Bodhisattva
May 28, 2015 through June 15, 2015
Since I will not be attending the events surrounding the Sixth Anniversary of The Day the Earth Stood Still in Los Angeles and Neverland this year, I felt that all of us “stay-at-homes” needed a little distraction. Of course, I do realize that we all have our own ways of memorializing … and celebrating … Michael Incredible Jackson. Mine will undoubtedly include (but not, by any means, be limited to) my customary month-long, nightly prayer/meditation vigil, a ritual observance I began in June, 2010 (described in Installment #21, March 26 through April 2, 2011) and which I have continued in each successive June when I am not physically “on pilgrimage.”
Nevertheless, I feel, our inability to participate in the communal events occurring in California (for whatever reason) while we all, at the same time, long to be there and part of it all with all our hearts, fragments our wholeness, divides our attention and keeps our inner worlds in turmoil. These conflicting emotions and thoughts cause us anxiety and stress. So, I thought a little distraction … for a few moments, at least, might be a good idea. Maybe, just maybe, we could, instead … uh … take our minds off being physically homebound by engaging our imaginations in a joyful, playful, innocent, open “pilgrimage” … allowing them to soar free to the sacred places we so dream about … above divisions and conflict.
I have decided that … drumroll, please … cue the soft, relaxing music … perhaps, an Imaginary Interlude would be welcome. Buckle your seat belts, please, dear readers; some turbulence is expected.
As regular readers will no doubt recall from the end of Installment #94, I had just learned that the claim against Michael’s Estate filed by Wade Robson had been dismissed by Judge Beckloff and I was in MAJOR celebration mode, particularly in light of the over two years of increasingly horrifying and sick-making sensational stories leaked to the gutter press and our prayers and visualizations covering the same span. Since I am usually home alone, my celebrations are by necessity fairly staid and frequently consist of finding ways to include Michael. So, it will come as no great surprise to anyone to learn that I decided to visit Neverland Valley Ranch with the help of my Neverland CD of nature sounds. What follows is a description of that visit on May 28, 2015.
As the natural symphony of birdsong and water rushing over rocks in its path began to play, I was instantly transported to Neverland Valley Ranch. The ease of my passage shocked even me. I found myself standing on the beautifully manicured lawn at the rocky escarpment beside Ryan’s Bridge so quickly that I stood, disoriented for a few moments, taking in the beauty and tranquility of this feature of Neverland’s scenery. From this vantage point beside the bridge, incredible vistas designed by an artist of incomparable skill stretch in every direction, all painstakingly carved out of and grafted onto the land and backdropped by the mountains in the distance, in such a way that they appear to have occurred organically as a result of nature’s exuberance rather than plotted and planned by human hands, each scene more beautiful and colorful than the last.
During my regular visits to Michael’s ranch, I usually take a few minutes to breathe deeply and set my intention to release my hold on what is commonly referred to as reality … to be open and innocent … to reserve judgment and let go of my mind’s need to qualify, identify, classify, explain, categorize, judge, label or, in any way, dissect the experience. Since I was in celebration mode, this was especially true during my visit on May 28, 2015.
As I steadied and quieted my breath and mind, I was able to very clearly visualize my surroundings. [Note to the reader: the clarity of the sensory experiences described in this Installment was awe-inspiring. It was like sitting in an IMAX theater watching these scenes unfold in full technicolor and Dolby surround sound.]
As many of my readers know, this visualizing thing is still fairly new to me. I used to think I couldn’t visualize or dream, for that matter, until Michael showed me during the trial of Conrad Murray, that I can, indeed, be fairly successful in this new exercise of visualization. I have been taking full and unabashed advantage of his tutelage ever since. Personally, I have found these visualizations entirely beneficial as my skill in creative visualization has increased and I recommend them highly to all my readers. However, nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to witness. The clarity of sight … sound … olfactory … tactile sensations I was about to experience still leave me breathless.
I turned around very slowly to fully savor the sights and smells and sounds in every direction … the flower beds, all planted with riotous color, redolent with the scents of flowers and fertile earth and bordered in natural stone … the coolness and softness of the lush carpet of lawn extending as far as the eye could see on my bare feet … the majestic, gnarled trees forming a canopy above the plantings through which various breeds of bird flew, singing and rejoicing exuberantly … the water sparkling like diamonds as it falls over the rocks at the side of the lake … the mountains in the distance lit warmly golden by the afternooon sun … the main residence and guest cottages behind me and to my left with their mullioned windows and dark wood, Tudor-style beams, shaded by tall trees and lushly planted in wonderful garden settings on every side … the fountains and water features lending their magic song to the symphony of the garden settings … the winding pathways of natural stone leading into, around and through each lovely feature … the rocks directly in front of me with the bridge to the right … and the lake flowing under the bridge to emerge beyond it, opening into an ornamental lake with water spouts climbing into the sky and swans floating motionless on the surface.
