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April 25, 2015 BLOG: Life in the Bodhi Hostel, El Valle, Panama El Valle is a small town. From what I hear from Diana the real estate agent whose office is next door, the town is mostly native Panamanian peoples, some with old time, quite large homes here and a smaller group of white folk many of whom come here only for the weekends. I can understand the appeal of a trip up to about 2000 ft., because just at dusk, a sweet cool breeze comes up and lowers the sweat factor very nicely for everyone making the evening hours conducive to conversation and assorted kinds of hanging out, including the late dinners favored in tropical climes It is the same at the hostel. Our population, of course, changes often. Some of our traveling brothers and sisters are intent on their travel and many do come here because the geology and geography are rather unique: living on top of a volcano even if inactive for 200,000 years, does have something quite interesting to offer the traveler.…

April 25, 2015 BLOG: Kids on Parade for Peace and Justice Since I found a parking place to actually stop the van for more than 24 hours, I have been cleaning up and drying it all out. With that in mind, I had Brad here at the hostel take down the spare tire and loosen the hitch out of its place and open the back doors. Not a pretty site. Everything was wet and moldy and so for the next three days it has been necessary to take everything that is wet out of the back and get it dry and clean once again with nearly endless laundry! I have been ‘at home’ on the parking lot in front of the hostel. Friday afternoon, I was astonished to witness what looked like an entire school of kids marching en masse along the main street here carrying their own hand made art work placards proclaiming their stand for peace and justice in the world. Here I was sitting in the front seat facing the street with a damp cloth in my hand working on some of the few dishes that I brought…

April 19, 2015 BLOG: moving on from crisis There are moments in every life that it becomes necessary to simply end the story, end the circumstances, leave behind the mess and move on. After three and a half weeks in Paso Canoas doing okay thank you in a safe place to park in a bus nest next to a hotel, using time to get more fit, making it but still waiting for a packet to be mailed from the United States with money in it that did not come, I woke up on tax day in the US with the idea that it was time to shift gears and move on. It takes something because the resources in the packet were important but even without them, I was not again in a stall. I was motivated even more because my ally, friend and a definite Princely person, Danny Thomas, showed up early in the morning to take me to breakfast. Some people just have a way with mornings and I am beginning to get a little tropical before 6 am. Seems Daniel was intent on making sure that the old lady found a place…

April 13, 2015 What is Lotus? When you were doodling around with an ordinary compass as a kid, you probably drew a circle with it and then, shortening the radius of the compass a little, you set the point on the circumference of the circle and drew an arc from the 2 other points on the circumference. You were able to do this 5 times to make a five pointed flower-like form within the boundary of the original circle. It looked pretty. Remember? This is the Lotus. It repeats forever within an enormous fractal code which turns up as our world, our physical universe as far as it goes and it is the entire unknown, hidden, inner universes, as I have noted, side by side and piled one on top of the other within you now. The Lotus is a symbol of Life and a symbol of each of us created Spirits now inhabiting physical form. I have said to many people: Without you/me the Universe would not be what it IS. Each of us is unique. There is only one me; there is only one you. Yo…

April 11, 2015 Making Your Own Medicine: a new definition and a new way The First Nations, Native American peoples lived on Turtle Island (their name for North America) many millennia before any of the White Lodge peoples came. Theirs is a very mature society. Understand that what we think we know about any of them is an observation coming from the White Lodge perspective, often prejudiced by religious considerations and the result of our making much deadly mayhem for them to which they responded in kind. Custer had no idea who or what he was dealing with and largely we still do not. The idea of medicine is not about a pill, a drug or the doctor. Remember their life was what we can call a ‘natural life.’ Their day to day existence depended on their land, their relationships with the flora and fauna all about them and on the cooperation among them founded on a Sacred Circle of Power to which every mature person belonged. They were very knowledgeable about plants: …

April 10, 2015 Raven’s Medicine Some of you who come to this site which we call Raven’s Medicine might wonder what it’s all about and so, after about 4 months of our progression called Journey of the Lotus, I decided today to talk a little about this. For the average kind of white folk, those of us who belong to the White Lodge, it is difficult to wrap our heads around the idea that a bird, or the spirit of a bird has anything to do with anything. The notion does not live anywhere in our experience so this piece I’m writing may be the very first take on a very old tradition of the Red Lodge our native or first nations peoples. Our world separated church and state. The Indian world considers everything as part of the Great Spirit, part of the Creator and its creation. Everything is imbued with Spirit. We are all Spiritual Beings, sacred and divine. Red Lodge people know the eternity of all life, being born was not our beginning nor is death our end. The world o…

April 6, 2015 The Mornings and the Evenings Each day of a Journey takes on its own character. I believe every day is like this but the embarking on a specific trip has a way of focusing my attention when I might not have been doing that at other times. Waiting for a certain time to come also brings with it an attention. All these criteria are in place for this one: I am stranded once again, a stranger in a strange land. Let me explain, if you will. Here I am in Paso Canoas, Costa Rica. I am forced once again to sit and wait for money to become available to continue my run. This time, money is in the bank but nowhere is there an ATM machine that will read my flat imprinted card. I do not even know if that is the reason it says, ‘insufficient funds’ when I know my bank balance is ample to handle what I am asking the machine for. There is something, don’t you know, about the electronic matrix that has the power to shut down everything, at least for me and for right now. …

