June 26 through July 18, 2017
You’re wallowing, again!
Fought in a battle
Nobody won
Left ourselves a mountain
To be overcome
You can’t run away
The past is said and done
I need us to carry on
What part of the last two lines in those lyrics don’t you understand?
You’ve buried yourself in a past that can’t be undone no matter how hard you try for the last two weeks. You’ve looked at it from every possible angle and still can’t figure out what happened, how it happened, why it happened. All you know is that it DID happen and that, in your opinion, it shouldn’t have. As a result, you resist it, which causes stress and anxiety.
We have talked a lot about focus in these discussions, so you understand the principle at work. When you focus on the sadness, the heart break, the unanswered questions you put not only your attention on those things, but also all of your energy. When your focus continues for an extended period of time it becomes concentrated there. When you finally do look up, all you see is more reasons to be sad and confused and unfocused because that is what you have asked the universe to show you with your prolonged focus.
It would be much better to experience the sadness; don’t deny it or suppress it; acknowledge it but, then, turn to all the reasons you have to rejoice and be grateful.
I can’t help myself, Beloved. We all miss you here with us so much. June is hard on your children.
I do understand that, but I am here with you. I’ve told you that at least a thousand times just in these dialogs, alone. I will tell you that as often as I think you need to hear it. And that’s not even counting all the other ways we communicate. I have never gone anywhere. What’s more all of you know that I am here with you. In a thousand little ways, you know that I am here.
I am always whispering my love into your heart … always. When you walk into an antique shop and are browsing through the items for sale and you hear my voice on the radio playing in the shop, you stop and say, “Hi, baby …” And I AM THERE and WE ARE ONE in that moment of recognition because we are joined in love.
In that magical moment, there is no such thing as time or space … or death … because we occupy the dimension called love. There are no boundaries in that space … no time limits … no spatial distance … no restrictions. In that place, we are together and we are forever.
You and I were never separate
It’s just an illusion
Wrought by the magical
Lens of Perception
Try to stay in that moment instead of buying into the illusion of the perception that the physical world wishes to impose on your freedom to choose. I know it’s difficult because our perceptions have been conditioned by the way we have been taught to perceive from infancy. The good news is: we can choose to perceive and experience our reality differently. But it takes monitoring our thoughts. That’s why I am here to remind you when you get caught up in the illusion.
When you look at the clock and the display reads 11:11, what does that mean to you?
I call it a “MAGICAL, MYSTICAL MICHAEL” moment (MMM for short) and I celebrate those days when I notice it twice.
Right! And in that moment, your love calls me to you … because it calls me to your mind and the love dimension where we are one.
When you go to sleep at night, how do you prepare for the night?
I turn on my MJ3 player on my headboard and listen to your voice for about half or three-quarters of an hour. I call it “snuggle time.”
[Michael laughs.]
If it has been a busy day and I haven’t gotten a chance to listen to your voice throughout whatever activity I have been immersed in, I particularly look forward to our “snuggle time.” It has become an extremely cherished part of my day.
Often, I receive assurance that you are here through the songs that play during that half hour. My MJ3 player is permanently set to shuffle among the songs on my “favorites” playlist which contains almost one hundred songs. There are times that I feel you so strongly in the music that comes up on that playlist. Last night was one of those times.
Will you tell me about it?
Sure! Well, last night I was in mourning mode and felt that I just had to watch you for a little while. So, I popped in a DVD that I call “Totally AWESOME Performances” which contains random performances from your entire career. I watched three or four, including Elizabeth, I Love You, which I was blessed to see in person, and ending with Earth Song from the Royal Brunei concert.
Then, I decided to go to bed and turned on the MJ3 player. As I settled into my pillows and got comfortable, I heard:
Gotta find a way somehow
Nothing’s gonna stop me now
Gotta find a way somehow
Even though you’re gone
Even though you’re gone
I thought that was a perfect song to hear in the circumstances because it so closely matched my mood. Then, the set list started in earnest and went something like this:
This Is It
In Our Small Way
Speechless
She Was Loving Me
Fall Again
Love Never Felt So Good
Someone in the Dark
I always call the demo for Chicago She Was Loving Me because that was your name for it; I call the remix version “the duck version.” I wish they hadn’t changed the entire feeling and character of that song when they “contemporized” (which is just another way of saying “remixed”} it.
