I think of meditation as the means to calm in times of trouble as well as the stairway to eternity

The above graphic always makes me feel calm when I look at it. I have returned to meditation this evening after a tumultuous day. I had a comforting message from Raymond that he had received financial help to get him through another month in Texas at least. I am so happy he will have the chance to do his one man show in a festival at another theater four more dates this month. We have been e-mailing each other and even did text messaging on gmail. He said he was feeling the power of God in this answer to a prayer. He was coming down with a bad cold, so will probably not be able to blog about it today.
I go to the eye doctor tomorrow for another post op check and received in the mail my date to have my other cataract surgery on the 20th. My daughter Ronda has reported that she will be available to drive me home and back later in the day for a post op visit to the doctor and home again.
When I told her about my neighbor she asked me if I did not think another HUD complex wouldn't be better with less younger people with problems. I thought of moving to the Silvercrest down the street last summer when I split with Doc, and if anything happened to him I would think very seriously of moving over there. As it is I can go down to Doc's part of the day and we are still doing videos together. He has never been threatening at all, even though I get tired of his drinking, but I doubt he will change much. I enjoy him more than anyone I know in the morning after he has had a good night's sleep. We are so compatible in our interests. I am afraid I would be very lonely somewhere else without him as he has proved to be quite an intellectual companion for me. I naturally wish he did not drink so much, but I wish I did not eat so much. It is hard for an overweight person to get too indignant about some other person's excesses. Especially when I have such a hard time losing. Even when I want to.
But I am going to continue to meditate on these addiction problems to see if I can find the key to more control.
Nothing much else has happened today. Management has not responded to any incident reports that may have been filed. This afternoon my neighbor was served with restraining order papers, and according to two uniformed men who were at his door when I came home, he has to appear in court this week. I think he called them. He and the other person, a woman, seem to be calling the police on each other.
Old ladies and young men with behavior problems do not seem too good of mix in a housing complex, but I was here first, so we will see. Doc would never move over to the Silvercrest. It is Salvation Army, and that is too 'religious' for him. I would not be able to do the things I do with him or breakfast with him every day as I do if we did not live in the same complex.
I just pray for more peace in here. There are a lot of troubled people in here and I try to spread calm whenever I can. Nikita, the new chair person of the tenants' organization and the other officers just opened the newly remodeled, painted, and cleaned up video room which is now a big spacious room to hold our collection of videos and will also feature a computer online for residents to tap their e-mails. I was glad to see what a good job they have done. That will help cheer up the residents and give them more to do. It also features a big wide screen and two flat screens for exercise tapes, etc.
So now I am getting ready to meditate and to pray for oil over troubled waters.

Time for spooks is here!

I thought it would be a good time to talk about my latest preoccupation with meditation developing into doing some therapy for the dead or dying. My sister LaRae paid me a startling visit the other night. I was sitting ready to go into my meditation in the evening when I felt her presence in the room as strong as I have ever felt it since she passed. Later she said that meditation had cleared out my mind and given me more energy to pick up the presence of the spirits. She said that she came to engage me in doing some of the work she has been doing for years (she has been gone 20 years to the other side). She helps people when they pass over to get used to the idea of being gone. She has even told me in a dream that she took one young woman who was burned to death in a fire along with her little child to live with her a while. The young woman was still in her thirties so her death was a great shock to her. We had known her family all our lives. My sister stayed with me all night working to show how this could be done by using telepathic powers to interact with these people.
So last night I felt my sister had gone back to Utah for an important conference that was taking place up there under the jurisdiction of her daughter. So I was left to my own devices. I started going over every person I knew who had gone from here, and eventually I came to a woman who had passed over a year ago after a lot of terrible suffering in a hospital for months with an infection that could not be cleared up. So I found myself with her helper who said that she still had not recovered and had to have what she thught was heavy medication to get through her days. I told the helper I had not been able to bring myself to go see her in the hospital as this was a rule I usually kept regarding residents here. If they were too sick to be here I would wait until they returned. But I had had a history of clashing with this woman that kept me from talking to her for fear she would begin to talk very negatively again. I thought she was going to die and was upset about how it all came about through an operation to reduce weight.
I feel that this was a harbinger of a meeting I had at the elevator today with another woman still here who apparently has the same horrible infection E had. Tammy said she almost lost her legs due to this infection and she still has it in her intestines. She can barely walk. A scooter has been ordered. This is one of the bravest little women I have ever met who seems to take the worst news stoically and without resentment. I think due to my talk to E's helper on the other side I was able to be very tender with Tammy, trying to comfort her for the six days of hospitalization she had just endured. I saw her break down it must have been just before she went in the hospital when she was sobbing at the elevator, but now she is so courageously resigned, not only to losing the use of her legs but I thought to whatever lies ahead which will surely be a shortened life. She isn't very old either. She has long golden brown hair and a face made even more beautiful by her response to her trials. I could almost see the soon to be angel in her eyes. She has been transforming into this hauntingly beautiful being as some people do when tried with terrible illnesses.
It will probably not be long until she joins the legions of ghosts who have lived in the Westward Ho.
I can hardly wait to see what work I will be doing tonight. I asked if I could not visit some theater people so I could talk about theater there as opposed to the problem of getting original plays done here. I have just been reading a book called the Noel Coward Letters, so tonight he is going to be one of the people I asked to talk to over there to see if he has any ideas about how to get thngs going here in theaters besides Youtube. He will surely understand the obstacles. He is a famous playwright just as Bukowski was a famous poetry and novel writer which were really memoirs thinly disguised as fiction.
I am going to have fun with the spooks! Hee Hee Hee! Scarey huh?

Thanks, Connie, for this fantastic header showing me at my spookiest.