.

Life is a dance and often the music and the tempo and the beat of that dance change significantly as we move through our different experiences. And that’s a gift because each of those experiences moves us forward and beyond where we were previously. What I have found on my own life journey is that often it is the most devastatingly painful experiences and losses that offer us the greatest opportunities to grow and expand into more than we ever imagined that we could be or become. It seems that this is the ‘work’ that I’ve been about during this lifetime and I will happily accept Steve Rother’s description of it as ‘lightwork’ of a different and unique kind. I’ve come to accept that I’m here to blow the lid off of how death is presently perceived and understood. It really isn’t the finality that so many on Earth think that it is.

In the manuscript that I wrote after my husband died and then got too busy in the aftermath to ever seriously pursue publishing, I shared about how my first introduction to death came when my father’s mother, my Nana whom we shared a home with, died when I was 7 and she was in her late 80s. Nana had left Ireland alone at age 16 to sail to America and make a new and better life for herself. She was strong and independent and she definitely succeeded. I loved her most for the incredible mirth that always seemed to be dancing just below the surface of her being and gifted her with a very ready and easy ability to laugh, and for the twinkle that always seemed to be sparkling in her blue eyes.

My parents honored Nana’s wishes and she had a traditional Irish wake in the custom of her homeland. Her coffin was set up in our living room rather than in some cold and formal funeral parlor. Folding chairs extended the seating for all the people who came to ‘pay their respects’ and give her a grand send off. Food and drink were offered in abundance as people talked and laughed and told wonderful stories about her long life and all that she had experienced during it. I didn’t really understand what death was about at that young age but I felt relaxed and at ease with the way it was handled with my Nana’s passing. I am truly grateful that was my first experience with death as it assisted in shaping my future understanding that it is simply a normal part of life, even when it is a painful part of it. I think the Irish are on to something in knowing that a death is truly meant to be honored with a special kind of celebration.

As I was writing that about my dear Nana’s sendoff celebration to whatever came next on her soul’s journey, I realized that those of us who loved my son Tim gave him a modernized version of that good old Irish wake for his own ‘Celebration of Life’ sendoff 4 years ago. There was no coffin since we chose cremation for his beautiful young body but it seemed appropriate that the green Celtic urn that housed his ashes sat in a place of honor in the living room with his beloved Dallas Cowboys cap on top of it. Those that loved him did such an incredible job of making his own ‘Irish wake’ a loving tribute and sendoff for him, especially since I was so numb and in shock at the time myself that I couldn’t think, let alone pull together what was required for this to take place, which so many others so lovingly working together did. How grateful I was and continue to be for that! As a single mom of my 3 kids with no biological family living anywhere near us, I look back to Tim’s ‘Irish wake’ with awe and gratitude as I realize what a big and loving extended family he and we truly have here in New Mexico. I am sure that Tim was very present at that sendoff party we gave him and he loved every minute of it!

I am sure because he’s told me that, as well as many other things, in the conversations we’ve had since he departed this Earth and his physical body. Those conversations continue to be ongoing on a regular basis, as do the conversations with every one of my other departed loved ones as well as the nonphysical beings who are close to me and part of my own ‘soul family group’ who like to come and chat with me as well. These communications are, quite frequently, much more real to me than whatever else may be going on in my physical human 3D reality. 3D in short is now but a very small part of my own multidimensional experience of living. And I have to admit, I’m having a blast hanging out so often with so many incredible beings who simply are no longer inhabiting the Earth at present in physical form.

I am aware that, to many who don’t experience multidimensional reality to the same extent that I do, this might sound like a “Ground control to Major Tom” moment or as if I’ve truly lost my marbles. I have. lol The wonderful thing though is that those marbles are all present and accounted for, just in different dimensions than the one my physical body is currently occupying. I’ve learned that I don’t have to let having a physical body limit my expanded experiences of reality, just as I know my departed loved ones have learned that NOT having a physical body doesn’t limit their expanded experiences either, especially of interacting with me here on Earth.

