When My Mornin’ Comes Around

 

First, the lyrics to Iris DeMent’s “When My Mornin’ Comes Around’:

When my mornin' comes around, no one else will be there

So I won't have to worry about what I'm supposed to say

and I alone will know that I’ve climbed that great big old mountain

and that's all that will matter

when my mornin' comes around

When my mornin' comes around, I will look back on this valley

at these sidewalks and alleys where I lingered so long

and this place where I now live it’ll burn to ash and cinder

like some ghost I won't remember

when my mornin' comes around

When my mornin' comes around, from a new cup I'll be drinking

and for once I won't be thinking there's something wrong with me

I'll wake up and find that my faults have been forgiven

and that's when I'll start living

when my mornin' comes around

I know my mornin’ will come around

This is a confessional, a way of saying that, like Iris, I know my morning will come around. In fact, I feel the dawn is breaking now. It’s been the longest night of my life; maybe the sun went down when I wasn’t looking, when I was overly occupied with what I thought was my life. Maybe my eyes were closed all along, and I’m only now beginning to open them.

It has, and continues to be, a slow motion nightmare, but in less than a year it will be over, and yes indeed, my mornin’ will come around. Oh, there will be differences from Iris’s morning. I expect there will be others around, and the place where I now live won’t literally burn to ash and cinder, and its ghost I will remember. But like Iris, no one will know the actual height of the mountain I’ve been climbing, and it won’t matter, as long as I know I made it over the top. I, too, will be drinking from a new cup, though I fear there will still be times when I’ll think there’s surely something wrong with me. That’s a mindset I’m chipping away at daily, one fault at a time. Ironically, or maybe paradoxically, at the same time my eyes seem to be opening to the new day, I’m striving to close them when I look at other people, to substitute the flaws I think I see in them with the kindness I detect in their spirit, or the harmony I hear in their voice, or the gentleness I feel in their touch. I’m trying. Oh God, I swear I’m trying. I’m not there yet, but my morning is comin’ around.

In the meantime, I think I may be going crazy. I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean literally out of my mind, and this scares me because I am venturing into realms and dimensions I know little about and that science has yet to discover. To quote the Moody Blues, “If only you knew what’s inside of me now, you wouldn’t want to know me somehow.” That’s what scares me- I don’t want to run you off. I want you to know me. I want you to care about me and love me.

Let me share a few of my secrets with you. If you didn’t already assume I hear a different drumbeat than everybody else— or most everybody else —allow me to confirm that I am, as you suspected, just this side of . . . well, you decide for yourself what I’m just this side of.

Secret number 1:

My spirit came to earth from a cluster of stars I cannot name (I’m sure they have a name in the astronomical world) but that I can point to anytime the night is clear and the stars are bright. I remember the first time I ever looked into the night sky and studied the Milky Way. My eyes fixed on an area I knew at once was my home. Then and there I ached to go home. I still do. But I can’t leave yet. Why not? Because of secret number 2.

Secret number 2:

I have been obsessed with death ever since I was old enough to ruminate on abstract ideas. Not death in the morbid, funeral, creepy, frightening, heaven or hell sense. No, not at all. Obsessed with death in that death is not death at all. I admit that I have subscribed to the belief sometimes, even recently, that to end life prematurely on this planet would release me and I could return to my star home, and this is true. But when you take an incarnate fleshly form, you are asked to endure whatever befalls you and “tough it out” until the end. Why? The answer is obvious. This is your classroom. This is the lesson— the “course,” if you will —you chose to take before you came to earth. To “drop out,” that is, to leave the course before you have completed it is to receive no credit. 

The only way to earn the karmic credit, if you choose to see it that way, is to complete the course, to take all of its quizzes and tests, to complete all of the assignments, no matter how unengaging or unpleasant some of them may be, and then be rewarded in the end not only by advancing as a student and attaining a great deal of knowledge and experience, but also experiencing a time of valuable insight that will aid you in the succeeding courses. Also, even as the course progresses, you serve as a worthy aid to those around you to whom the lessons may not come so easily. It is a cold, harsh world and I, like you, have experienced many highs and lows, as the saying goes. But I have acquired a great deal of valuable experience and it is, and shall continue to be for some time to come, my job/assignment to aid those around me, sometimes merely by being who and what I am.