The place just teams with life and overflows with the force of love. It is a place in which organic, natural beauty is completely harmonized with artistic ingenuity, man-imagined, designed and crafted beauty. The product of one man’s imagination … Michael Jackson … and it shows what humanity is capable of creating by working hand-in-hand with nature rather than against it. It is a place of joy; it is my place of joy. Every blade of grass exudes it, every flower petal and leaf breathes it, it rises from the very ground to create an atmosphere of pure love energy. The man who created it poured his soul into every project he undertook and that soul is reflected in every inch of the 2,700 acres. It is here that that man painted his life like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and invited all comers to participate and enjoy his vision. Every vista … every scene … is a masterpiece of planning and execution and each contributes to the serenity slowly filling me with every breath.
I completed my slow revolution and began to spin faster and faster, my arms outstretched to embrace this place and the beautiful soul reflected in every feature … with my head thrown back to view a nearly cloudless, blue sky. I recognize it … remember it as if I had been here before and it welcomed my return. It is truly the home of my heart and soul.
Feeling a little dizzy, I stopped revolving and turned toward the bridge where I saw Michael approaching on the opposite side. As he stepped onto the bridge, he was our beautiful Beloved as he appeared in This Is It … tall, lean with his smile lighting his eyes … but step-by-step he became younger and younger … shapeshifting before my eyes into the trial years … the Invincible years … the HIStory years … the Dangerous years … the BAD years … the Thriller years … the Off the Wall years … the Jacksons years … each more beautiful than the last … until he reached the side upon which I was standing as a 10-year-old boy with closely cropped hair, beautiful mocha-colored skin, deeply penetrating eyes and a great, big, mischievous smile on his face, setting the tone of this visit firmly in the realm of the “inner child.”
I knew I was in for some F-U-N! While no words were spoken, the feeling was:
“Clap! Clap! Anybody here like games?”
I was not surprised to find myself, too, morphing into that 10-year-old child I never really got the chance to be due to circumstances beyond my control (and described in several previous Installments, so I won’t bore my readers with those details here.) Suffice to say that Michael has schooled me in revisiting that innocent, playful girl on occasion … and she and I are becoming much more fully … and happily … acquainted. What I did NOT know … and could never have imagined … was exactly HOW MUCH magical, mystical fun was going to be squeezed into this hour-long visit. I mean how much F-U-N can one possibly compact enough to fit into one, tiny little hour? I was about to find out!
While many of my afternoon “power naps” in Neverland are replete with meanings and significance that send ripples radiating outward toward the far-flung shores of the rest of my life in various ways … or lengthy discussions of long past but never-quite-forgotten events that help me broaden my perspective … I got the feeling that this visit was going to be different. After all, during our discussion in Installment #94, I had asked Michael to accompany me in my celebration and he appeared on this occasion to have every intention of showing me a celebration to end all celebrations. I would not be disappointed.
When Michael reached me, he grabbed my hand and ran to the rocky escarpment by the bridge, his clothing landing in little piles along the way, and dove into the water from the rocks. Finally surfacing, he turned back toward me, his head rising up and down as he treaded water, and waited for me to dive in after him. We swam and dunked and splashed each other, laughing hysterically the entire time. Then we slid down the rocks nearest the water (made smooth by the water rushing over them and leaving a slick surface behind) with him leading the way and me following in his wake, splashing once again into the lake only to run up the bank and slide back down.
The afternoon sun was warm, the sky a clear blue and the water was cool, tingling against our bare skin; it was a perfect California afternoon, the droplets sparkling with little diamonds in the sun. Occasionally, we would leave the lake and dry ourselves in the open air, lying on our backs under the trees, two beautiful, innocent, uninhibited children holding hands … with no pasts to cloud our happiness, no shame to mar our enjoyment and no future to worry about. We were free to do nothing more than fully live these moments … NOW.
