Celebrating Mary Jane

REMINDER from Mano:

As we celebrate Mary Jane’s writing our blog, I celebrate that I have been able to touch many lives and make many friends.

REMARKS from Barbara:

As I prepare to write this blog, I am surprised to realize Mano has orchestrated 141 offerings to date. 12 years ago when I refused to write his Blog, Mano suggested I ask Mary Jane if she would do it. She was charmed by his request. She created 68 blogs before she died March 2019. 

REMEMBERING Mary Jane:

Today I share her last blog to celebrate with enormous gratitude giving me the experience and confidence to continue sharing Mano’s thoughts after Mary Jane died.

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Celebrating Mary Jane’s 12^th Anniversary From Her First Blog

Blog #142

Mary Jane’s Final Blog
Originally presented in January 2019

The Arbor Day tree walk with a small group of TreeSisters (see last month’s blog), turned out to be a pivotal touchstone for me. We visited six trees in Nevada City’s downtown area. The guardian/owner of the first one, a towering tulip tree, ended her presentation by thanking the tree for its vital role in bringing her to Nevada City and the house on a busy corner of the main street. The tulip tree is the first thing she sees out her window each morning, and it continues to nurture her daily. Before we started on down the street, this friend pointed out some bruises that crossed her nose and cheeks and explained how they’d occurred when she was running after her granddaughter. (Just in case we wondered about them, she said.) It only came to me later that this little consciousness-raising comment may have been just the impetus I needed to become personal myself, when we reached the London plane tree I’d been communicating with. I found myself unexpectedly talking about how the tree had been giving me strength to do another PET scan and find out what the melanoma has been up to in my body for the previous eight months. We spark off one another and form networks, I mused, in the same way I was feeling the network of strength among the trees we visited and talked with—and the way they were transmitting that strength to us.

That night I had one of those powerful dreams. I was lying on a black mat on the ground with two or three other TreeSisters, at the confluence of meadow and woods. We were doing an AmpCoil treatment—that resonance-balancing machine that is popping up around town and that I’ve been using. I was stretching my mind to articulate a “phase II” healing process. Then I was by myself, and a peacock and coyote were rushing toward me from different directions. I wasn’t afraid but wanted the other women to come back, so I dropped to the ground and yelled “help me, help me.” When I returned to consciousness in the dream, one of the women was there with some fox kits in her arms—the coyote had turned out to be a pregnant fox. 

It was significant to me that with the animals, I had moved from head to heart, and that the coyote/fox, as cunning trickster, had something to teach me. And the peacock too, of course. In my work to make contact with the melanoma being, to accept it as an entity I’m to continue relating with, I kept wondering if I’d been naive in my striving to be straight forward, honest, and authentic. Perhaps I still haven’t figured out the “cunning/trickster” angle very well. My question became: What is right action in the face of those slivers of truth arriving to round out the picture.

The PET scan results showed melanoma all over my body—liver, lungs, bones, lower abdomen, maybe brain, even vocal chords. So here I am in a new phase of the cancer that was diagnosed in 2010. Once this metastasis occurs there’s really no treatment for uveal (eye) melanoma, so I am in the land of miracles, holding life (so precious) and death (also precious) at the same time as best I can. In my own work, this TreeSisters group somehow thrills me—the possibility of forming a new and special kind of network, fearless, kind, and unselfconscious. 

A week or so later an anthroposophic massage therapist, kind enough to come to my house, told me: “You wouldn’t have to be very sensitive to pick up the presence of nature elementals all around the room.” Then she suggested that it might be my destiny to help heal the rift between the angelic, human, and elemental realms, and that my personal healing could occur through this larger mission. Whether this comes down, ultimately, on the side of life or death I don’t know, but it seemed right, especially as Barbara’s book makes its way to be printed this week.

Since then quite frankly, I have been struggling with the difficulty of keeping my head clear as I learn to use pain medication. It is fascinating to me, like going in and out of sleep, demanding patience with myself. Barbara had a little conversation with Mano about the future of the blog, and he recommended that we keep on going. “Mary Jane needs this anchor to stay on earth. This keeps her in the flow of the Council’s healing energy. We have much appreciation and gratitude for her excellent creation of the blog. We regret that she is experiencing so much pain .db. Unfortunately it is being used to keep her focused on her destiny path.”