TIME

I remember an old T.V. show about a girl who was half alien and she had the power to stop time by touching her two index fingers together. A ding sound would chime and everything would be frozen. Then, whoever she touched would come out of the trance but time would still be frozen. What a cool power!!! I wish I had that power. It seems I'm always watching the clock. First I have to be here, then there. It's like a race. I even put aside some down time but it often gets overrun by time you didn't plan for esp. when cars break down and kids get sick and the down time turns into take the car to the shop time and the kid to the doctor time etc. etc. Then one day, the race just ends.


I guess it was the same before we ever had clocks. The sun told the time. Before there was ever electricity, we raced against light. But when that sun went down, we had to stop what we were doing. That is, until we invented fire. Forget about electricity, fire was the big light bringer. I bet ancient man felt so full of himself back then. "I made fire. I beat time. Mwahahhaahahah!" Such fools we are.


Someone told me that time is an illusion but if it is, then everything is an illusion. As long as I live in this reality, time is as real as the night and day. I used to think I had power over it, the way the first inventor of fire did. In my youth, I stayed up all night, worked all odd hours, attended school, partied and kept going and going, wearing our my adrenal glands with the idea that sleep is only for the dead. But nature has a way of slapping you in the face when you don’t listen. I started hallucinating; dreaming while awake and I realized that I wasn’t an exception to the rest of the human race. Then, when I graduated, I slept. I slept for a good week. I went to work and realized that I remembered things better and was sharper than ever. To this day, I have no idea how I functioned on no sleep or what it looked like to others.
We have invented machines that get us places faster and ways of growing food more efficiently. We have formed farms and cities to control nature. As an unintended consequence, we also invented smog, global warming and oil spills. We thought we knew something. We thought we beat nature but nature has a way of slapping us in the face.


Why are humans so hell bent in controlling nature? Is it because we were made after the image of God and we have the urge to create in our DNA? Yet, somehow, every choice we take to conquer time and the elements backfires. So I’ve accepted my fate and have stopped wasting my energy trying to conquer realities such as time. I think that when we are born, we are only given a certain amount of time. It’s in our DNA. We live, fighting it, afraid of the change that will come when it’s all over. It only reminds me how precious time is and I could spend all my time trying to fight it or I can spend my time enjoying every second of this finite life.

When I saw my reflection in the snow covered hills....

Truth is I'm changing.  I've changed so much I hardly recognize myself.  I'm changing for the better really, my whole mindset is maturing.  I don't accept excuses or silly melodrama.  I know that if I want something, I should just do it.  But I sometimes don't know what to do if I can't do what I used to do 'cause it's not me anymore.  I know, it makes no sense but I'm writing this more for me now.  Everyone we ever were, we love.  And when we change, we mourn a bit of ourselves.  We can be changing for the better.  We could be on the verge of enlightenment but some part of us hangs on to our old selves.  After all, it was a lot easier to be a lesser person than we are today and I do miss the crutches I used to fall on.  

I miss the way I used to write, not like how I write now isn't bad.  When I was a little kid, I didn't even think about writing.  I wrote the most incredible stories and used my imagination to see how far I could take them and I loved doing it.  Then I changed somewhere along the way.  Some English teachers started making me think I had to put meaning in everything.  I spent so long trying to find that old kid in me again.  But she's gone.  It's the things I really want that I'm afraid of doing 'cause I know what the cost is, my heart and soul and dreams and wishes.  

I'm just writing to relax.  No clarity tonight, no poetry, no sweet imagery.  Maybe I'll read this tomorrow and learn something about myself.

Notes on the Introduction to Tantra Workshop

I haven’t written a blog here in a while because it is hard to know what to write.  Part of me wants to write anything but then I realize that anyone could be reading my secret thoughts and I hesitate.  I’ve been suffering from some writer’s block lately.  Or am I just too busy juggling the various aspects of my life to sit still and write?  I have to be so many people all at once.

