I used to call myself an Earth First!er.  But now I’m not sure.

In November 1999, I drove from Colorado Springs, where I’d been a realtor for 3 years, to Tucson to pick up three old friends and drive with them to Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta Wilderness on the Mexican border.

We were meeting up with a dozen other environmental activists at the location where the original four guys, among them our friend and mentor Dave Foreman, had hatched up the idea of a radical environmental movement, enlarging the idea of the Monkeywrench Gang of the novel by Edward Abbey, also a sometime colleague and icon in our midst.

We were not the most radical Earth First!ers.  We were looked down on by the activists of the Northwest.  Once when a controversy arose, we were called Foremanistas, implying we were enslaved in a cult to Dave’s fame.  He’d been interviewed on national news and published the Earth First! Journal, controlling its content, of course, and the Northwest Most Radicals didn’t always like his assessment of things they might have done.  We were not cool.  But we had great parties.

I remember those like halcyon days, an idyllic time of street theater, civil disobedience, camping, even wilderness consciousness raising weekends together.  While others risked their lives, we had mailing parties, potlucks, and did a less intense version of radical.

I had dropped away from them almost a decade before, and a lot of weird stuff had gone down in the meantime.  In 1989, Dave Foreman had been framed (agent admission on tape) and nearly sent to prison along with four others who did go, one of whom was a friend of mine, Peg Millett.  In 1990, Judi Bari had been bombed and the FBI would be found guilty in court twelve years later on numerous crimes related to the assassination attempt.

My husband and I discovered during this time that we’d had two FBI agents in our house on a few occasions and that there were at least 38 pages in other people’s files that included our names in capital letters, meaning that there were files on us.  I’d found myself unable to keep up my business, so I got a job doing a limited number of tasks for someone else who would outline the scope.  I could handle that.

Then my son got cancer and our health insurance company declared bankruptcy the same week.  My husband was not just unhelpful, but hostile, and as things had not been going well between us for years, I left him.

At a counselor’s office, I said a few words I’d had no idea were coming out of my mouth:  that I thought I had been sexually abused as a child, which totally blew me away.  But when I tried to remember my parents ever looking at me when they weren’t angry, I couldn’t remember any, except the time my father smiled, for which I still remember the powerful fascination of it, and gave me an injection.  Something in my body was feeling very harmonious and relieved by this idea, while other parts were hysterical, numb, or sobbing.

At work I began to find myself unconscious with my head laid on my desk – every day for enough days in a row that I finally accepted that I couldn’t work. 

I’d been a workaholic all my life, knew the phone number of every activist, progressive organization, and local progressive politician by memory, and had won awards and commendations at most things I put my mind to.  But I was a mess.

I had weird memory problems.  I screamed at the slightest surprise, then couldn’t use my arms for a half-minute or so because of all the adrenalin lodged in my elbow joints.

If I quit working, what would I do for money?

At a reception for the nominees (I was one) for the Martindale Prize, an annual fiction writing contest with some prestige in Arizona, I won second place and was offered assurance that I would be accepted into the Master’s Program if I wanted.

With the promise of scholarship money and encouragement to write (good therapy) I enrolled.

One humiliating year later, I built a house in the desert and intended to be a hermit for the rest of my life.

My God, the quiet was good for me.  My life would revolve around that land for the next 12 years.

One more year later, commuting to Tucson four days each week, I had my Master’s Degree and no idea what to do for income out in the country.  A couple weeks later, at my twenty-fifth high school reunion, I met my number one teenage crush, and we fell in love almost on the spot.   I had mystical dreams, and one month later I was living with him in Colorado Springs.

Four years and some months later, we’d exhausted the good we had to give each other, and I was planning to return to my hermitage.  I came back early, abandoning contracts to colleagues, to meet these long-lost friends near the Organ Pipe National Forest.

The first evening, a friend handed me binoculars and told me to look through them at the Pleiades.  I’d never been a skywatcher and didn’t think it that interesting.  I was a bird watcher, and that seemed enough time behind those instruments.  More, though, I was in an interesting conversation and didn’t appreciate being interrupted.