We did manage to take a few moments from our carefree romp to remember our “Change the World” intention for the day and sent the light of love to the corporate global media lying beneath a massive tree with our hands linked, our fingers intertwined and listening to the natural symphony playing out all around us.
Gazing up at the perfectly blue sky through the leaves of the tree, a cloud … wispy and amorphous … floated past where we were lying, soaking up the sun. At first, we tried to imagine a shape in the cloud with varying degrees of success, and we giggled over our unsuccessful attempts. Eventually, Michael laughed and said we needed to make things a little easier; we graduated from imagining shapes to creating them.
We reached up and stopped the cloud’s passage to mold and shape it … as if it was Play Doh … into magical animal shapes. Unfortunately, since we were still holding hands with our fingers tightly woven in a tapestry of togetherness, while my right hand was shaping a rabbit’s haunches, his left hand was shaping an elephant’s trunk and floppy ears … so we ended up with some fairly interesting and hysterical hybrids, which would slither, slink, slide or gallop off across the sky, making room for the next cloud to float past to be shaped and eliciting peels of laughter as it exited stage left. As we got warmed and dried by the sun, we jumped up and dove into the water again for more swimming and sliding, dunking and splashing … and, of course, more peels of laughter rang out to enrich the entire atmosphere with joy.
Eventually, we swam under the middle arch of the bridge to play in the ornamental lake, being scolded by a pair of swans for disturbing their peaceful playground, which just sent us into more gales of laughter. Swimming up to the dock where a swan-shaped boat sat moored, we jumped aboard it, cast off the lines tethering it to the dock, and lay on the seats, facing in opposite directions and just let the small craft drift wherever the current took it. We continued our game with the clouds, shaping them like clay with the added hysterical-laughter-producing effect that because we were facing in opposite directions, either my side or his side of the animal was upside down. Have you ever seen an eight point buck standing on its head with the wings and tail of a peacock? Uproariously funny!
When we got hot, we jumped back in the water and swam, tipping the boat as we climbed back on board soaking wet and taking up our positions on the seats again. Of course, all this tipping resulted in the bottom of our little ship filling with water to the level of the wooden seats, but instead of sinking, the craft just overflowed its sides and stayed afloat with colorful little fish being dumped in both directions over the sides and jumping over our bodies, lying on the seats, still joined by hands and fingers.
Michael grabbed a wispy cloud and fashioned a ring to hold up for the fish to jump through … and, surprisingly enough, they did. Furthermore, they seemed to enjoy jumping through his ring. So, he grabbed another one, fashioned it in a ring and handed it to me … and we had a regular “fish circus act” jumping through his hoop, back into the water in the bottom of the boat and then through mine. Who knew you could train little, tiny rainbow-colored fish to jump through hoops? It seemed … at least, in this moment and in this place … that anything was possible.
Suddenly, he sat up on his seat, released my hand, cupped his hands and submerged them in the water to form a little lake and lifted them to me, his eyebrows raised in challenge. He offered his hands and what they contained to me. I, too, sat up with my knees touching his, covered in water and took the contents into my cupped hands. There, in my hands, was a small, brightly colored WHALE the size of a guppy, breaching in the bowl of water he had gathered from the bottom of the boat. I looked deeply into his eyes in the wonder of it and we both just laughed. No explanations were considered, offered, necessary … or possible. And the wonders and laughter just kept on coming.
When we got tired of playing in the boat, we swam to the edge of the lake in search of ice cream, leaving the boat to be buffeted by the gentle currents created by the water spouts, and ran willy-nilly toward the arcade room, dripping ice cream along the way. I understood, somehow, that he was unable to contain his excitement to show me a new game he had just received called “Black Holes” and he wanted it to be a surprise. Coming up behind me, he put both of his sticky, ice-cream-covered hands over my eyes as he steered me inside.
I knew he wanted me to be impressed … and I did try to act surprised when he removed his hands … but it didn’t look like much from the outside, except it was BIG. I mean, this game was huge, occupying the entire middle of the floor of the arcade room, leaving little room for the rows of pin-ball type games in single file along the walls, and extending all the way up to the landing on the stairs of the two story room … just below where Captain Hook was being chased by Peter Pan around the cove-like ceiling. It was big enough for two of us to sit side-by-side in the capsule-shaped cabin with plenty of room left over. Fortunately, we were still children so my hips fit comfortably next to his on the bench as he closed the cabin door to start the game.