My latest novella is a work of erotica that is pretty exhausting to read.  The sex scenes are very bold and they consist of descriptive climaxes that are comparatively more intense than the average orgasm.  I have to say that in marketing this novella, I have separated myself a bit from my own sexual nature.  It’s as if I’m afraid that thinking too much about sex will interfere with my other roles.  I suppose this is why the subject of sex has not been addressed in this blog as much as I initially thought it would be.

The other day, I attended an introduction to tantra lecture and I was forced to re-connect to my own sexual energies, the energies I have written happily about in the past.  The teacher, Shama Helena, had a very intuitive sense about why people hit blockages in their relationships and in themselves.  She said that as children, we are energetic and lively.  We are like walking orgasms.  Then we are told to sit still and be quiet.  We are taught that pleasure is naughty and we have to hide our excitement.  In the workshop, Shama encouraged us to go into our bodies and breathe and be aware of the various parts that we have cut off because we are told that to acknowledge them would be “naughty”.  This was my first public tantra session but Shama made me fill at ease by having us all close our eyes.  She ensured us that no one was looking and she had us breathe deeply into our lungs and imagine the energy inside us reaching those “special places”.  Once again, I felt that very important and significant part of me waking up. 

As I got to know her, Shama told me that she has approached the seminary and asked them if she could train the priests in tantra so they could deal with their celibacy better.  She was turned down.  She is looking into teaching it to teenage boys so they would feel less powerless over their erections. I find Shama to be a very freeing and interesting person.  She made me ask myself if we are trapping each other with our need to cut off or control our sexual natures.  Shama said that our sexuality is beautiful and spiritual and blissful, yet there are people out there who think that it is gross and evil.  Is it really healthy to cut off a very strong part of ourselves, a part of ourselves that is such a huge source of energy and love?

Shama said that when we cut ourselves off from our sexual feelings we do not enjoy the sensual pleasures that make the exploration of love so blissful.  Men just want to stick it in and women are left unsatisfied or they are so cut off from their sexuality that they are afraid of experiencing the penetration of love.  Yet, if we take the time to explore every different sensation, we experience more connection, more bliss, and greater climaxes.  We feel things we that we would have never felt had we not taken the time to explore and get to know ourselves.  We learn things about our bodies that it had been trying to tell us and we take better care of ourselves.  

One of the students at the workshop said that everything he learned will make him more spiritual.  He said that he was Buddhist and he practiced meditation and he realized how much his sexuality was a part of that.  What if we were all allowed to show love and affection without the fear of sex?  I am reminded of how different we perceive things when we tear down the labels that society has given them.  All life is a grand and awesome experience.

My Past Life as a Fortune Teller

My past life as a fortune teller

When I say "past life" I mean, it was many phases ago.  I've been many things, lived many lives in this one lifetime.

When I was very young and living in another country, my older brother bought a deck of tarot cards.  He was fascinated with the mystery of them.  He tried to scare and intimidate me by saying he was messing with something evil.  I wonder to this day if he really believed that or if he was just trying to scare me as older siblings often do.  It was just a deck of cards.  He made it seemed like it was scary to look into other people's fortunes.  I guess there is a fear factor involved, depending on who you are.  I was never one to scare easily.  That is the only thing about me that is creepy.  Perhaps this is the reason why I saw things so clearly.  I could see through people.  I was not moved by fear.

I was given my first deck of tarot cards in high school.  One of my best friends became fascinated by them.  We studied books on the tarot, on the symbols and what they meant.  My friend was going through a very tough time.  He was coming to terms with the fact that he was gay, something he had denied all his life.  He never wanted to tell me, but I figured it out and kept the secret.  To his surprise, I didn't freak out.  I simply saw it as news, nothing more.  I was never one to judge people but this was high school and kids could be cruel.  He picked the card "The Devil" to represent him.  Looking back, it was the perfect card.  At the time, his whole world was unfolding and it must have seemed like such a temptation and he must have felt like the greatest outsider.  But cards change as we do.  They are only phases and represent our own attitudes at the time.

He liked to study astral projection and gave me a book on it.  I suppose he wanted to escape the world.  I never understood the need for people to escape their body and try to understand some other astral world before being able to understand what is right in front of them.  Even when I accidentally succeeded in it, I still didn’t see the point.

