We Have the Power

I want to convey to you something simple and yet very powerful.

It uses the imagination. It allows for the truth that we are living our lives from the inside out. What we are inside determines what we experience as our world.

Yesterday, I was sitting on the couch crying when my husband came home. He came home three hours later than I thought he would. He went to his French class (as an American living in Quebec, he takes French classes) and then instead of coming straight home, he went to his friend's house and had lunch, talked, and ended up visiting for two hours or more.

While he was doing that, I was imagining that he was dead, killed suddenly in a car crash or something, killed so suddenly that nobody could have foreseen it, just like my brother.

My brother died in 2000, suddenly dead of a heart attack at the age of 43. He died so unexpectedly, seemingly in the peak of health and vitality, that when the authorities in Denver, Colorado, where he had been living and where he died, called my sister to tell her, she didn't believe them. She wanted proof.

I didn't know he had died for almost two days after the rest of my family knew. My father had died less than a month before and I had gone into retreat after spending weeks being so caring and loving toward everyone in my family. Finally, I wanted some time to care for myself. I lived in a remote area, on a mountain road and had no telephone land line, only a cell phone. I had turned off my cell phone so that I could be on my own, quiet, no demands made upon me for just a couple of days.

They kept trying to reach me and couldn't. So they called the police. The police came to my house. I could see them walking in from the gravel road, the one young officer already taking off his hat as he approached my door. I remembered then, so clearly and powerfully, how the young police officer who was my younger brother's friend had described walking up to my parents' door to tell them that Christopher had died back in 1996. He had spoken of the tell-tale holding of the hat in both hands, turning it round and round for something to do, for something to focus on while telling people that their loved one had died. And I knew why they were there at my door even before I opened it.

They didn't know that I had just lost my father. They didn't even know who had died. They told me that my family were desperately trying to contact me and that someone in my family had died.

I thought it was my mother. So soon after losing her husband of 47 years.... No, it was John. The one with whom I was most close. The one on whom I depended more than I could admit even to myself.

I wanted that time, then, in the days after I heard the news of his death, to be all about me. "Let this be somehow my time to be comforted and cared for!" was my plea to the heavens. But it was not to be. It was, as with Christopher's death, and the death of my father, up to me to be the strong one, the one on whom others depended. Even though I told them, "I can't do it this time...." whispered it, really, in a desperate attempt to find the strength and comfort from someone else for a change... even so, it fell on me to exercise the family dog, fly to Denver and deal with all of John's affairs, put my grief on hold until after the funeral....

As I sat on the couch yesterday, all of that was there within me, needing to be released, to be resolved.

When my husband saw me crying he did all the right things. (I didn't even know him in 2000 when John died so tragically.) He hugged me. He held my hand. He got a blanket from the bedroom and wrapped me in it. I could have written a message in the sky, "This man is so wonderful in the way that he loves me!"

But it wasn't enough. I was hurting and needing to find resolution for what had happened in 2000.

I went into the forest and sat. I got chilled sitting there and then came in and had a hot bath. I had supper. I sat by candle light and felt, and remembered, and felt some more.

Then, I realized that I could bring my wonderful husband into that scenario. I could IMAGINE him there, in 2000, with me, holding my hand, saying all the right things, doing all the supportive things that I was so desperate to have someone do. And so I did. And it felt so good. And it healed the hurt and terrified self that I was then. I literally felt as if I would crumble into madness, into catatonic madness in my unmet grief when John died. Instead, I did the dishes and walked the dog and took endless phone calls from friends of the family. In my imagined new scenario, my husband was there with me every step of the way, helping, understanding, listening. He said, "You're allowed to scream if you want to." He said, "You're allowed to feel so angry that you want to lash out and hurt someone, or hurt yourself." He said, "You are not alone in this. I am here. I am not going anywhere."

And then, finally, after more than twelve years, my needs had been met. I had imagined them being met, by this dear friend who happens to be my husband, and so they were. See, this is the key thing. When we imagine that it is so, it is so. On one very real level, it is so.

So, then I slept.

And this morning, I woke up and did it again. This time, I was addressing the child I was so many years ago and saying, "You are a good, sweet person and will have a life of joy and self-fulfillment." Only this time, I as I am now, was saying that in my imagination to the child that I was then. And it felt so good!

As we imagine it, so it is. And the future is the past healed. That last line does not come from me, it comes from Tobias, channeled through Geoffery Hoppe. You can find the messages, many of them, at www.crimsoncircle.com

I imagine now that I am surrounded by good, wise and true friends. And I am.

As we imagine it, so it is.