C is five months old when I wrote this. D just a whisper in the wind. During this time, I often spoke as if someone else as a way to access some deeper wisdom. Lots of dreamwork. I read books back then penned by various channeled entities and consulted one. That might help explain the perspective below.

* * * JULY 1994

I write, I sigh, thinking of all the ways of dullness — the taught ways, ingrained ways, exotic ways, imbibed, snacked, channeled, snuffled — so many routes to dullness. But the precious ore does not diminish even in the face of our riotous attempts to bury it or to live as if we were superficial creatures with nothing to rely on but our paltry opinion of ourselves.

In spite of yourself, your crystal has surfaced, has refracted light and lit our faces with the most spectacular array of complex colors.

Who can forget the Mexican woman in white, her magnificent dance, the clarinet players in the trees? And what about that ledge? Or how that gauzy rainbow we wore fluttered when we jumped. . .

Can you hear us sighing with pleasure as you axe into the ground of your being — a pick to separate out the gold, agate, and crystals, a canvas tarp to hold the rich dirt? Nothing is dispensable and nothing can be saved.

And it goes on some with this metaphor of mining, the presence of shame, the funny business of acceptance while also wanting to change.

… none of us can possibly perspire or shake for you. And yet, as we enter the mine, we touch the sweaty earth, we feel ourselves in the darkness and we are there.

So rest, please, in the sturdiness of having no one but yourself to care for. But rest also in the paradox that in caring for yourself, you bring us all a bit closer to that which we came here for.