Not long after graduating high school, I visited The Psychic Eye Book Store and was drawn to a beautiful tarot deck.  It was called The Tarot of the Old Path and the symbols spoke to me.

I spent a summer working at residential camp.  I taught programs there.  After 10PM, I had some time to myself.  The counselors got an hour off from manning the cabins.  We'd go to a little dorm area with a lounge and chill out.  I'd take out my deck of cards and study them, their symbols, what they meant and what I felt from them.  I started reading for people but I told them I was just a novice, just learning.  Every once and while I'd have to refer back to my book.

The funny thing is, I'd ask the subject if they had a question for me, and they always would.  But they never want to disclose what it was.  One boy was very excited about an upcoming venture but he wouldn't tell me what it was.  I told him that if he did what he was going to do, he would get what he wanted, but it wouldn't be worth it. 

The next morning, I didn't see him at the camp circle.  He had been replaced by the gofer boy.  I later learned that he snuck off to see another counselor who he had a crush on.  The only thing is, she was camped out with the other kids at the time.  He was fired for this transgression and so was she. I learned my first lesson, that people won't ever heed the warning of a fortune teller.

When I was younger, I started writing in a journal.  I'd write my dreams only to learn, later on, that many of those dreams came true.  Dreams are easily forgotten.  So imagine my shock when I went back to read those papers only to find that some dreams, that seemed so surreal at the time, were just images of a future I would never have imagined for myself.

I saw things such as the destruction and falling out of my martial arts school due to conflicting belief systems and the falling out of my parents’ marriage, and the great 95 quake that shook and tested the mental capacity of many Sothern Californians before they happened. I was so young then and these came to me as impressions and dreams and all were frightening at the time.  One lady gave me solace.  She was a yoga instructor and fortune teller herself.  She told me I had to learn to help those who I felt such bad energy from.  She said I had a gift and that I'm a healer, and that I couldn't run away from that.  But I didn't know how I could possibly help anyone.  When you are young, all change is scary because you don't know yet, that things happen for a reason.   So I left

I moved to NY to seek my fortune.  I lived with some roommates in the ghetto.  I would read for them just for fun.  I remembered some neighbors coming over to hang out.  One guy was curious, the other had to leave.  He just walked out.  He thought what I was doing was evil and I sensed such a great and irrational fear from him.  I still find that funny.  I recall my brother's first impressions of the cards.  This man had similar impressions, but he was scared out of his mind.  He believed that something bad would happen if he had anything to do with them.

  

Funny how what is evil and scary and dangerous to one person can be a friend and nurturing companion to another. Also, I learned that fortune tellers themselves have impressions.  A fortune teller told a friend of mine that she would meet a man full of chaos and to stay away from him.  Years later, she married that man and told me he was the best thing that ever happened to her.  She thought she couldn’t have kids and this man gave her three.  Their marriage lasted over ten years before they got divorced.  So, I guess the question is, was he or wasn’t he good for her? Fortune tellers can’t answer these questions.  No one can.

I recall the first time I read for one of my roommates.  She wouldn't tell me her question but I did the reading anyway and tried somehow to answer.  The symbols and the way they set themselves in the spread were dark.  I saw bondage, knives, lots of knives.  I looked at her in awe and asked her what her question was.  She said, "why?"  I said, "Because there is a lot of conflict, fighting, knives, bondage, feelings of being trapped.  "That's weird," she said, "I just wanted to know who killed my uncle."

"How did he die?"

"He was stabbed 29 times"

I don't remember if I solved her mystery for her.  I just remember that was as dark as it got.  That was not the reason why I stopped reading the cards.

