It's a pleasure to be here in the IEA as a forum for bringing different people together from different professions, different interest groups to try and get our teeth into a common subject area. What I'm talking to you about today is functional land management, which we are developing as, I don't set myself low targets, as a framework for sustainable climate, smart and productive agriculture. I'd like to acknowledge the many co-authors on this presentation that have contributed material and slides to this. Now, also like to thank the organizers for giving me the opportunity to start this presentation with this slide. This is my favorite photograph, and it is a very famous photograph, it is so famous it has a name. I'm wondering if any of you know the name of this photograph. My Latvian colleagues are excluded from this quiz because they've seen it before. On one occasion, one person once knew the name of this photograph. Any takers here? It's called the pale blue dot, there she is. This is a photograph taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it flew out of the solar system past Neptune, past Pluto. It turned its camera back one last time at Earth, and this is the last photograph that it sent back to Earth. And it's a photograph of our planet, and it's one pixel, and it's called the pale blue dot. Why am I showing you this?  At the same time, it's getting busy on the planet. So last year, last September, the United Nations revised its forecast for the growth of the population. No longer are we expected to stabilise of 9 billion people, we're now expected to continue growing up to 10, 11, possibly to 12 billion people by the year 2100. And that has led to the question in the media, are we running out of land? Or if you want to be more positive, I'm an optimist, how can we make the most of the land that we have? Can you people, can you see a Frank from there? How can we make the most of our land? Because we expect a lot from our land. We put a lot of demands, increasingly put demands on our land. In Ireland, we're all familiar with the demand we're planning to put on our land in terms of the food harvest strategy, Food Harvest 2020, where we want to increase milk production by 50% in response to the phasing out of the milk water. But that's only one of the demands we put on our land. To produce clean drinking water. We expect the soil to filter the water so that we can drink it. We expect our land, increasingly, to sequester carbon, as a sink to offset some of our greenhouse gas emissions. We expect our land to provide a home for biodiversity. And we expect our land to provide a home for our waste. Both from sewage sludge and in the form of from intensive enterprises, pigs, poultry, that normally don't have the land base to dispose of all their own sludge. All right, this is not Ireland. Can only be France. How can we meet all these demands at the same time? This is where we came up with the idea of soil functions. You can also call them land functions. I used them interchangeably. Where we looked at the EU thematic strategy on what our land can supply. What can our land do for us? Well, it can produce food and fiber and fuel. Our Dutch partners also wanted flowers in there, but it can regulate and purify water. It can sequester and regulate carbon. It can provide habitat and it can recycle on the trees. Keep these colors in mind. They will come back throughout the presentation. I've tried to make them intuitive. There's two more functions in the EU strategy. The soil is also an archaeological archive. And it is a building platform, but that is less related to agriculture. So I'm keeping those out. Now, we did an initial scoping study where we came to two overall conclusions. All our soils can provide all functions, can perform all the functions. But some parts of the landscape or of the land are better at some functions than others. Let me give you an example. This is a kind of exit. A typical mosaic of a landscape. Here we see some tiddish land. And what that does for us, it provides food. Big white box, okay? That's the main function of that land. It provides food. And there's also a little bit of the other things that can take big slurry. So also nice purple box. Here we have a coniferous forest in the background. Also provides stuff in the form of fiber, wood. But also has a very big role in carbon sequestration, big black box. On the horizon there we have blanket peat. Doesn't provide a lot of food fiber or a few forests. But it has a very important role for carbon sequestration, biodiversity, and provision of clean water. Okay, so each part of the landscape has a different balance of the soil functions. Example from Damagol, here's habitat, farmland, habitat. Typically the main function there is to provide biodiversity. And we have an extensive grassland which typically does everything at the same time. Now, that must be what we did in our first day. Where we related the supply of the different soil functions to land use. But then we realized very quickly, of course it also depends on soil type. Not just on how we use the land. These soil functions are typical for our well-drained soils. Now if we look at moderately poorly drained soils, we can see that the white box is getting smaller. We get less production from poorly drained soils. But in return we get more carbon sequestration. So we asked ourselves the question, can we create a matrix of land use by soil type? Where that can predict the supply of these soil functions for us. Now when we did that with IT Sligo, where for each of the soil functions we developed conceptual models. Based on a very extensive literature review that we could then employ to predict this supply. And this is the matrix that we come up with and this is just being accepted by the Journal of Environmental Science and Policy. Now, where do we go from there? We have now related the supply of our soil functions to land use. Which we have a land use map of and drainage. And as of last year we have a new drainage map of Ironman following the publication of the Irish soil information system. Formerly known as ISIS, funded by the