The Sandwich looks much better on TV
It is raining today. There are puddles and lakes all over the place as snow melts and pools on corners and on sidewalks. There is also freezing rain/ice on the sidewalks today as well, which made getting around a little “slip and slidy!”
Hubby hasn’t been feeling well, I can tell we will be bouncing another cold between up over the next week if I am not careful. I thought we’d go shopping and out to lunch today. It is something we do together to get out of the house, even if the weather is shitty!
We have been seeing these commercials on TV for Quiznos subs here and they always look meaty and tasty. We splurged and decided we would try them for lunch at the food court, we were both sadly disappointed with the presentation and the food itself. What a waste of $20.00 for lunch. We should have stuck with the good old standards.
I needed to get a couple of books from Indigo today, and I lucked out with both. I got Rory Stewart’s “The Places in Between” it looks like a great read. The New York Times calls the book a “Flat out Masterpiece!!” I also needed a copy of Soren Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling” for my term paper for Modern Christianity. They had both, which was surprising since the website did not show either in stock anywhere in Montreal. Which just goes to show you, you can’t trust websites 100%.
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After Indigo we headed up to HMV on Ste Catherine’s, to look for some music. I was pleasantly rewarded with Mary J. Blige on sale “The Breakthrough.” What an INCREDIBLY wonderful Cd. Mary J, is Da Bomb!!! The Cd is just amazing. If you don’t have a copy, then get yourself one and listen to the diva sing.
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Well, that’s all I have for today. I am gonna go do some reading and chill out in my cozy comforter. see ya later…
The Other Side…
Many years ago, during the ‘sickest’ era of my AIDS experience, things were really bad for me. I was hospitalized many times from 1995-1998. Tonight on Coast to Coast, they are talking about (O.B.E.’s and N.D.E.’s) This was last nights show, since we are 24 hour tape delay here in Canada.
Below is one of my tether experiences.
The N.D.E. I talk about is the one that happened when I was last in the hospital, I was having severe migraines that were so bad, that I would crawl around on the floor banging my head against the walls of my apartment trying to alleviate the pain. In such cases, I would have to call for help and usually end up in the E.R. for a shot of Toradol I.M. to stop the session from progressing to fruition.
I remember being in the isolation ward, that’s where they always put me – for fear that I would catch something from someone in the E.R. they were very careful with me, because I was a repeat patient. I was laying on the gurney and the doc had been in for triage and he left me to go get the meds I needed.
I was in so much pain, that at one point I separated from my body and rose out of the room, I could see myself and it was up through the tunnel and into a place that was peaceful. I landed on my feet in a garden of immense beauty. I could smell the flowers, I could see hills and green grass as far as the eye could see. I must be sitting in the garden because I was met by a feeling of immense ‘Godliness.’ The garden was beautiful, I can still see it in my minds eye. The closest we come to this is a visual from “What Dreams May Come.”
You know at that point, we have our list of questions to ask the almighty, that’s where I figured I was. I wasn’t at the gate yet, but I thought I should get the questions out before that experienced either ended or I died on the table.
I asked my questions, that was then. And afterwards, they sent me back to my body, telling me that “it wasn’t time yet.” I returned to my body, and in the time that I left my body and returned, they had come back with the shot for me and it was given to me, and I had about an hour to myself to recharge my steam and they would release me to go home.
I returned to the world – minus the answers to my questions. Needless to say I was mift! I went back to my life, and proceeded to live. I guess that experience did not change me in ways that most are changed when they go across and return to talk about it. I made several really bad choices, that I came up a real looser. It took another ‘near death experience’ to get my attention – and that one had nothing to do with heaven, but closer to hell.
It was years later that I was at a workshop with a friend, and I met this man who walked up to me and told me he knew where I had been, and he saw that I was ‘frustrated’ it was like he looked into my soul and saw everything that had happened to me since. And he told me these wise words: “You went across and you asked your questions, and you came back unfulfilled, didn’t you? I told him yes. He then told me that I should take those questions and ask them to the living, and not wait until I was dead to seek the answers. Because once you are dead, there is no need for questions is there?
Since then I have always had those “soul” questions in the front of my brain. And I communicate those questions as they come up to the universe and I wait. I guess there is a reason I am re-printing these stories for you, because life is a journey. The more questions we have, the greater need we have to answer them now, rather than later.
I saw that man once, I never saw him again after that.
I once met a man who knew things about me and spoke to me and told me something wise in a public place once before, when I was much younger. I was working in a grocery store, my first job, to be more exact. I was in junior high school then. I was bagging groceries in a store by my home. The cashier I was bagging for was being stubborn to a woman who did not speak very good English. This elderly man with a black beret and a red and black checked jacket and black pants walked up to me and said “You speak a second language, you should use it because it is a gift for you. Don’t waste the gifts given to you.” Ok, I said, and I translated for the woman standing there.
That elderly man walked into the store and never walked out, he had to pass me to get out of the store because there were no other exits. At the end of the shift I went looking for him, and never found him. He disappeared and I never ever saw him again…
Ok, so now, he’s gone off the deep end…
No not really. These are my experiences. Maybe someone else has had them too…
Snapping the Tether … O.B.E.
I wrote this on June 12, 2005 while at my inlaws on an old blog.
In reading Dr. Brian Weiss’ Many lives – Many Masters, I can honestly say, “been there, done that.” For the last few years I have had these nap sessions, my dream states come during intense power naps or at the END of my sleep periods, usually the last 3 hours of my nightly sleep cycle. Anyways, I finished reading the book this afternoon. After everyone left and we broke down the patio and put everything away, Peter and I laid down for a nap, we were exhausted running around all day with 2 kids.
