A client wrote me (in my fortuneteller capacity) an emailed MOAN, "ANITA my new boyfriend didn’t call. He said he would and didn’t! I have had to do some major yoga, meditation and breathing work to stay mildly sane!!!"
I answered, "Good that you did that. What if...we never had to exercise that muscle that produces peace and joy when activated with meditation, mind practice, or YOGA? What if... God just gave us this hothouse perfection? Gave us Boyfriends that called on time, mothers that didn’t nag us about what we were doing with our lives, fathers that sent generous checks at Xmas and Easter?
That 'get above it all' muscle that you exercise with any mind practice which helps you TAKE THE REINS and create impeccable inner peace amidst all assaults to the ego --- is an important action to learn to do.
The TIBETANS say that when we leave this plane we have to immediately call on that muscle to grab the sky hook, and go consciously to another realm, instead of just being put in the line that looks like the line of flattened corpses hanging on clothes-pins in 'Beetlejuice.'
WHAT IF we lived in some Utopian permanent delight and THEN we hit a bad day on the old grief meter. The Boyfriend didn’t call. And what if, that day, death DID call? We’d be up Infinity Creek without our paddle, isn't that so? "
And footnoting my email, industrious to the last, I mailed her this amazing file off BBC's website about the current CARGILL-induced terminator seed famine in India. One of a dozen famines that oligarchs, transnationals and Britain Herself have visited upon this serf of a country by tinkering with India's fragile food-staple-merchandising ecology. (In India's most notable famine, when Brits sold all the rice in India to the west, during WWII, 3.5 to 5 million people died. ) If you want to see a fascinating article or two about the current famine, Google up FAMINE + INDIA and find the current famine. Another big famine where maybe 5 million died, is the IRISH famine, and online are things you never knew about it. Like how the Brits did nothing and let them all die. Google these two specific famines and you'll read everything you will want to know about the famines that will hit this planet in the next millenium as temps change and drought hits third world and American plains.
Well, my client took a while reading the files, then answered "@#)%* that was depressing... Thanks I needed that after a very depressing weekend..."
I thought her words might contain hostile sarcasm, a veiled and angry 'how unsympathetic you are' - type reply. So many people expect sympathy for horrors waaaa-y down the scale from pancreatic cancer . So I zap her back "Actually, stories like the one I just sent you about the FAMINE are very useful. When the boyfriends of this world bum us out, just say ‘I’m so glad he's my only misery and I’m not in India" . Or say : "I’m glad I’m not in the farming country where these stupid farmers bought the promises of Cargill or Dow and paid good cash for transgenetic seed, planted it, had to use all the pesticides and then found 'OH OH all the bees died, None of our other usual food crops bloomed! Or fruited. Jeez, we’re out of food and can't buy food as we're into hock to the bank for twenty trillion so they're foreclosing on our farm (which probably was Cargill's original agenda--- times a million farms.). OK. No problem I’ll just eat the bag of poison and feed it to my kids. We’ll check out with our bellies aching and go find another body via reincarnation in the heavenly lifetime supermarket'. That must really be uncomfortable. That’s my definition of a bad hair day. "
My client didn't answer that email. I think I lost a client. Oh well, on the scale of griefs, it's not a very big one.