Environmental Protection Agency. And this allows us now for the first time to map the supply of soil functions. You can call them ecosystem services if you like, soil-based ecosystem services. So here we have the supply of primary productivity. The capacity of soils to purify water, to sequester carbon, to provide a home for biodiversity. And to take nutrients in the form of sewage sludge or slugging. You see some regional differences appearing on the maps. But actually the real variation turns up when you zoom in. Okay, the variation is actually very fine grain. It can be field by field, because different fields can have different soils. You can have more than one soil in one field. You have different land uses in field by field. Very fine grain supply of soil functions. If all of this is a little bit theoretical for you, we're currently, thanks to funding from the Department of Agriculture, conducting the square project where we're actually trying to verify this matrix. Where we're measuring the five soil functions on four of the grassland sites around there. That's what the soils can do for us. Now let's look at what we expect from it. What the demands that are put on soils. We've framed that demand by the policies, the European policies for these soil functions. So we have the cap and the areas of natural constraints that frame the demand for production. It was the phasing out of the milk water as part of the reform cap that frames that demand for that increase in production. And then we have the environmental policies. The greening measures that refer to biodiversity and carbon. Nitrates deals with water and nutrients. We've got the water frame directive, the habitats and birds directive, the environmental schemes which typically deal with all the environmental functions. We've got the new climate and energy package and the sewage launch directive. Okay, that's how we framed our demand. Now if you map those, we've also made maps of how that demand translates spatially. And this is where it gets interesting. And I'm going to give you three examples here. On the primary productivity, this is the demand for increased productivity. What we've done here is we've got good evidence that the 50% more milk is going to come from existing dairy farms. We've very few new entrants or full-scale conversions for beef to dairy. This is simply a map of the density of dairy farms. Okay, so these are the areas where we expect an increase in what we demand from our land in terms of productivity. The good news is that most of the increase will take place in areas with a large carrying capacity. There are exceptions. West Limerick is an example of a very high dairy population that will require drainage in order to meet that demand. It's a wet area. I'll come back to that. I have an example of it. Very distant picture when we look at carbon, the demand for carbon sequestration. Because there is no difference regionally. Because it doesn't matter where you sequester the carbon. There is no regional demand for carbon sequestration, only a national demand. As a country, we will have to sequester carbon in order to meet our 2030 targets. But that doesn't mean we have to sequester it in a particular location. So that's why we see a unicolored map there. Third example is on nutrient cycling. There, the demand takes place at regional level. Because nutrient cycling is the disposal of sewage sludge and pig slurry and poultry. One of the main constraints there is the cost of transport. Okay, it can be moved, but it's very pricey to move it. So the demand for our land to recycle nutrients is highest around the intensive enterprises or the big cities. Now, that's the theory of supply and demand. How can that work in practice? This is where the issue of scale comes in. I want to contrast two of the functions. Our water quality standards we have to meet at local scale. Every field in Ireland and Europe has to comply with drinking water regulations. A depth has to be below the 50 milligrams per liter of nitrous. That means that we cannot offset between regions or between farms. The other extreme, as I said, carbon sequestration ambition is national. Now, that is implications, because that means that it may not be the best approach to expect every dairy farmer to plant trees on his or her land to offset their specific methane emissions from the cows. There's no reason why we couldn't optimize that and trade between regions. Now, that leaves us in trouble. Now, that leaves us in terms of managing this process with two angles. We've got farm management to manage the local processes and we've got an example of that and land management. We've got farm management. What does that look like? One example of how we can manage our soil. This is a graph of the fertility status of our soils in Ireland. We see a range of soils in a different pH bracket. Only about 20% of our soils is in optimum pH. Similar for phosphorus, only a quarter of our soils is in the optimum phosphorus condition. And the same for potassium. And if you put them all together, then only one out of 10 fields has optimum soil fertility. And optimum soil fertility, of course, being defined as fertility gives us enough productivity but it has a low risk environmentally. So there's huge gains to be made there at low cost. That's an example of farm management. The other example is land management. And the example I'm going to use to explain this is what we call integrated land management and that is the term that the department uses to specifically look at two functions, primary productivity and carbon sequestration. So now we're going to use the greenhouse gas debate as an example. We know that our land, back to our discussion over lunch, both sequesters carbon, locks carbon away but also mineralizes it. So we know that from our forestry, we're currently locking away 2.6 megatons per year in this country. That is projected to decline unless we start planting at a very high rate again because we're beginning to harvest our Kyoto forests. We know that our grasslands lock away a lot of carbon, you said that correctly, and it is actually projected to increase ever