My friend was oddly insistent, so I finally agreed to look, vowing to tell him the truth about what I saw.  Little points of light now look like big points of light.  Thank you.

As soon as my eyes adjusted and I saw the stars, I believe I caught my breath and was suspended in an ocean of powerful sensation.  Awe.  Recognition.  Love.  Home.  Shock.  A memory of watching them recede, thinking, “I wonder what it will be like to be gone a long time.”  Ten times shock.  Numbness.  No.  That’s the sort of thing that weird people say.

The binoculars slowly sank with my hands to the table.  “I think I’m from there,” I said, then having recognized my voice speaking these words to no one but everyone, and that everyone responded with silence, I lifted one hand to my mouth and waited for the murmur to cover the sounds of the desert night and my words ringing in my head.

I told no one else about it for years, and no one ever mentioned it to me.  Now, as I write, it’s been 14 years.  And I finally want to put it in context.

I believe the Earth resides in a galaxy filled with a complex matrix of intelligent life, of which we are just barely becoming aware, though there are forces lined up keep us ignorant.

Galactic life has political and social complexity not unlike that on Earth.  There are coalitions and federations and pirates and researchers and saviors and crazy people and beings far smarter than us and beings not as evolved as us and most of these we cannot see, or they keep themselves hidden for one reason or another, or someone keeps us from seeing.  All that and more.  Just like here on Earth.

I was going to say “But more dimensional,” but that would be untrue because Earth is also more dimensional than we know.

And we’re beginning to see.  And waking up (it seems the dimensional density of Earth makes full awareness difficult) to the fact that we are all from somewhere else in some sense.  Either geographically, ancestrally, genetically, or by past soul life.  And we have tribe elsewhere, and some nearby, though they might be difficult to detect in another realm.  But they’re there, watching, helping if they can.

And we’re here because Earth has been getting so sick – so poisoned, so violent – and we were supposed to inoculate the Earth with good ideas.  I have always tried to do this in my small ways, but worry that they don’t add up to much, compared to the corporations and their enchanting technology, which obviously enchants me, as I sit here typing, hoping my words will actually go somewhere.

I used to think that the mind controllers recognized me and worked to destroy my potential or co-opt it, and might have done it.  Now, I like to think I chose to be born into that world in order to experience the very Heart of Darkness here on Earth, so my tribe, fellow warriors, could understand it through me, so that they can respond appropriately to what’s going on here.  Like I’m a nerve cell in the body, conveying information back to the brain.  Which, maybe, is what every single one of us is, nerve cells of God reporting back, yep, this works, no, abort this idea.

And with all our feedback, the gods will know whether to destroy this place or just give it a good cleaning.

Meantime, concerned for my own soul, having been through the Dark and survived but barely, I’ve tried to free myself of any programming that might still be in me, and I believe I’ve been successful, though I can’t say for certain.  I’m what literature calls an “unreliable narrator.”  You must judge how much of what I say is true.

And now we’re at a countdown.  Eleven days till a lot of people think that something Big is going to happen.

Aside from all the prophesies – which I respect for their age, synchronicity, and global character – there’s the simple fact that the planet is sick.

I’m a pantheist.  I believe – and I have experienced – that everything is living.  Trees.  Rocks.  Ocean.  Mountains.  Storms.  Sunshine.  And much is intelligent.  Much is loving.  Some things are teachers, and hard ones.

Thought forms are alive.  And there are beings, intelligent and not, kind and not, in the invisible realms all around us.  (We know when we have gut feelings about these things, but our minds deny, too well educated.)

And beings exist in what we call “space.”  (What a neat piece of mind control, defining words the way we do.)  Ancient people called it “the stars,” “the firmament,” “the heavens.”  And it was not empty.  People came from there, and people have always come from there, since long before they created humans here.

The Sumerian gods, Enlil and Enki, as well as Jehovah, and all the other gods have had their frustrations with humankind, and some have threatened more than once to wipe humans out, and tried, but we get saved by other beings, sympathetic to our evolutionary status, which seems to remain that we are promising creatures with some traits that should be fixable.

