Returning to the Heart of a Gnome

Reminder from Mano: When you light a candle, give thanks to the fire spirit.

Here (says Mary Jane) is a tiny story of my life. In mid-March a routine PET scan showed a small spot on my lung (probably a touch of pneumonia from The Cough) and another one on my breast near where last summer’s melanoma was removed. I can’t have surgery until the cough goes away, so I have come home to wait three weeks. What has slowly filled me is great happiness. My highest good, I realize, will be served by abandoning all my normal activities—study groups, meetings, shopping, errands—all but a little heart-required grandson time. I can burrow into my comforters, with candles and beautiful music, sleep, meditate, continue my healing wanderings into childhood and ancestry. The following days have been precious out-of-time ones. When I’m tempted to begin it all again, I tune into the place in my chest where the cough still waits in longing for some deeper kind of attention.

The poet David Whyte, in “Time Is a Season”, says: “To make friends with the hours is to come to know all the hidden correspondences inside our own bodies that match the richness and movement of life we see around us. The tragedy of constant scheduling in our work is its mechanical effect on the hours, and subsequently on our bodies, reducing the spectrum of our individual character and color to a gray sameness. Every hour left to itself has its mood and difference, a quality that should change us and re-create us according to its effect upon us. In many traditional cultures, a particular hour of the day is seen to have a personal, almost angelic presence, something that might be named—though only in hushed tones, and only in ways that reinforce its unknowingness. The Benedictine, Brother David Steindl-Rast, defines an angel as the eternal breaking into time, each particular breakthrough of the numinous utterly extraordinary and utterly itself. Time and each hour of time is a season, almost a personality, with its own annunciation, its own song, its whispering of what is to be born in us. Its appearance like a new conversation in which we are privileged to overhear ourselves participating.”

Recently Barbara has been creating a new book. She has long had a manuscript on the Council of Gnomes, and now, to complete it, she has placed herself in this all-embracing Time space to comb through her years of communications with the elementals and open to new revelations of her life’s work. From our emails and conversations, I would say that this review is bringing her great happiness, as she gives herself permission to simply be with her true self and true experience.

I understand, too, how I can live with a story about myself for many years, and then, with age, wisdom, added information, or necessity it comes to me again from a new angle and clicks into alignment with a greater, higher energy. The resonance refines itself; peace reigns. This arrival of peace, of truth, Barbara always describes as the deep involuntary breath (DIB). When it comes, she knows and trusts. She believes that everyone has some variation of the DIB, which of course doesn’t signify the end of the learning but is a trusted signpost along the way.

The September 2014 blog describes Barbara receiving the Heart of a Gnome from the council. Through her recent reviewing lens, with its added degree of accuracy, she describes the gift anew. “Today I woke up with thoughts about authentic language and ‘I’ messages—that ‘I’ messages come from the heart and ‘you’ messages from the head. And then, voila, Mano helped me remember the gift the council had given me of the Heart of a Gnome, a teaching I had forgotten about.”

She began connecting the “I” message work with the Heart of a Gnome gift. “The heart is authentic and speaks with ‘I’ messages. The heart is personal. It speaks the truth, what it knows and has experienced. The head speaks with ‘you’ messages. It is impersonal, full of opinions and other people’s stories, and it relates beliefs rather than knowing. I have experienced a rebel in my mind, versus a revealer in my heart. My mind acts out in rebellion against plans and purposes I am guided to do. My heart encourages truth through revelation in the action. Akasha’s teaching is that merely having the idea for something to happen will not bring its manifestation. It takes heart desire to fill the idea with substance. The heart is the action motivator. When I think about going to the amphitheater, my mind can easily talk me out of it. (It’s too cold, too late). When my heart wants to go, it happens. As for the Heart of a Gnome, “It is pure, it does not know duality, good and bad. It knows only perfection (‘good’, which to the gnome means ‘God’). It is innocent, like a child, trusting and kind. It is eager to do its best.”

Another revelation was that other helpers she has received in the past—the Joy Guide, the Green Heart, the fairy in her heart—carry the same energy as the Heart of a Gnome. “The Joy Guide was first given to me in 1970, during my first psychic reading. Later in the amphitheater I was told that I had been given a fairy in my heart. And then I received the Heart of a Gnome. I believe these are all different names for the same aspect of consciousness that lives in our heart. All of them have the same quality, the same being; it is the same being I now recognize as the experience of taking deep involuntary breaths when I think, hear, or speak truth. This being is also called the inner child, the innocent one. She is pure and holy and is a constant reminder to live with the truth of heart knowing rather than head knowledge.”

“I see this as such a beautiful gift. I never fully realized the depth of its meaning. As I work with the material for this book, I find that is true for so many things I have experienced and been told. Mano has used this past two months’ work to reveal so many truths in such a deep embrace. As Pamela Eakins has said, ‘Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.’ And as John Powell says, ‘To be honest and open and free, to let you see who I really am, takes the rawest kind of courage.’ ”