so slightly up to 2050. But if we count the good, if we want to count the good, we also have to count the bad and that is where the drained organic soils come in. Soils that were drained in the past, typically 60s, 70s, emit carbon because oxygen enters the high organic carbon soils and starts mineralizing and that can emit carbon dioxide for decades. Previously that was not a problem because the IPCC decided that those emissions were very low. But in the latest report, the IPCC has increased the emission by a factor of 20. So the emissions from drained organic grasslands, the IPCC says, are 20 times higher than we previously thought. And certainly this is coming into the equation because we're losing 2 megatons of carbon dioxide every year. On a national basis. That leaves us with a net thing. Now, what can we do in integrated land management? One of the things we can try and do is enhance sequestration. For example, through a newer forestation. And the department has just launched its new plan. As you said, planting rates are up for the first time. Now we have a long way to go. We need to go up a lot further in order to keep accumulating carbon, but it's a clear opportunity. The other thing we can do is try and plug our carbon leaks from the drained organic grasslands. And that we're doing currently a scoping study or a test study on that, funded by the Dairy Research Trust, Dairy Levin, and the Department of Agriculture. Where we look at these historically drained grasslands. Typically drained by the OPW. Okay, in the flood alleviation schemes. With Asoelma and Arlandjusma, we're trying to identify the extent of the hotspots of these drained organic grasslands. In the best case scenario, what we're hoping to find is that these hotspots are taking up 1% of the land. Which is also the land that is least productive. Okay? In that case, you would address that 1% of the land in the form of what is called rewetting. And suddenly we can actually, that threat of carbon emissions can turn into an opportunity. Because these emissions also took place in 1990. And now there's a big chunk of the emissions that we can do something about. That we can reduce. And then we can get credit for. The worst case scenario is that these hotspots are not concentrated. In small spots. But that they're very spread out. And that there is no relationship with productivity. And now we have to address a huge area of the land without clear benefits. Or with great difficulties. So that is what we're trying to assess at the moment. And we hope to have to report out before Christmas. And the department is looking for that in order to inform their position in the call. Make yourselves. Now the other side of the equation is of course can we prevent new carbon sources in response to new range of wet land. We know that drainage is a very good thing. Because it increases the traffic ability of the land. It means we can keep the cows out for longer. And we know that for every day that we keep the cows out longer we gain about 5 euros per hectare in gross margin. About 2.5 euros per cow per day out over us. Now that ranges from the extension of the grain raising season ranges from 20 to 50 days. Depending on where you are we can model that. So that could add up to I don't know 250 euros per hectare growth difference in your margin in response to drainage. So that's a good thing. Unfortunately drainage also induces mineralization and therefore carbon losses. And we can also model that now thanks to the work of Gary. And these losses range from 1 ton up to 2 tons a hectare per year. Big differences between sides. And now we can look at the ratio between our financial gains and our carbon losses by describing a carbon price to these carbon losses. The carbon benefit from the longer grazing season is minute compared to the carbon losses. And its carbon benefit from the long grazing season is very important at national level. But when you do the calculations on the individual fields it's behind the common. Okay how we're going to make this work is the final part. One common criticism of functional land management is that letting each area produce the soil function that it's best at that would work in China. Or that would work in a central command economy where the government has a role in telling farmers what to do. You're growing forest, you're growing beef, you're doing something else. I dispute that and I'm going to put an alternative to you. My take is that in the EU we have a very long history of incentivizing farmers to do one thing or another. And we have got many instruments and that's what I'd like to talk to you about. Let's look at the policy framework. Previously we talked about scale, the importance of scale, local, regional, and international. And if we first look at the objectives for primary production, food farming here, the objectives are very clear. At local level we want farm viability. At regional level we want to ensure regional development. At the national level we want to achieve some sort of food sovereignty. Now that's an interesting debate, the role of food sovereignty. But certainly at European level we'd like to be quite independent in our food supply. As highlighted by recent geopolitical events. On the water quality side we have a local level of drinking water quality. At regional level a surface water quality that's that the surface water quality depends on a whole catchment, not just on one farm. And of course at national level we have to identify a higher status set. Carbon, we've got two objectives. At farm level we know that we need carbon in our soil to protect soil quality. Not a huge issue in Ireland, we have a lot of carbon. Big issue in Europe, particularly the Mediterranean. At national level we want to sequester carbon to offset some of our emissions. Very different objective, but same soil function. By diversity it's different. It cooks across scales. At the local scale we may have to protect a little protected snail and carry. Very small scale. On the other side we have the habitats at national scale, the fresh water pro-muscle, which all plays out at national scale. So