I believe we’re at a point in history similar to the days before the Flood.  Maybe we’re at the point that the-teacher-our culture-calls-Jesus  prophesied when he talked about “the harvest.”

(For the record, I think the crucifixion story is fear-indoctrination with the message:  “This is what we do to do people who question authority too loudly.”  And it worked.  Christians are all about obedience to authority, rather than the radical message this God-sent teacher brought us.)

The teacher said:  Treat others well, even people of other races (like the Good Samaritan) and people you think aren’t as good as you (like the Woman at the Well).  Be generous and not materialistic.  Don’t be violent.  Be simple and straightforward with your prayers, in private.  Women, don’t put housework over devotion and learning, and if you do, don’t get angry at other women who don’t (story of Martha and Mary).

The teacher supposedly said he’d come back.  And I believe he is.  What had always sounded like sappy fantasy before is suddenly feeling like reality.  And I’m not excited about this just because I like what he taught; the first time I heard the string of Scriptures I just cited above, I had a shocking sensation of recognition as if those ideals were written in my soul so deeply that they were already mine, like I’d been part of the history of those coming to be creed.  Amazement as the sensation of recognition burned the memory of that moment in all my cells.  That’s why I believe he’s a real being.  I believe I know him very well.

And I’m tired of this Earth, and as much as I hate the violence being done against her, I think I understand that violence happens and I’ll never stop it, just as Jesus said, “The poor will always be with us.”  And so trying to stop it is righteous, but sometimes even the righteous fighter must yield and recognize a bigger picture.  My bigger picture is that I am not from here; I’ve lived here and loved it, and tried to do my little part to protect her, but ultimately my world is bigger.

I’m tired of the materialism, tired of capitalism, tired of money.  I’ve read that some alien beings feel sorry for us trapped in this culture in which accounting for our hours buys us our food, and some people live in misery for all they lack.  I believe those aliens come from a place like mine, and I’d like to return – when it’s time.

Being here now is quite satisfying, actually now more than ever.  So much that I almost feel torn between the desire to leave or to stay, which may be my choice, and as much as I’ve waited for this day, I now find myself seduced to stay if I have the choice!  Wouldn’t you know….

So if the Big Thing happens in eleven days, I say Great!

But I’m not really counting on it.  I’m not sure my mind didn’t create this idea our of desire.  As Ed Abbey said, “There’s not much going for the theory of reincarnation but desire.”

I totally disagree with Ed on this, as I remember a lot of past lives, including that little flash of a life pre-Earth.  And I trust those memories that come all at once, with whole-body recognition and emotions that sometimes drop me to my knees or the floor and sometimes make me cry for twenty minutes before I can compose myself.  They feel like me, and I trust them.

Yeah, I think I’m from somewhere else, and I’m here now for a purpose:  to tell my story of sensing other dimensions and beings, of being appalled at human behavior since I was a child; and to inspire a happy, creative approach to life with as few of the trappings as I can.  (Others will do better than me and will inspire different people.)

I hope I get to wake up in twelve days in a better place.  Maybe it’ll be a New Way of living on this Earth which we will create through our prayers, meditations, and actions.  And we’ll hardly notice the day things changed.

Or maybe like David Wilcock says, an band of energy in the galaxy will intersect us and cause a DNA mutation that will trigger our change, whether we work at it or not, and suddenly we’ll be perceiving in extra dimensions.

Or maybe those of us with positive visions will split off into a dimension separate from the people who are creating these wars and economic turmoil and manipulation.  LIke the Hopi tell their children, “One day we’ll wake up and the bad people will be gone.”  That has always resonated with me.  Or from the Christian perspective, all the good people will rise up and away.

Maybe spaceships will rescue some – I don’t know.  It almost doesn’t matter.

I feel extremely grateful.  I believe I’ll be supported by my cosmic tribe through whatever comes.

And to that end, I’m envisioning what I want to remain with me in a dimensional shift:  cooperation, kindness, nurturing, creativity…

If there was ever a time for deciding what it is we want, this is it.

We don’t know what is coming, but we do know that thought and intention are powerful.  And I believe they are alive.  And we can feed them.  With prayer, imagination, and being.

See you on the other side.