I guess there were many reasons.  I got bad at it is one.  I lost my touch.  I fell in love, moved on, became very focused on my own life.  How can we be there for others if we are not together ourselves?  I became practical.  I'm still practical.  'Cause really, what does it matter if I know the future.  I saw 9/11 as clear as day.  It didn't make any difference.  We have the power to change things yes, but I don't think I am making the most progress by knowing the future.  We can misinterpret the future anyway.  Things that seem like bad omens can turn out to be blessings in disguise.  No one ever heeded my warnings when I read their fortunes.  They went ahead and had their little disasters and learned their lessons on their own.  It never made a difference what I said.  I stopped reading horoscopes.  I stopped looking into people's hearts, none of my business anyway.  I'm done being a sadistic voyeur.  This life is a mystery and whether I know the future or not, I am a fool to think I am anywhere near grasping it.  I think it's a waste of time.  So read fortunes and have your fortunes read.  Do it for fun.  But don't take it seriously because you will never truly understand the future until it happens.  The present is what is important.

I still have that old tarot deck, wrapped up in silk.  I wonder if they print it any more.  I pulled it out a few times but really didn't get much out of it.  It's just a piece of nostalgia now.  I have completely blocked out my ability to make any more of the cards than good art.

I might still have it though.  One day I decided to take a restorative yoga class.  The lounge for the center was situated outdoors and it was a windy and cold night.  I thought I'd sit inside, by the desk.  I had never been to the place before.  I knocked and the instructor's dogs came to my door barking up a storm.  The instructor appeared, annoyed that I interrupted her class and told me to wait outside.  This is what I get for being early.  She rubbed me the wrong way so I, being in a yogic mood decided to try to find something I liked about her.  I held the poses in class just enjoying the quiet.  I saw a vision of the front of the room.  Someone was sitting there.  Perhaps it was her but my days of interpreting my visions are long gone.  I saw a figure of a tall man with a beard and a great cross coming out of his back bending over to hug her as she sat there.  I made nothing of it, just another vision as many I have had.  But something told me to tell the lady about it afterwards.  Maybe she could get something out of it that I couldn't.

When I did, she was aghast, almost in tears and I wondered if I had described someone who passed away.  No, that wasn't it.  And I was wrong to ever make any assumption in my mind.  She was to be baptized the next day and she believed the figure to be Jesus. She said that she felt that she was being hugged, as in my vision, that whole month.  She thanked me so much for the vision.  I guess I still got it if I want it.  But really, I don't.  Or do I?

Why I Write

Last week I spoke to a book promoter.  We all know that it is easier to promote non-fiction than it is to promote fiction.  She asked me why I write fiction when I could obviously write about a subject that I am an expert in and use my book to promote my business.  I told her that I’ve been writing fiction since I was a little girl. I still have several unpublished works that I would like to get out there.  I started writing before I ever started doing what I do for a living.  She gave me the sound advice to write a book about my job (which shall remain anonymous).  I already have a following and writing a non-fiction book about my practice will enhance business sales and help me save up money to promote my next fictional work.  

This was very sound advice and she was right.  Hec, my husband has told me the same thing.  Unfortunately, I have two personalities.  There is the very knowledgeable lady who makes money being an expert in her profession (which shall remain anonymous).  This lady is very sane, very practical and very focused.  But then there is my other personality, Lacey Reah.  Lacey Reah is wild, outrageous and passionate about life.  Lacey Reah cries at movies and her eyes shine when she sees something inspiring.  She reads books and gets lost in them.  She loves a good story.  Lacey Reah is who I am when I’m not making money and she has always wanted to write fiction.

After speaking to this book promoter, my two personalities started to collide and I started looking into the idea of focusing more on my business.  Then, I read something beautiful and I watched a movie that took me away.  What is wrong with fiction? What is wrong with escaping into the life of another person and seeing the world in a different perspective?  What is wrong with writing a story, with reading a story that challenges the imagination and inspires others in a non-conventional way?  When I indulge in my hobby of reading, or watching a play or a movie, I remember the reason why I write.

I don’t write for money or to get more clients. I write because I have to.  I write because deep down inside me is a boiling pool of passion and if I don’t write about what I feel like writing about, I will explode.  I write to preserve the beautiful moments in my life in symbols or in stories I make up.  I write because it feels good.  I write to experiment with ideas and philosophies that are important in life. They may not have a place in the office or in my profession but they make my life richer.  I write so people may read my works and laugh or cry and think.  