Secret number 3:

Just as I have been obsessed with death ever since I was old enough to ruminate on abstract ideas, I have also been obsessed with Love. Love as a force I cannot ignore. Love as a force in the universe that makes gravity seem like a feathery tug of the sleeve. The idea that Love is neither here nor there, but is in fact everywhere. It flows in and through us, and it can rightly be said that one does not fall in or out of love, but that one simply experiences it, shares it. Becomes a part of it. Such is the case with marriage, children and their parents, young lovers, and so forth. It is a seldom and poorly understood power in the universe, and yet it is the supreme lesson all of us are tasked to learn by our Creator. It is this precept— Love —that we all must master before we can ascend to loftier heights in the heavenly realms of the universe. And as easy as the concept may seem, I am beginning to realize that it is not at all an easy concept to master; it takes a lifetime— often many lifetimes —to learn.

I have a vision in my mind of standing before crowds someday and moving them emotionally, of pleading with them as it were, to embrace Love on a new level and rejoice in the kindness that is giving and receiving Love. It’s a noble idea, and I hope I will do well in my endeavor when I undertake it.

But there is one aspect I fear I am denying, or at the very least ignoring, and that is the aspect of loving myself. I have a very difficult time with this, and I wish that I would become aware of my own value and the love I not only possess, but the love I am worthy of receiving. There is one person- a new person - who loves me unconditionally, though she may not be aware of it yet. The magic that is Love has usurped her spirit. “Here is my heart,” she whispers, “I give it to you.”  There are others in my realm, both known and unknown to me, who think very highly of me and who would love me unconditionally also if only I would give them the chance. So tonight as I prepare to go to sleep, I will once again think on this idea: that all are worthy, and this includes me. I must learn to respect myself. Love myself. Know myself.

Secret number 4:

I can vaporize clouds at will. I first read about cloud vaporizing in Richard Bach’s magnificent little book, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. I think I wrote a blog about this once, but if I didn’t, or if you missed it, the short version of the experience is this: I went out in the desert beyond the western reaches of El Paso, Texas, one sunny afternoon back in 1986 to be alone and to meditate. I was still reeling from the death of a young woman who meant more to me than anyone in the world, and as praying had yielded little in the way of answers or comfort, I had learned about meditation as an alternative and a much more satisfying way to communicate with the universe (God, if you wish). On this particular afternoon, however, the vibrations were low and I wasn’t having much success finding any sort of peace. My monkey mind was more chattery and restless than usual.

So I lay back and started watching the billowy white clouds as they drifted by like so many vaporous sky wanderers. I thought about Donald Shimoda in Illusions and his instructions to Richard on how to vaporize clouds. I thought, what the heck, why not give it a try? So I did. And it worked! Again and again and again it worked. No natural phenomenon, no weather anomalies— whichever cloud I focused on, and there were many to choose from on the brilliance of the day, vaporized within one, two, at the most three minutes. Over and over and over it happened. I did it then, and I can do it now.

Secret number 5:

I have had a past life regression, only one, but in it I felt and described to a wonderful channel, Gladys Rodehaver, the manner of my death and what I did after I died. Who was I, what happened? I was my uncle John Clay Jones. Shot in the head by a German sniper in World War II as he peered up over the edge of a foxhole. I had absolutely no foreknowledge of this. All I ever knew about John Clay was that he was killed in World War II. It wasn’t until I relayed to my mother (John Clay’s younger sister) a week later what I had seen in my regression that she confirmed the details.

Secret number 6:

I believe in channels and channeling. Not the fakes and charlatans, mind you, there are plenty of those out there. No, I mean the people who are smart, insightful, not given to fads and quirky conspiracies. I have known only one true channel (Gladys), but the men who introduced me to her were all engineers— electrical, mechanical, and, in the case of my own dad, industrial. Not exactly dumb, gullible individuals. Not only do I believe in channels, I am myself a recipient of communications from time to time from an entity who identifies herself as Trikola, though I write her messages rather than verbalizing them and having them transcribed later. 

Trikola first made herself known to me, quite without any solicitation from me, I assure you, back in the late 80s, not coincidentally when I first began to meditate in one form or another. I have heard from her nine times so far this year (it is August 9th, 2017). It is she who taught me what I wrote above about death and love. She has taught and shown me many other things of a much more personal nature, but I wanted you to know that I possess no cosmic wisdom of my own. 

What I know I have been taught. What I have been taught has come from entities on other planes, perhaps in other universes, where they tell me there is no such thing as the past or the future or even the present, for these so-called time frames can overlap and become muddled. The future does not exist, any more than the past exists. By this I mean that any number of infinite possibilities exists at any given moment in time, and so to say that this will happen or that will happen is inaccurate because it is like trying to predict the waves of the ocean. One simply cannot know the shape or strength of a body of water, and events and time are like a current in the ocean. As I say, unpredictable, yet predictable only in the vaguest of ways.

The dawn is breaking now; my morning’s comin’ around. I believe I’m ready.