When She Was Loving Me begins, the bass is a wave of energy that just gives me a total body rush … it’s so deep and sensual … and when your voice begins, I just melt. Last night, uncharacteristically, that happened when all of these songs started. I felt you so close. I felt you were trying to tell me something.
And did you get any kind of message from the songs that played?
Well, when I look at it in retrospect, I think the overall message is: Enough with the grief, already! Let’s get busy!
[Michael laughs.] Well, I wouldn’t put it in exactly those terms, but it’s to the point and succinct.
Actually, when looking at just the titles and not even considering the emotion or lyrics of the songs listed, the message is pretty clear:
This Is It! This is the way it is. Resistance is ineffective. This is the hand we were dealt; let’s PLAY with it. We need to do what we can In Our Small Way. Love is magical and its effects leave us Speechless. You know that; you have experienced it.
She Was Loving Me always gives me gooseflesh. It gets my fullest possible attention the moment it starts. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing, when that song starts … I stop. Sometimes, I put whatever I’m doing aside and dance to it and I always imagine that I’m dancing a slow dance with you, my heart. It’s not so much the lyrics of the song; it’s the feel of it … the emotion that bass evokes in me. There’s an intimacy to it that I just can’t put into words. It’s a wave of undiluted, inescapable love to me – like being dipped in hot, molten love.
Fall Again is a plea to renew and deepen our relationship. It represents, for me, your invitation after the events of 2009 to rekindle our “spiritual connection.” We all need to realize that Love Never Felt So Good as it does now, when you are with us in an entirely different and more intimate way than ever.
And, finally, “When someone in the dark reaches out to you … It touches off a spark that comes shining through … It tells you “never be afraid.” I remember so well when I first heard that song and recognized you as my “someone in the dark.”
Promise me
We’ll always be
Walking the world … together
Hand-in-hand
Where dreams never end
My star secret friend …
And me.
And I have promised that … repeatedly in these Conversations … from the first to the most recent.
The thing is that I also felt so reassured … and loved … and cherished.
Good! There ya go! That was the point. Like I’ve told you so many times before: I LOVE YOU MORE!
Just put your trust in my heart
And meet me in paradise
I’m here with all of you, if you will let me be here with all of you. It doesn’t matter where you are, “where there is love, I’ll be there.” You know that, don’t you?
Yes, Michael, I know that. And I can’t tell you how unbelievably grateful I am in that knowledge.
Good! You of all people should know that!
Grief and anger and excessive mourning over what is does no good … and it can block you from feeling my presence, as I’ve told you before. You get yourself all tied up in knots and it becomes a little harder for me to untangle those knots and get you back to the joy you feel in my love and your awareness of it.
Please don’t get me wrong. I know that your grief is founded in the love that we have all found here together; I appreciate all your love; I understand that as spiritual beings still very much committed to your human experience, you depend on your human, physical senses to relate to your reality. You want to see me; you want to hear me; you want to feel me with your physical senses.
However, we are creating a new reality, here … one that holds great promise for you and for your world. In order to create this new reality, which recognizes and promotes the spiritual aspects of the human experience that have been ignored for centuries, we have to exercise the spiritual senses you all were endowed with in considerable depth. Sometimes, you don’t understand that you have an entire array of spiritual senses that need to be developed and that is what we are doing here.
All of you are making so much progress in this and I am so proud of you all. However, occasionally, some of you think of all the sad things that happened in the past and you start to wallow.
I was not wallowing! I was commemorating!
Yeah! That’s what I said, “wallowing!’ [Michael giggles.]
Okay, so maybe I went a little overboard, huh?
[Jan gets a visual of Michael throwing a round life preserver from an ocean going vessel into a vast expanse of water.]
Okay, now, that is just plain cruel.
Well, if you can tease me, I can tease you!
The point is that things have changed. And that’s okay. I don’t deny that. It is inevitable. Change is what life is all about; it is the one constant you can count on, regardless of context. You are experiencing this as a sad thing, especially at this time of year, instead of celebrating all the wonderful things that have occurred in the past eight years for all of you.
Some of you have traveled to places you never thought you would see in a million years. Some of you have met people who will become lifelong friends. Others are developing talents you had always told yourselves were impossible for you. Some of you have done all three. All of this is a process of expansion for all of us.