This is the message that I’m being nudged to share with you today. Death is the greatest illusion there is. And once we can see through the illusion, we can continue living, loving and laughing with those who have left their bodies behind as much and as often as we desire. I kid you not. I do it all the time.

Our departed loved ones want to reach out and touch us too. They often simply have a hard time getting through the veils that our doubt and disbelief and holding on to the pain of grief put in place between the dimensions. The more we can release them, the easier it is for us to have magical experiences of love with those we love, regardless of what plane of existence their soul may be presently occupying.

I had such an experience last December on the eve of the Solstice. I had picked up my mail as I was coming home at sunset and was so touched to see that I had a package from Ziggy’s daughter in Canada. I knew it contained a very special Solstice gift she has been sharing with me for years that connects us in heart all year long (a beautiful We’moon day calendar that we know we are turning the pages of together even though doing so in different countries). I was feeling a multitude of emotions as I held that gift in my hands and decided to sit with them in my car in the otherwise empty parking lot outside of my apartment before going inside and breaking the spell I was feeling myself under. It was a very mild day and I wasn’t cold at all sitting in the car with the engine turned off. I opened the package and found tears slipping down my cheeks as I read the loving message it came with. My heart was overflowing and I felt Ziggy so close as I savored the love that I have for the daughter that he himself had loved so much while here on Earth and I know he continues to love from wherever his soul is now residing as he gets on with his eternal adventures. I wanted to do something in that magic moment to honor the love that I felt myself so palpably immersed in as I sat there in my car. I had picked up some groceries on my way home and I realized that the bottle of wine in the bag on the floor of the passenger side had a screw top rather than a cork. I also found my eyes resting on the baseball cap of Ziggy’s that was still pushed into the pocket of the driver’s side door where he used to keep it so he had it readily available when he was driving while we were out and about on one of our many shared excursions. Even though it had been over 2 years since he departed his physical form, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to remove the cap from the car. I liked it there and its presence comforted me as I can feel his essence and energy and therefore his company still in the hat.

On impulse, I spontaneously put on the cap and unscrewed the wine bottle, pouring a small bit of the red nectar into an empty water bottle. With a smile on my face and love overflowing from my heart, I toasted both father and daughter and thanked them for the joy they each have added to my life in all that we’ve shared with each other. Then I sat for a while with my left arm resting on the driver’s side door just below the window. As I did I began to notice that what looked like fog was forming on the window in a manner that didn’t match the mildness of the weather and that I couldn’t explain. As I watched mesmerized it seemed as if this mist was forming itself into what looked to me like pulsing feathers, as if it was actually breathing, in and out, in and out. Feathers have always been a sign to me of my connection beyond the Earth realms and I am always overjoyed when I find one in perfect timing as an affirmation of that connection. Now it seemed I had a living breathing affirmation happening on my car window right in front of my eyes. As I continued to watch the “feathers” reminded me of the “tongues of fire” that had been gifted to the apostIes by the Holy Spirit in the biblical Pentecost. It came to me that I was experiencing the “breath of spirit” in what I was seeing. I knew it was Ziggy reaching out to touch me in love and letting me know he was right there for my toast and toasting me back as well, just like old times. I sat watching this phenomenon for I have no idea how long. Time seemed suspended and standing still. And then my rational mind kicked in and I began to doubt. I thought that it must be that the warmth of my arm against the cooler glass was causing this. So I took my arm off the door and the phenomenon stopped. Then I put it back on to see what would happen. Nothing. Nothing happened. I waited and waited for the pulsing feathers of fog-like mist to reappear and they didn’t. I tried several more times. Nothing at all. I had blown the beautiful connection by letting my mind’s doubt overshadow the magic.

Ziggy later affirmed for me in one of his interdimensional visits that this experience definitely had been him reaching out to me in love. What an incredibly beautiful gift that was! More frequently the gifts that come to me from those no longer here on Earth are things like hearing a song that connects us or finding a penny (“pennies from heaven”) at exactly the perfect moment. They always bring a smile, sometimes a tear too, and I am always so thankful that those I love who’ve left their physical bodies behind continue to make their presence known to me.

