How I missed my computer.

Well, here I am, eight months later not having posted on any of my blogs.  I have been busy though and I went back to work.  Yes, that is crazy but the government took away my health care and so I thought I might as well go get some more travel money since I have to stay here for six months.
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I came back the end of Sept last year after having spent a couple of months in South America.  I was there to work with Ayahuasca at two different centers in Peru, Blue Morpho and Ayahuasca Wasi.  Both were great.

When I got home I had no real plan where to live and most of my stuff was in storage. I parked temporarily at my sister and brother-in-laws, Joanne & Bert, at Pike Lake Saskatchewan. That worked well and we decided I should stay all winter. That was useful for them also as they live elsewhere. Pike Lake is not  situated near a 3G network so my Internet use was restricted by a sporadic signal. I was there for five months.

Next I stayed at a friends in Saskatoon to watch her house while she traveled and during that time I found the perfect spot for me. It is a TINY but cheap bachelor apartment and I have been here for a month. I moved most of my stuff from the storage and it is oh-so-good to settle down again. It is just right to have this place to come home to when I wander off again.

I have been making the most of my restored health care with dental work and a couple of minor surgeries.

Today I tried to use my phone for a WI-FI spot and it works perfectly. I am writing this post on my computer through a wireless connection to my phone.

During this time I have also been working on a home study course in Modern Shamanism that is awesome.  More on that another time.

What I am trying to say is that I missed writing my blogs.  I did a blog post every single day while I was traveling the winter before last for six and a half months and I really enjoyed it.

So hello again, or for the first time.  See you soon.

One year later ....

Hello again!
I landed back in Saskatoon on April the tenth after a journey of a lifetime in Asia.
If you would like to see the notes and pictures from that trip go to my other blog Notes from a Wandering Traveller.

I am happy to get back to the platform of this blog where I can incorporate some channeling into the mix. Thanks for hanging in there, I appreciate that you are still here.

Daily posts are my goal but they may be on either blog. After six months of daily blogging on the road it is a well ingrained habit. I need a subject that I am excited to write about though. Don't get me wrong, I am excited about my city of Saskatoon I just don't want to search out topics every day. I will share tantalizing bits of my amazing city occasionally as I come across them.

A word about Blue Morpho Tours
At a beautiful camp deep in the Amazon jungle, near the city of Iquitos is the beautiful thatched roof camp of Blue Morpho where lives are changed on a daily basis.

I have been known to frequent this camp and highly recommend it to others.

Here is what they say about themselves: "Blue Morpho has blended traditional shamanism, shamanic workshops, and Universal Spirituality into a tour that offers a truly unique and life-altering experience in the heart of the Amazon. Blue Morpho’s mission is to provide a safe, supportive space where individuals can experience personal growth, energetic evolution, and healing through traditional Amazonian shamanism. This mission has been, and always be, Blue Morpho’s goal; it’s what drives us forward today."



A new branch of their work called Modern Shamanism has been created. It is a block of teachings which apply shamanic wisdom to daily life. The web site is new and is scheduled to be open mid May at http://www.modernshamanism.org/

In the meantime you can tap into a facebook page of the same intent at: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Modern-Shamanism/159340477461227?sk=info.

If you are interested follow along there are great things to come.


We all have our own paths to journey for learning. Shamanism is one of mine at the moment. It has been a year since I have been there and I am looking forward to going again this August.

There will be more on this for sure but for now I will leave you with this poem which I enjoyed.

Someone seeking learning, knows more and more.
Someone seeking Tao, knows less and less.
Less and less until
things just
are what
they
are
•
By simply being,
everything gets done.
Get things done
by letting them happen.
Struggling all the time,
gets you nowhere.

Tao Te Ching

Notes from a Wandering Traveller

Wow, again it has been a long time between posts. Suffice it to say that I am finally retired and already off in Iquitos, Peru where I am working with some Shamans in Ayahuasca.

I am having a fascinating time here and since I will be travelling for a while I decided to set up a separate blog "Notes from a Wandering Traveller".
Please join me there. http://notesfromawanderingtraveller.blogspot.com/

"The Last Vestiges of Normalcy" will continue to operate as well but will be dedicated to channeling and other spiritual interests.

I am going back for a second shamanic camp in a few days where I will diet Sanango for the first time. I am really looking forward to it. I will be away from Internet access for 12 days.

I recommend the Blue Morpho camp to anyone who would like to begin a journey of a lifetime with Ayahuasca. The camp is very safe and the Shamans are very experienced and very ethical. Read more on Blue Morpho Tours. http://www.bluemorphotours.com/

Getting Unplugged.

May is almost over and I haven't posted since March. I have not been idle, just otherwise focused. It seems to require a lot of think time to plan the closing down of everything life has been. Some more "stuff" has to be gotten rid of due to lack of space and sometimes that involves a mental releasing prior to the physical release. Ah well, I am slowly moving in the direction of trusting the universe to provide.



Finalizing retirement plans, setting financial matters so they continue on automatic, organizing retirement insurance including travel and consolidating important information so that it can be easily utilized along the road have been my focus of late.



I am happily planting out flowers and enjoying the beautiful spring weather in my borrowed garden. It is wonderful to get my hands into the soil once again.



I have a back-log of channel requests that I will attempt to deliver in the next several days.

In the meantime, for those in the Northern Hemisphere, I hope you are enjoying spring as much as I am.


Saskatchewan "Living Sky" shots are courtesy of Terry McBride of Saskatoon.



