I had cancers on my shoulder and back for years. I just kept piling on more layers of ever-bigger bandages to sop up the blood. They hurt constantly as they spread. I couldn’t find comfortable positions to sleep in, couldn’t use a seat belt, or wear heavy clothes in winter.
So I made my peace and prepared for departure.
Then I got a gal pal. Girlfriends won’t let you get away with that stuff. I finally followed through on many lapsed promises to her by going to a clinic. First time I’d been to a doctor in maybe ten years. He expressed concern. Said I could either spend megabucks I didn’t have for surgery, or hundreds on some expensive cream that might not work. I didn’t consider myself worthy of either. What was my life really worth? What was I contributing to anyone else’s?
I drove home thinking that maybe – just maybe – not for myself, but for my family and lady friend, who seemed to see some lingering potential in me, I might dig up the money for that cream.
I climbed the steps from the woods still lost in uncertainty. The matter was decided for me when I found a tube of the stuff in my medicine cabinet. I live alone. I have no idea where it had come from.
But the story did not turn all Glory of God and Magic of Merlin in an instant, perhaps because I was still gray with doubt, or maybe because I had major lessons to learn yet. I tried the cream for weeks, but it only dug deeper, wider, more painful holes.
So I stopped using it. I really didn’t care anyway. I’d feel just as at home on the next plane of existence. But my new lady friend in England (it was a Facebook relationship; we hadn’t actually met yet) wasn’t having any of that. She had an idea. Since I sent healing to others all over the world, she suggested, why not zap some through myself while I was at it?
She had to keep nagging me. That whole physician heal thyself thing seemed vain, foreign, unacceptable. But every once in a while I did give it a shot.
I headed off to Europe, expecting to live only another year or two.

At our favorite sites, we felt the sacredness, the power, the spirit of the land itself. Christians built churches there centuries ago on spots pagans had already venerated. You can feel the Nature spirit, and the Christ love, empowering and clarifying each other. – In Holy Cross Abbey, outside Tipperary, I stood between relics of The True Cross. Wearing my bag of talismans, I lifted my arms, feeling immense power flooding in from on High. – At the top of the Castle of Edinburgh, St. Margaret’s tiny private chapel opened its sacred aura for all. I felt to be in one of the earth’s radiating centers of love, enfolding all and everywhere in compassion. I felt intensely blessed and profoundly at peace. – We felt early Christian passions mingling with ancient Nature faiths in Rosslyn Chapel, where relics may have been hidden.
In the crumbling shells of centers for worship I felt the surging, sometimes joyous, sometimes agonized and desperate faith of churchgoers from ancient centuries, and of masons who had built those holy sites. An ancient place of worship is much more than tombs and history. It is passion left in the stones by masons as they chipped it together. – It’s babies lost in fields by poor farmers and grieving parents who couldn’t make it in for services. – It is need, it’s fulfillment, and it’s an unquenchable quest. – It is unknowable mysteries; and a deep silent knowing. A building is only sacred to the degree that it taps into something that could never be contained within its structure.
I felt connected to so many special centers. Like a spider weaves its web with many links, and as he moves around he feels vibrations from every point. As with karma, every ripple feeds every other. I carried these spirits within me; just as part of me lived within them.
I was losing my sense of physical presence. Lynden and I were sick for months and I stayed home. The winter broke records and I stayed inside. I got a devastating earache and deafness in Italy, and could hardly have felt more isolated.
As I healed from this, though, it was like I was building a new body. It was like I was buzzing.
We spent six months touring ancient monasteries and spooky sites. Besides pieces of the cross we saw one of the thorns, bones of apostles, the robe and belt of St. Francis; touched a column Jesus may have leaned against while preaching. We spent hours holding and reading the miraculously materialized letters of the theosophical mahatmas. I set the talismans bag down on one of the bound books of these letters, on the baptismal font in Rosslyn Chapel, and the tomb of King Arthur in Glastonbury. Some sites throbbed with power. I felt every part of me coming alive, shining, re-forming itself.
I’m back in the states now, but I am not the person, nor is this the body that left here.
Where the cancer had been there are now only tiny white spaces, and even the freckles are gone.
It’s as though someone or something has erased them.
I was deaf off and on as a kid and have always been somewhat crippled by the residue of that. I let others do the talking while I skulk off into silence. My humor comes from trying to psychologically survive a childhood with no friends of any kind; from making a total hash of trying to figure out what people around me were saying.
But since that months-long earache, my hearing, my mental processes and capacity, and my eyesight have all been improving.
I walk around wondering what that sound is. I stop and it stops. I walk and there it is again.
It turns out I can now here and be distracted by my pant legs rubbing against each other; the clink and scrape of the buckle as I lean in against a counter. I puzzle out a sound I have never heard before and it turns out to be various layers and rhythms within my own breathing.
Inside, with all doors and windows shut. I hear something running loudly along the deck and look out, expecting to see some large mammal, but it is only a tiny bird. I can identify different flying birds by the sounds their wings make against the air.
I can see hummingbirds sitting quietly in trees 50 yards away and know their gender. I can smell things I never could.
Just as I am besieged by offers to sign up for Medicare, which maybe I could take as a time of sliding away toward the end, I am pain free, all my senses are growing sharper, and I am churning out deeper wisdom and more powerful books than ever before.