Immediately, we were plunged into a black, tunnel-shaped funnel and ejected forcefully out the other end into a magnificent starfield with millions of stars interspersed and joined by a bluish cloud. The capsule seemed to be able steer itself through the starfield at a leisurely pace, but could also be steered by a joystick-looking protuberance located between us and Michael took great pleasure in steering us around clusters of stars for an upclose and personal look. By using the dials and buttons, he could lasso the stars, gathering them together as if he were herding cattle, and fling them out into the beautiful blue cloud with ease, creating new configurations and constellations. We could, if we chose, reach out and touch the stars with our hands or pop them like bubbles blown from a child’s wand dipped in soapy water. It seemed like we spent hours circling around this first starfield with the beautiful, blue light swarming around us. We were in no particular hurry.
The fact that these visualizations were so clear and beautiful and visually stunning is one that I have to attribute to something other than my “novitiate level” skill at visualization, which, while I admit is improving, has in no way reached this level of detail and clarity. I was being majorly helped here by the pilot of the vessel … and my ever-generous and solicitous host. I understood that. While my body was resting in my recliner on the dark side of the moon, I was being taken on a tour of galaxies and nebula light years beyond my poor ability to imagine.
Dreamer
As we neared the center of the starfield, the capsule accelerated towards another circular tunnel and we were deposited into a new and different starfield joined by pink and purple wispy clouds with bright, white, strobing lights at the center. The capsule slowed, once again, to allow us to explore to our hearts content, playing with this starfield as we had with the first. We drifted our hands through the swirling pink and purple gases, leaving trails and ribbons of brightly colored “tails” in their wake which appeared, at times, like peanut butter and jelly swirled together in ribbons and at others like cursive handwriting spelling out messages like “I love you” and “We are forever.” Michael was all wonder and awe as his curiosity soared and he steered us through clusters of stars and clouds that seemed neverending.
Through another Black Hole tunnel, the starfield resembled a revolving disc with trails of brightly-lit, white clouds that were almost milky in viscosity and we rode the farthest reaches of this galaxy which so closely resembled the Milky Way in which Planet Earth is located as if it were a carousel, spinning in joy and trailing stardust; through another, we were surrounded by galaxies and universes extending as far as the imagination would allow. There seemed to be an infinite number of these starfields, each different and unique and beautiful. And we explored them all.
“Black Holes,” the game, seemed to have no time limit, as indeed the entire fun-filled afternoon of swimming and playing with clouds and “circus acts featuring fish” and laughter seemed to stretch into eternity. But eventually, we exited the capsule and the arcade still holding hands as one would with one’s best friend.
However, as we left the building and entered the sunlight outside, we were again our adult selves … Michael as we have all seen him, beautiful and in command in This Is It … the director and lead actor in this 4D, technicolor movie … and me as I am today. We ambled down the walkway to Ryan’s Bridge hand-in-hand as “You Are Not Alone” began to play and he began to sing along. Together, we danced beneath the massive tree that had held our Play Doh cloud animals and nurtured our “inner children” as he swung me around, kneeling in front of me … chivalrous and gallant … only to rise again, swing me around and kiss me on the forehead.
I awoke just as my 60-minute CD of birdsong and water tripping over rocks in its path was ending. We had squeezed as much fun and frolic, laughter and play … and love … into one afternoon as any two children could have possibly imagined … and, more amazing, it all happened in one hour. Sixty minutes … one tiny little hour!
I admit to being a little sad to awaken back into this reality, but my sadness was completely overcome by my joy and gratitude and all were leaking from my eyes. I put in disc 2 of my HIStory CD and danced again with him with the strains of “You Are Not Alone” filling the space in my little Sanctuary.
When I had invited Michael to join me in my celebration, I had no idea … none whatsoever. He had shown me a celebration to end all celebrations. No one and nothing could have topped this one.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an Hour
He had led me to EXPERIENCE the meaning of those famous words by William Blake (and he had experienced them with me) … rather than just to know them. These words have been used to portray Michael’s sense of wonder and awe by Howard Bloom. It was an apt portrayal. Experiencing them with him is something that will stay with me forever.
Postscript: When I tried to rise from my recliner, I was sore … as sore as I have ever been from an afternoon of physical exertion … like swimming, for example … hmmm!
Post-postscript: I pray that all of my beautiful friends travel safely in the light of love, gather joyfully and peacefully in Michael’s honor, and walk softly in his sacred places. He will be walking among you … yes … but he is also holding all of us who travel in our imaginations closely. In His Love
Jan
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