In my struggles to tell the world about my novella, Fireflies, a novella that is erotic with a great plot and characters, I asked myself if the novella is not successful, would I do it again?  Would I give up writing?  I’m almost done writing a story that explores faith, prejudice, religion and society.  It was a struggle to write but if it isn’t successful and I went back in time, would I write it again?  Absolutely.  I had to write it.  It helped me to deal with issues I could never understand if I didn’t make up a story about it and put myself in the shoes of characters who are not me. 

Why do I write?  I write because I have a voice and if no one is there to hear it, I’ll still write.  I’m a writing fool I guess:

I end with a quote from Faulkner's speech at receiving the Nobel Prize:

"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."



I'm curious, why do you write?

What Would You Do?

I wrote this blog many years ago under another alias.  One of my friends told me about this news story:

A corrections officer from Florida was calling up fast food restaurants claiming to be a local cop and telling supervisors to hold and question employees about a fake crime that they had supposedly committed. In one case at a McDonalds, the supervisor made a 17 year old girl take off all of her clothes and then let her boyfriend (not an employee) rape the girl because that's what the "detective" told the boyfriend to do.  So the boyfriend did it.  We have been conditioned from birth to follow blindly the orders of authority.  Even the most horrible orders won’t make the ordinary man question what he is being asked to do.

At the time, a man had just killed himself over the internet.  He announced it.  Everyone went on his website to watch it happen.  He took pills.  He could have been saved.  People laughed about it.  Finally, someone notified the moderator of the site who found his location and called the officials.  The police came in to find him dead.  People were watching this happen on the web.  Some people were shocked, others laughed.  Thousands of people witnessed a man dying on the internet and just one person made an attempt to contact the moderator. 

I recall an incident in Vietnam.  I can't remember what it was called.  A group of soldiers were told to raid a village in search of spies.  They found none.  But they were so frustrated from dealing with the conditions they were dealt with in Nam that they violated the people in the village.  They took everyone, man, woman, children alike; and put them in a ditch to die.  One man, who flew a helicopter, saved the day.  He said he'd shoot anyone who'd harm those people and he managed to set them free.  Interestingly enough someone emerged a hero, though at the time, he might have appeared a traitor.  I’ve heard many versions of this story.  Even though many soldiers were guilty for brutally murdering innocent people, only one man was persecuted.  He was the scapegoat.  I also heard that these soldiers were following orders. If this is so, then why did the officials get of scot free?  So now the question is, are we right to just follow orders?  As innocent as it seems to be a blind follower of authority, there is something quite evil about choosing to remain ignorant.

I dealt with bullies growing up.  No, they never picked on me.  They picked on my friends and it seemed I was the only one to stick up for them while everyone else stood around and watched.  I even attacked a group of kids who were pestering my friend while other friends just looked on for entertainment.  They ran away.  This happened in the fourth grade.  In Junior High something similar happened, but this time, the crowd was bigger.  All they did was watch a friend of mine getting pestered by another girl.  I told them they should be ashamed of themselves.

We need to stop and think about how we laugh, ridicule, judge and kill people.  Whether it is someone committing suicide on the net, or a kid being bullied at school, or innocent people being tortured in a war, or a loving couple who simply want to get married, we have to be courageous and speak our truth.  Maybe speaking the truth won't do anything.  But it's better than nothing.  I'm starting to realize that now.  Why live my life just being a peon?

What would you do?  How easy it is to stop what is wrong.  But most people stand around, watch, laugh, and do nothing.  What would you do? 

An experiment in the seventies was conducted.  They told people to give someone electric shocks in another room.  the person would be screaming in pain, begging for them to stop, but when told to keep going, the subjects continued to inflict pain.  It was all rigged but the large majority of the people continued to do what was told to them even though they could hear that it could be torturing or harming another.  It was an experiment on the power of authority.  Who are you?  Are you the kind of person who would keep pushing the button just because that was what you were told?  People think they wouldn't.  People think they know right from wrong.  But when tested, the results are quite contradictory.

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