Namaste'

It's official!

I am now a card carrying "SENIOR CITIZEN".

The picture is very dark and hard to photograph. It shows a view of Canada's Parliament Hill at night.

Its funny how nobody gets excited about turning "senior" and yet they are all over turning into a teenager, turning 16, turning 18 and even turning 21. After that it begins to be about holding back your age. I remember I had my first (and worst) age crisis at the old age of 29.

I guess we go merrily along without mentioning how we are dreading getting older until one day we "hit" the big 40. Nothing graceful sounding about that, and friends tend to dig in with the old jokes and the black balloons. I think they do that at 40 because they think that 40 really is getting old and they don't want to point out the obvious later on.

By 50 you are starting to care less about how fast you are aging and are kind of proud to have lived half a century.

By 60 you are starting to get excited about retirement, like when you were 16 and couldn't wait to be 18. The only difference being they were waiting to start and you are waiting to finish. Those last 5 years don't take so long to go by and then there is something to celebrate, the end of life in the working world.

Sure, it doesn't always happen at 65 but there is a point where you are done and you are clear to do anything you want. Remember being a child and how delicious time was. Those long endless summer days, spending time with friends - all day if you wanted. Wake up whenever you want and sleep whenever you want and you don't even have to be responsible for your own expenses if you have savings or a pension.

So I say, lets celebrate turning senior, lets start enjoying senior benefits and discounts and lets talk it up. Congratulate seniors on entering the next phase of their life. Tell them to live it up and do everything they always wanted to do. I know I will.

The White Shag Rug

My “stuff” is all crammed into a 5 by 10 storage shed. Whew! It went well I think. Well, I did have a wee bit left over after all the giving away, selling and packing off to the shed. On Oct 30 and 31 there was a half ton truck load and 4 small loads in my car which had to come with me to the house. I expect to have less when I leave here as there is a lot of sorting to be done on clothes and files and other small personal stuff. Now, I wonder what I did with the whole month of holidays. I always seem to do it this way, packing boxes as the movers are carrying them out, moving mountains of stuff in my car because it wasn’t packed in time for the movers. Well, I am here now and that is all that matters. I have 8 months to get ready for the next move where the plan is to emerge from here with only a back-pack ready to take on the world.

I am not naturally a neat person, in fact, I am happiest if things I use regularly are just sitting around where I can easily grab them. As a house-sitter things can’t be quite like that. My new temporary digs are very pristine, nicely furnished and artfully decorated. Clutter has no place here. Everything that I use I put right away after. The environment appears untouched, except of course, for my bedroom/office where I allow my natural tendencies full reign.

Another tendency I have is to like things in my environment to be practical, user friendly and easy to clean. When I was introduced to my beautiful bedroom it had a lovely gold brocade bed cover with matching shams. “That looks cozy”, I thought, moments before the bed cover’s owner said “We don’t sleep with that”. Now, just keeping my mouth shut, I am thinking “Then why do we have it on my bed?” The place did look very nice though and I was happy to have found it. Later that day I put the “too fancy for me” bed cover into a closet in the spare bedroom and replaced it with a cozy user friendly quilt.

After having been here almost a week I began to wonder about the cleaning requirements of the beautiful white shag area rug on the floor of my bathroom. I flipped over a corner discovering that it was jute backed. “Oh oh!” I thought, “No washing machine for this rug!” There was a tag on another corner with cleaning instructions, or so I hoped. DO NOT DRY CLEAN. Plain enough, but what then? Is there a third option? The tag also said, Vacuum vigorously and spot clean stains immediately. That beautiful little rug now resides in a corner of the family room where it will never be stepped on by me.

These two small issues aside, I am 3 weeks into my first ever house-sitting gig and am more than completely happy with everything else.

The next few months may be quite uneventful but I will post if something interesting comes up.

The couch is gone!

I brought in a chair from the spare bedroom and the living-room still looks fine, but it is a sign that the transition is beginning. The couch went to Joanne and Bert’s cottage at Pike Lake. I will still be sitting on it from time to time, but its absence emphasises the change which is in the process of unfolding.
I love that I have plenty of time to process these changes and to be comfortable as I separate myself from the things which will no longer be needed for my journey. It could be exciting to speculate upon what might unfold but I don’t do much of that. I am totally just immersed in relocating my possessions and organizing my details into a coherent and portable format. There is no sense of loss or fear of disaster, just a muted puzzlement as to why these options are so natural and easy to make at this time.
October will be a month of holidays and total focus on the project More on that later.

And so it begins!

10 more months until my retirement but so much to do before then as I prepare to pop out of the coocoon provided by working life into the great unknown. I hadn’t spent much time thinking about this transition until this year. I was neither looking forward to it or dreading it and now it is imminent. Of all life’s transitions; starting school, starting college, getting a job, getting married, having children, starting a business and getting divorced, this may well be the most exciting and challenging of them all to this point.
I plan to move into my back pack and become nomadic for a time. There are no fixed plans yet as to where I will go and for how long. This blog will have the updates as I have time to write as well as other random thoughts as I process the journey. Please share your comments with me too as I like to know how you are also.

Greetings!

Welcome to my blog. I have high hopes of writing "something" regularly. I expect I will note my observations on life, retirement, travel or whatever I am on about at the moment.

I expect to be moving around quite a bit, so this blog will also be my link to the folks at home.

I am on a learning curve in this venture. Patience, it will get better!