that's cross cut. And finally on the nutrient management side we have our manure management of intensive enterprises and a regional level of sewage sludge. Sewage sludge can travel a little bit further. We've seen our two pathways, our farm management and our land use management. And now let's have a look at the instruments that are available already to us to manage this process. So we have three types of instruments. Market, mandatory and voluntary. Our main market instrument is the value chain. We encourage production through the market, through money. But on the market we also see the emergence of quality assurance schemes, voluntary by processes. Voluntary adopted by processes which make it mandatory for the primary producers. And at national level we have the marketing initiative of that in the form of origin green. Okay, and that tries to address some of the other functions, water quality, carbon, biodiversity. The mandatory policy instruments will have the single farm payment which is linked to the greening measures, which is linked to the good aggregate environmental condition of sorts. Okay, so that aims to maintain the carbon, they aim to increase biodiversity, and the single farm payment is meant to maintain the flow of food. We also have the nitrates directive, and the requirement to conduct environmental impact assessment when we do significant works like drainage or forestry. And that has a focus on biodiversity. On the voluntary side we have agri-environmental schemes that address many of the objectives. And at national level we have mandatory designation of the 200,000 sites, and voluntary the delineation of the areas of natural constraint to compensate farmers that find themselves in less reductive circumstances. We've got forestation schemes, came that sequestering carbon, a voluntary scheme at national level. And finally we've got river basin districts, management plans, which are one of the few plans that operate at regional level rather than local, national. And finally we see the emergence of manure trading as a market driven incentive to manage delusions in manure. Now what does this tell us? What this tells us is that we already have 14 instruments in the EU to manage the different objectives, the five objectives, the five things we expect from our land. Okay, let's analyze this graph. First thing that we see is nearly a neat objective, and this looks a bit messy. Okay, there's no one-to-one alignment between instruments and objectives. But don't be mistaken, that's not a bad thing, because we don't want a different instrument for each policy objective. In fact, it's a good thing. We want to see these cross-cutting instruments that address more than one objective. The second thing we see is we've already got enough instruments. We don't need new instruments to manage our land. We already have 14 of them. We also see some alignment between instruments, where one is a condition of another, for example the single farm payment in relation to the greening, but there's also room for more alignment. There's still a few boxes there that only have one or two columns. The main question that I would like to ask is very few, if any, of these instruments account for differences in soil time or land changes. A forestation being, if I can use it as one example, there's nothing stopping me, or I get, if I plant forests on client agricultural land, I get the same grant as I would when I plant it on a type of land where I would compete less with food production. There's no customer section. And it's their room to address that. Now, that is a question for Ireland, but also a question for Europe, where Europe got interested. And this is a question we're trying to address in our Horizon 2020 project. It's called landmark, land management, assessment, research, knowledge base, because ultimately these questions and these five things that we demand from our land, it's not an Irish thing. It's all of Europe, also in Brazil, also plays in countries like China, who are partners in our consortium. It's a four and a half year project aimed at informing the land use directive that you'd be hoping to publish by the year 2020. If you're interested, follow us on that project in 2020. And at that, I will park it and leave it open to discussion. Thank you for your time.


Hello everybody. Welcome to the Magdalen series part 7 where again we're reading through the book by Megan Waterson and Mary Magdalen Revealed. The first of possible her feminine gospel and the Christianity we haven't tried yet. We're almost through with this book sadly but as I've said the next book we'll be going into is the Magdalen manuscript and when we get closer to the end of this book I will again put another post on my community tab with a link to this particular manuscript so you guys who are following along and reading along can go ahead and get your copy. Before we jump into part 7 of the Magdalen series I wanted to ask you guys a question. I talk a lot about the Doshas in conversations with people. This is part of the Ayurvedic system of science which is the sister science to yoga. The Doshas system is a system of understanding energy particularly your energy as well as the energy that surrounds you. I've had a lot of questions in the comments regarding the Doshas system and this is something that I feel very very passionately about because it's something that Westerners just don't understand and it's not Westerners fault they just haven't taught us this. Basically in the Ayurvedic system of Doshas an apple a day does not keep the doctor away for everyone. Here in the Western world we just assume that some foods are healthy and some foods aren't but that's not necessarily true because it depends on what your Doshas is. For me I am Vata Pitta and so my Vata gets a little bit imbalanced from time to time and so raw foods like apples will absolutely make me very unhealthy. And another example is coconut oil. Here in America everybody thinks that coconut oil is so healthy and we should all be cooking with coconut oil. No if you're kappa you should be cooking with coconut oil. If you're Vata like me cooking with