You think of it as the anniversary of my death. These thoughts lead you to all the sad and uncomfortable things that occurred leading up to what you perceive as that ending. “The last song … the last rehearsal … the last whatever …” which inevitably leads to gloomy thoughts and wallowing in what could have been “if only …”
The thing is: there is no such thing as death. It is the anniversary of our expansion … the first step of our ASCENSION. And that is more than sufficient cause for celebration.
I have an idea that may help. Have you ever tried thinking of it as OUR BIRTHDAY? Because it is, you know. It is the anniversary of our union. We celebrate the passage from invisible to visible as our birthday. Why can’t we celebrate the passage from visible to invisible as another birthday? It makes a lot more sense because it was not just MY birthday. We share it. It was all of yours as well.
All of you who hear me in the music or in these Conversations … who see me in little signs like license plates and crescent moons and full moons and repeating numbers, it is your birthday, too. It was when WE were born to this new kind of relationship we have spent the last eight years exploring.
As I told you several times during my physical life, believe me, the best is yet to come if you can just stop resisting what was and begin to celebrate what IS. I am not done with you, yet. We have so much still to explore.
When you live in our ONENESS, it becomes more difficult to be overcome by grief because you realize in all those little signs that I am right here waiting for you to be ready to take the next step in realizing and experiencing our ONENESS more fully … more intimately … for all time.
Now that we have that out of the way, I want you to tell me about your recent trip.
Okay, Beloved. For some time now, I have hesitated to travel to Los Angeles and Neverland during what has become known in recent years as “Michael Week.” The trip, itself, is a grueling experience for me. In addition, there are so many people … and so many events scheduled … during that week that the energy of the week becomes frantic and overwhelming for me, which produces a certain amount of anxiety. I try to mask it, but I am not cut out for all that activity. It’s like trying to be something I know I am not.
Yeah, that is never a good situation. I always felt a little baffled by all the pandemonium that attended me trying to go anywhere. You know that I was generally uncomfortable in large crowds, too, unless I was on stage. I do understand how you feel.
While I do not judge the many celebrations that occur and I do not impose my affinity for more contemplative activity on anyone else, for me as an individual who craves quiet communion with you as the uppermost reason for the trip, the hectic schedule becomes a bit disorienting. And as I am getting older I find it a little harder to keep up. My feet swell; my knees ache; my back and ankles become increasingly uncomfortable as the week goes on and I find the discomfort distracting. I have never found large crowds comfortable and it seems that my discomfort is increasing as the years go by.
In addition, some of the people who gather in Los Angeles for the anniversary celebrations are more concentrated on the “Superstar” persona and less focused on the “spiritual master” that I think of when I think of you and that is one of the things I appreciate most about you.
Oh? What’s that?
You have the ability to meet each of us where we are in our individual journeys with you and lead us forward from there.
Of course! You are all on the same journey. You’ve just stopped at different rest stops along the way, as we’ve talked about before when we discussed the trial of Conrad Murray, if you’ll forgive the analogy. [Michael laughs.]
[Reference: Volume 1, Installment 25, Page 249]
This year, a couple of my friends invited a few of us to a “spiritual retreat” focusing on your ongoing spiritual impact on our lives in the wilds of the Canadian Rocky Mountains – Lake Louise, to be exact. From the moment I heard of this idea, I wanted to be a part of it. It sounded so up my alley. I felt a strong sense of being “called” (for lack of a better term.) I determined then and there that I was going to make my attendance at this spiritual retreat happen, somehow.
Good! You are beginning to listen to some of those promptings that are a little less tangible. They can’t really be defined. You “felt a sense of calling.” There is just a sense of knowing that this experience will benefit you in some way. And, as always, when you are benefitted, the world is benefitted because a healed you equals a healed world.
As so often happens when you are involved, my love, the obstacles to my participation … from obtaining a new passport to figuring out how to get there … seemed to just dissolve and blow away. I spent the months leading up to the trip making little gifts and imagining myself there and painting my imaginings. In other words, I was totally absorbed in visualizing the trip and the sense of renewal and revival it would afford.
And? How did it go?