March 4, 2015 Work Ethic When I was quite a young woman working for my daily bread in a warehouse business that sold lighting, fixtures, cable and assorted equipment for illumination there came a day of intense transformation for me. There was a brilliant 5 minutes of the time I was there when several quite significant things happened. I had been hired to learn the business with the offer that after 3 months training, my wages would double from the pittance that would just get me by while I was getting up to speed. When I went upstairs to talk to the boss about the deal, it became clear in about 90 seconds that this self satisfied troll was never going to see me as a valuable asset to his business and that he was never going to pay me the offer made. At the top of my voice, I retorted when he told me I was fired, that he was much too late: I quit before I even walked up these stairs! It was a defining moment that kept me from making that foolish mistake ever agai…

March 3, 2015 Leaving El Salvador, the Next step A Journey happens on many levels. Likely the first step at the very beginning was the decision to do the trip in the first place.  I was told once that as soon as a decision is made, the brain responds immediately with its specific chemicals to support that decision. Seems there is quite a lot to note that we are spirits inhabiting our bodies, So today in El Salvador (the Savior), there was yet another step to be taken on this Journey of the Lotus. As George and I have been surveying my household goods, his counsel about border crossings was to organize everything properly and then categorize it into a proper list to minimize the need to inspect in the first place. To that end, yesterday, we visited the local ferreteria, the Iron Man location to have some welding done on the inside of the van. After a quick trip up the highway to Cara Soucia, we hove into the side street where Chola has his place. He and his helper…

March 2, 2015 Elections in El Salvador; the Will of the People There is, no doubt, that the American media has reported that there were elections held in El Salvador yesterday, Sunday, March 1. The polls here in Puente Arce were closed early because two women were fighting! The rest of the family went early to the high school up the block and around a corner to vote but George was too late mostly because he focused his attention most of the day on the store room where we organized and categorized my load to be re-packed in the van. There is a little more to the story, of course. George has been making all the moves necessary to get an official driver’s license. It has meant already two trips to Santa Ana on the motorcycle which takes about a three hour round trip and the bureaucratic hoop jumping added in. On the second trip, he learned that he would have to get a newer birth certificate. It was necessary to make a trip to the other side of El Salvador to the mou…

Part One: Pay yourself First My personal story begins in 1979 when I attended a ‘Prosperity Seminar” given by John Roger. His teaching was simple: Pay yourself first by tithing (10%) to the God Force living within you/me. Separate 10%, 10 cents of every dollar, one dollar of every 10; 10 dollars of every one hundred and keep it in a sacred stash (not in the bank.) The basic idea is that in order to empower yourself, your natural creativity, your natural generosity, your natural magnanimity, it is necessary to do that with sacred money; money not related in any way to the private bank’s fiat money. Even though we are using that fiat currency, when we separate it from the ‘system’, as soon as we declare it sacred, it becomes our personal empowerment. At the time, I placed the tithe I had in a small cotton bag and wore it in the front of my jeans at my naval. People came to me to pay me back the courtesy loans I had made to them. People also asked more often for my se…

February 25,2015 Blog: Puente Arce, El Salvador: typical and untypical town Puente Arce is a border town between El Salvador and Guatemala: in this it is untypical. The main street is always crowded with big trucks coming and going. There are local buses that go to Cara Sucia and onward both south to San Salvador and east to Sonsonate and Santa Ana. There is some traveling auto traffic and there are plenty of local peoples’ Japanese cars and pick-up trucks adding to the congestion, along with pedestrians and a host of uniformed border guards with their camo mufti, belts, and guns in their hands that stand more of less behind the barriers surrounding the border. The town is laid out on either side of the main highway. With approximately 9000 people here, each section is easily more than a square mile in extent. This family live on the east side and our dirt street is off the main street which is perpendicular to the highway and right at the barriers of the border crossi…

FEBRUARY 24, 2015 BLOG: Ready, Set, Almost a Go I do not think I will envy the tourists who take themselves on exotic cruises on those enormous ships. It might be great for some to have a printed menu in their hands before they leave the safety of their own back yard. It may be okay to know exactly which day is to be Papua, New Guinea and at which hour there will be dinner on the terrace of the local palace. For some, this is the ideal and for all of this, they pay handsomely for the privilege. Although parts of this great journey have been a little harrowing, other parts have been exotic, charming and truly beautiful. The meals I have enjoyed on the terraces have been offered by willing hands from cooks with the skill that is accrued by feeding their own kind of local cuisine to many numbers of people over the years before I even sat at their tables. I have been in El Salvador now for about a month. It has turned into a patchwork of the times: getting grounded o…

February 21, 2015 BLOG: Fisher Folk, the beach in El Salvador I have some fantasies that come along with becoming a ‘divine older woman’, one of them is that, even though I am always willing to drive wherever I wish to go, having someone else drive is wonderful. I get to go where I would not usually go especially in a foreign country where I am not so familiar with the roads and the destinations. My friend George who found me at the border here of El Salvador has taken over the driving. This includes navigating the alley where the van is parked and the destinations that are near here. On one of our trips to Cara Soucia, our planned stop at Western Union was stopped by a cranky computer, so I said after we had found some fruits and veggies at the local mercado, let’s go to the beach! The highway was paved until the final turn off at the playa where we turned to a sand and dirt packed road that wound around the evergreen mengle forest, around the houses and yards, aro…