This nap session was 4 hours long, when we both woke up. But I have to say that this session was the most “terrifying” astral trip I have ever been on. As my title says, snapping the tether was necessary to get “across” the divide. This has been happening at home for the last, oh, I would say 6 months, like clockwork every time I went down for a nap. It scared me because i did not know what it meant when the “snap” would occur in my brain, and I would float free out of the bedroom, and my consciousness. Today I understood what the “snap” was and why it was necessary.
On the way out – I noticed the “SNAP” it shook me as I laid in my bed, it always comes as a “JOLT!” as I move from this “plane to my Astral plane, which allows me to move from one place to another, as I wish or as my consciousness selects.
I found myself standing on a platform in the cosmos, kind of like a clear platform “rushing” through space, along with other “astral” travelers. I could see the stars and the planets, yet I was safely “standing” in my little astral travel capsule. I could see that EVERY decision, a “yes or no” and a move forward, move backwards, transfer from one “plane to another” as discussed in the book, was possible. I have traveled “backwards” but only rarely, and those spaces were always in “black and white.” My grandmother’s houses are always shown to me in that mode. They are the only two houses that I go back to and I can “walk” through the house, but I am not allowed to open ANY of the doors. I cannot pass through any portals, and I am told in these spaces that I can only observe and take what I need, that no information will come from “people” in this place; I am always alone in these spaces. I cannot communicate with anyone from these dreams.
So I traveled to this particularly “horrible” place. It scared me so badly that I was hyperventilating in my sleep and it woke me violently when I reached the “end” of this period. The place was very sadistic in nature. The person I “was” then is not the person I am today. What I did to people in this place was truly horrible and sadistic. There were moments of torture and fear, well, allot of torture and fear. Like getting strapped in for a “terrifying train ride from Hell.” There were trains in the dream, traveling at speeds unknown to man, which made it particularly “STRANGE!” because I could not “place” his time anywhere on the logical past life, present life, future life time line. But it was familiar to me. Maybe this has to do with the area of my life that I don’t talk about at all. Because in reflection, I knew “things” as a child that no child should know about. This relates back to my abuse as a child and what my father had done to me early on in my life, possibly!
Anyways, I don’t want to go back to this place ever again, because it was absolutely the most terrifying area I have visited.
Turquoise Mountain Foundation
The Turquoise Mountain Foundation
Developers are threatening to demolish the medieval cities of Afghanistan; the last masters of traditional Afghan arts are dying; high unemployment is breeding extremism; Afghans need jobs, skills, economic opportunities and a renewed pride in their national culture. The Turquoise Mountain Project will conserve a section of a medieval city, work with householders to improve living conditions, restore ancient buildings and create an academy to preserve and develop traditional skills. The project will provide vocational training, improve the living conditions of poor citizens, conserve heritage, foster the export market for Afghan goods and lay the foundations for tourism. The Turquoise Mountain (Firuzkuh in Dari) was the greatest indigenous Afghan capital of the middle ages, destroyed by Ogodei, son of Genghis Khan in ca. 1220-22 and lost to history. Its only surviving monument is the magnificent Minaret of Jam. The name of the project evokes Afghanistan’s unique tradition of art and architecture.
The Turquoise Mountain Foundation is a non-profit, non-governmental, Afghan Social Foundation, driven by Afghans. It is not intended to be a sterile heritage project. The project aims to include neighbourhood renewal benefiting the poorest citizens. It hopes to provide assistance and small grants to traditional home owners to encourage them to value and preserve their existing buildings. Mud architecture is energy efficient, much easier to heat and cool and maintain and unlike its modern replacements does not depend on Kabul’s almost non-existent electricity supply.
The project will not impose alien theories or disrupt existing structures: instead it will begin with a construction project and the craftsmen and techniques will be organically developed from the construction work. It will build on the existing workshops and traditions, support existing masters, and hopes to train apprentices from the traditional craft communities as well as introducing talented street-children and the disabled to the traditional arts. The Foundation aims to run short courses for Afghan undergraduates, architects, designers and engineers to encourage the use of traditional arts and designs. The school’s trainees will not only work with historical restoration projects and museum conservation; they will also be encouraged to develop links with construction companies and commercial trading and export houses. Thus heritage will be combined with vocational training, training with academic instruction and both with private sector development and tourism.
Afghanistan is fortunate to have traditional Islamic cities which are almost unique in the world. The royal capitals of Kabul, Herat, Ghazni and Balkh have all been inhabited for thousands of years: the citadel of Herat, capital of the Persian province of Ariana, was ancient at the time of the visit of Alexander the Great. In each city, layers of Persian, Hellenic, Central Asian and Islamic architecture lie next to traditional houses, baths and shrines, and compared to cities in other parts of Asia these have suffered little from modern development. But the oldest areas are now often the poorest with impassable streets filled with sewage and waste, and the houses lack basic services. The fall of the Taliban in 2001 has propelled a property boom. In Kabul and Herat developers are demolishing sections of the traditional city to construct concrete shopping malls and Western villas.
Afghanistan has unique traditions in tile-work, incised and lattice wood-work, plasterwork, masonry, pottery, metalwork, music, glasswork, calligraphy, carpet-weaving and embroidery. Traditional workshops from the tile-workers in the Friday Mosque in Herat to the potters in Istalif near Kabul, continue to work within traditions which are centuries old but the masters are aging, few apprentices are coming forward and their skills will soon be lost. Already, standards are dropping. Recent international attempts at conserving the medieval masterpieces in Herat are struggling to find artisans with appropriate skills.
Get your copy of The Places In Between by Rory Stewart: HERE