Tim especially has a wonderful sense of timing as far as letting me know he’s near and I often find myself laughing out loud at his connections with me as it’s apparent that he still has the same wonderful sense of humor that he did when he was here in body. I love when he visits and I can feel his energy so strongly and clearly that I can then translate it into words and we can have ongoing conversations.

Tim’s most recent communication included him telling me how much he is “enjoying the eternalness of life” and the continual new and exciting experiences that being eternal offers. He wanted to remind everyone that being an eternal soul means that death is not something to fear. It only separates us from those we love if we are unable to allow ourselves to continue to feel the soul connection between us that goes way beyond the physical and never ends. Ever.

He asked, “When you are in the place to do so, share more with my friends and everyone interested about how truly ‘the veil’ IS an illusion and we can all continue to have ongoing relationships with each other regardless of ‘where’ we are, whether incarnated in a body living on Earth or choosing to experience the eternalness of soul living on any of the many, many other dimensional planes we have the option to enjoy. This is one of the greatest freedoms of being an eternal soul. Life doesn’t end and neither do our loving soul connections. We remain connected in love eternally and I want to encourage everyone to be aware of this and to consciously choose to open more and more to this awareness in tangible ways while still living your human reality. Yes, so many hurt when the physical disconnection of death happens and someone they love is gone from their human reality. And yet, death as an ending to that love experience shared is the greatest illusion of all for we all continue on and on and on and the love connection never ends. “

Tim then went on to talk about how “Oneness” actually means that there is no distance between any of us on the soul level. He said that “soul to soul communion and telepathy transcend any seeming distance between dimensional realities and make it disappear completely. When you commune on the level of soul there is never any separation so communication is instant and so is the soul response in love to it. “

How beautiful is that?!

We are each multi-dimensional beings, whether we are aware of that while living our human reality on Earth or not. The beautiful picture I have posted above is by the incredible visionary artist Gilbert Williams, whose art seems to me to be living magic and so imbued with the energy of the spirit realms. This is saved from one of his past calendars, which I then framed and have hanging on the wall opposite my bed. It serves as a focal point for me of the bridge between dimensions and I frequently imagine myself meeting those passed on loved ones of mine on that bridge.

The other night as I gazed upon it once again I was surprised when Tim’s energy and voice interrupted my reverie and he told me that we don’t just meet ON the bridge, we go back and forth over it all the time. He shared with me that I go all the way across the bridge to the other side of it often and visit the other realms and those I love there just as frequently as they come to visit me. I just am not consciously aware that I’m doing this when I return to my waking state. Making this trip is easy and natural, though it requires an altered state of consciousness from our usual mental human focus. We all have access to all the different dimensional planes and realities and the key that opens the door between them lies in our consciousness. This is what being a multi-dimensional being means.

Well how fun is that?! Talk about limitless opportunities for adventure and new experiences. How much more there is to what constitutes our “reality” than we have any idea of!

Tim asked me to pass on one more thing, this especially for those who have known and love him. He said it’s not an accident that this year’s eclipses fall on the 2 significant dates associated with his departure from the Earth plane as there is always an order to what is divinely orchestrated on the soul level and sacred geometry truly is at the core of all creation. He wants everyone who misses him here on Earth to think of the solar eclipse on the 21st as a grand celestial birthday celebration for him. He insists that, “It IS a birthday for me, the 21st of August. It was a birth for me into the remembrance of my eternal life and eternal beingness, so it will be a grand birthday party! Please join me for the celebration as the Great Central Sun gifts the Earth with so much incredible energy as this amazing event takes place!”

That boy sure did love a party and would use any excuse to get one going! lol This certainly feels like a perfect opportunity for an interdimensional party the likes of which has never been seen before. Tim promises to host and says the music will be out of this world so please come join him/us for this once in a lifetime rare eclipse/birthday party celebration! I’m sure it will be memorable. Just connect in spirit from wherever you are on the 21st and let’s see what kind of magic and surprises await us!

Till then, love and blessings to All!