Grandchildren at dawn
Many people have been sharing their weariness and pain recently, feelings of anger, helplessness and exhaustion, asking how to keep going. I channeled Mary Magdalene directly for one friend and want to share some of her thoughts. I hope others will find her words to be helpful, as I do.
Love, Barbara
Mary: Once upon a time, there was a man, a dear friend; it doesn’t matter where he lived. As in most human societies, he had friends and enemies. He had a wife and children, aging parents, siblings, nieces and nephews, friends, a large village. He was a farmer. Every spring, he prepared the fields with his plow, which he pushed with his own laboring body, break up the soil, and planted the seeds. And now his young grandsons were just barely old enough to learn to do that with him. He was excited to pass on his knowledge and skills.
His seeds were important, not just to his family, but to his neighbors and friends as well. He was a very knowledgeable farmer. His crops were wholesome and large, full of good nutrients. He rotated crops, he understood how to speak to the crops, nourish them with his love, so that the food brought great energy for people. He knew the skill of speaking to the seeds!
The year that I’m talking about, an enemy from afar appeared while he was out working the field. They broke into his home compound. They killed his wife, they killed his children, his grandchildren, even the babies. They killed many friends and neighbors too. Ahhh.
When he found what had happened, his reaction was not to want to go out and kill them. It was just to want to leave the body. A few of these invaders had actually found him, in the field. They had fought with him and injured him, but then their comrades called them off, to flee as they were cowards and being pursued, so they had left him badly injured in the field. Neighbors bore him back to the village, and there he learned about his family. His first thought was, I have nothing left to live for
I was brought to him over a week later as I was one trained to help the sick, injured and weary. I was there for him and the whole village. He seemed to be dying. I sat with him for a long time. I told him that whatever decision he might make was fine, if it was grounded in love, not fear, that I knew his pain was a part of the decision, and there was no right or wrong decision. His essence would live on and come back again and start over to plant new crops, perhaps, or to do whatever he would do next in the world.
I gave him some nourishing soup, fed it to him (He would not refuse me that), washed his wounds and changed the bandages, sat with him for a while, until he went to sleep, telling him I would be back the next day. When I returned the next day, he was sitting up in bed. He was a bit stronger, and he looked me in the eyes, and he said, I choose to live. And I smiled. I was happy to hear that. I asked him what brought about this change of heart. He had a bag of seeds next to him, a large container of seeds. He said, My grandsons, now dead, perished at the hands of these men. This was the year they were going to learn how to plant with me. If I do not plant my seeds, no one will learn how to plant and nurture them. My seeds will die and I will be the killer. These are seeds that I’ve saved year after year, bringing them in with the harvest, drying and storing for the next year. They are meant to feed future generations of my family and my friends. If I do not choose to live, my seeds will die, not only my family, but my seeds. If I revive, I will plant these seeds. I will teach other children how to plant I will continue this passing on of love, of energy, of joy to new generations. I choose to do that.
And then he was exhausted and fell back to sleep.
Day after day, he increased in strength. Others of his village helped him, brought him into their homes, gave him food. As he recovered, eventually, he chose to move back into his family compound, and some young men and women moved in with him. People understood his need to return to his own home and land. They came, lived there with him, and they brought babies into life, and they brought the women to dance and cook and sing, to thatch the roof, to help gather new seeds. and boys to learn the planting of the crops and the growing of the seeds. His home became a center of life again. He lived for many years after that decade, passing on knowledge of the nurturing of seeds out of the love in his heart. This was not a “right” thing to do, a moral obligation. He had free will choice, and if he had chosen otherwise, all would have respected and understood it. But he choose to heal, which meant looking deeply at the enormity of pain he had felt and saying, “I choose to move on, because I have such riches to share, because above all else, I am alive. I have love in my heart and the seeds of love, I am not going to let them die.”
I know he never stopped grieving. I saw him from time to time. He enormously missed his children and his wife, and the grandbabies, but something in him was no longer broken. Something in him came to terms, I would say, with the pain of the human experience, the loss that is part of the human experience, the lack of the individual’s control over that experience. He made his peace with that, with the brutality, with the anger, with the grief, and still was able to say, “there is a life and love to pass on”.
You each have free will choice, and there is not a right or wrong decision, but your process of healing at this point really depends on your choice, and that means coming to terms with the pain and grief of past history, and saying, “I let it go. I choose life and all the gifts of life that I yet have to share.”
And there’s no shame in saying, “No, I’m exhausted, I choose to leave and I’ll come back and do it again when I’m strong”. But here you are, and you may wish to choose life. If you do, Spirit will work with you in every way we can to help support the physical and emotional healing. I am Mary and I leave you now, with love.