Like clockwork, Beloved, as always. As you mentioned earlier, I had often heard that Lake Louise was one of the few places of natural beauty – nearly untouched and pristine – left on this beautiful planet, but I had never anticipated that I would get the opportunity to see it up close and personal. It was such a blessing in every sense of the term. The trip, itself, was the longest road trip I have ever been on (two full 14 hour days in the vehicle) but I was with three friends in a comfortable van.
Not only can I forgive your little analogy above … I so appreciate it after that road trip. There were times when I thought that I would give anything for a rest stop. As a matter of fact, as we were driving through Saskatchewan, the Canadian authorities must have been aware of this need because they had placed porta-potties in little off road sites for easy access specifically for such occasions. How thoughtful of them!
We had your music and your words to pass the time in total immersion with you and we were all looking forward to seeing the beautiful mountains when we arrived and sharing our “Michael” stories.
The scenery was beautiful beyond words, the mountains in the distance snow-capped between the nearer objects and the sky. We stayed with our friends in Calgary the first night and visited the tree they planted several years ago in memory of you in a beautiful park overlooking Calgary, Alberta, Canada to begin our pilgrimage.
As we drove into the mountains, they loomed larger and larger and gorgeous waterfalls could be seen cascading down the rocky cliffs as the snow melted. What a beautiful drive it was; we couldn’t take enough pictures of the area.
Our hotel was located at the foot of the mountains and was surrounded by snow-covered peaks for our entire five-day stay. As a matter of fact, there was a blizzard that dropped about six inches of snow on May 24.
We spent the entire time immersing ourselves in your energy with daily sunrise meditations at Lake Louise, an energy vortex reputed to be dedicated to St. Michael the Archangel, which seemed eminently appropriate … and eating fabulous food at the restaurants at the hotel and in the immediate vicinity.
There were planned group sessions during which we all shared our experiences with you both before and after the day the earth stood still and invited you to be among us. Our beautiful artist brought many of her paintings to decorate the living area of our meeting room, so you were very present in all our thoughts.
It was amazing to hear everyone’s stories and realize that, although individuals with different backgrounds, ages, and experiences, we all shared many common elements in our ongoing relationships with you, including experiencing the thought that we had all gone crazy and deciding that sanity (as the world defines it) is way over-rated, anyway.
I had been feeling that I wanted to renew our relationship and the energy of the physical area, the beautiful mountain scenery, and the companionship of this group of friends who share that relationship were perfect for the purpose. The only drawback was that I had underestimated the tendency for the mountains to fluctuate so drastically in temperature and had not packed enough winter clothing. As a result, I managed to catch a miserable cold on the second day there. By the third day it had settled in for the long haul, which curtailed my fullest possible participation for the rest of the week a little.
Nevertheless, I would not have traded the experience for all the tea in China. On the return trip, we took a different route and were able to stop at Rushmore (yet another place I never thought I would see) and eat lunch at the wonderful cafeteria below the monument.
On my return, and once I recovered from my illness, I created a little video with some of the photos of the mountains and a poem I wrote to preserve the memories of this remarkable journey.
One of the most remarkable discoveries I made was that I can manage to feel you with me anywhere; I don’t have to travel to Los Angeles. I felt you very strongly and talked to you throughout this recent pilgrimage.
Of course! I believe I told you that earlier in these Conversations. I am with you always and you are always in my heart.
So, now that your two weeks of focusing on all the sad things that happened in the past is over, let’s return to being grateful and immersing our thoughts and energies in our ONENESS.
We have lots to do.
Indeed, we do, Beloved. And I am sorry, but I have added another activity to our already fairly full schedule.
Oh? What’s that?
I am determined to learn how to read music. It’s a little like learning a whole new language with a different alphabet. Can you help?
No … not really. I don’t read music.
I know, but I went out and bought myself a keyboard a couple of weeks ago and I want to learn how to play … or at least be able to hunt and peck my way through … some of your music. I have the Jackson 5 Anthology, Dangerous, and HIStory sheet music books and I am going to teach myself how to play at least the easiest ones.
But I can encourage you and support you when you get discouraged.
I figure a keyboard is easier to play than a harp and there are no strings to break or tune. So, it would probably be easier to teach myself to read music using it. Then, I can move up to the harp.
Just remember not to get discouraged. And don’t forget what we’ve learned with all your other activities.
I know … Practice, practice, practice until you get it right … then, practice some more until you get it beautiful. It will definitely be a challenge.
You go, gurl!
Withachildsheart's Blog 