coconut oil is going to destroy your system because it's energy. It's energy needing energy right and so if that's something you guys want me to do a deeper dive on then just let me know down in the comment section below. I was actually considering doing a bigger deeper dive on this on another channel but that kind of felt through so I have spoken about this in some of my older videos but if that's something you guys want me to go into in more depth just let me know. I think that Ayurvedic medicine is going to be the medicine of the future. It is obviously the medicine of the past. It was the original medicine before medicine became corrupt and I think we're going to go back to that system because it is the most logical system in the world. And because Mary's Gospel is very much mirroring the Yoga Sutras of Patanjalene I feel like it was kind of appropriate to bring up the Dosa conversation here on this episode in this series because we again Ayurveda is the sister science of yoga. Alright let's get started with part 7 in the Magdalen series. We are starting with the chapter called the cave of eggs. In a world I was set loose from a world and in a type from a type which is above and from the chains of forgetfulness which exist in time. From this hour on for the time of the due season of the Aeon I will receive rest in silence. The Gospel of Mary chapter 9 verses 28 through 29. It was one of those moments when I seriously didn't know what would happen next. I was in yoga gear because what else do you wear when you're climbing a mountain to visit Mary Magdalen's cave? I was trembling, unsure if I could keep moving forward across the tiny ledge I had somehow managed to climb out on and I was clutching a small red shoulder bag that had my hotel room key, some euros in it to pay for the candles I had just lit in her main cave, dark chocolate, I never go anywhere without it. In a map of a place on a mountain I had just found out about the night before a place I was determined to find called the cave of eggs. Let's back up before I move forward. I woke up that morning at 5.13 and I screamed at the side of it. The number 5.13 was haunting me. I kept waking up to that exact time and I kept seeing it on receipts, on train tickets. It was everywhere. So I looked at the little red numbers on the alarm clock and I gave it a wink. I vowed to figure out what that number meant biblically at some point and then I rolled over and went back to sleep. I see numbers all the time too and I usually look them up and research them like for example, right now I keep seeing 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11 and I know now that means that the rejoining of soul family and that means that more people that are very much connected to you, your soul, are about to come into your life. Not saying that I don't have soul family in my life. I do. I have a lot of people in my life who are part of my soul collective but with the 11, 11 popping up a lot that means that really intense soul connections are about to come back into my life or come into my life for the first time. So it's super interesting and she's lucky if she thinks 5.13 is early in the morning. 5.13 a.m. is actually going to late for me. So all right. I woke up later, glanced at the alarm and screamed again when I saw it was already 10 a.m. I had forgotten to set it. The taxi would be picking me up at the convent at 11 a.m. I rinsed off as quickly as I could, put on my yoga gear and raced downstairs before breakfast ended. I can't remember the last time I slept till 10 a.m. I don't even think I slept till 10 a.m. when I was a teenager. My taxi driver Veronica doubled as a tour guide so she filled me in on as much of the local history and the belief around Mary Magdalene's arrival in France and her eventual retreat to the cave at the Sainte-Bombe as we made our way along the narrow roads to the base of the mountain. She said that most believed that Mary Magdalene had arrived first in Sainte-Marie de la Mar and preached for many years along the coastal parts of southern France. Then when the Romans began to persecute the Christians more violently, her brother Lazarus was beheaded. Lazarus was not Mary Magdalene's brother, FYI. He was Mary Bethany's brother who was Philip's wife. So some of the stuff she talks about here is actually inaccurate and I know where she's getting it from. She's getting it from basically the deep state, the controlled educational system and of course the church is very much a part of that system. It's a 501c3 here in the United States which is a nonprofit government entity. So churches are very much part of the problem. But also what I want to talk to you guys about too in regards to this is we're looking at two timelines. We're looking at the Satanic timeline and we're looking at the God timeline. And I hope I can explain this right and this is what I've been getting from my research and looking at these government papers of the truth of Mary Magdalene and Joshua. The Satanic timeline is trying to rewrite history and is trying to convince us that everything that happened with Jesus, they even changed his name to Jesus, ended in a crucifixion, happened in the Middle East, she went up to France, all that stuff. But the God timeline actually tells a very different story where the Christ, Joshua, Mary did all their preaching actually on the American continent. And we know that there are mummies in the Grand Canyon. We know that there's money with Alexander Helios' face on it all over the United States that's found. Again, Alexander Helios was the son of Cleopatra and Mark Antony. He was the Ptolemy line and Egypt at that on this timeline over here, the one we haven't been taught the God timeline shows us that where I live in Georgia and Florida is actually Egypt. And so this is interesting because Alexander Helios, I believe, was Mary Magdalene's father's like grandfather or great grandfather, meaning that was her great grandfather or great great grandfather. And I have been told there's a possibility that the real Mary Magdalene is actually buried up in what we call Canada. And I've been told that that burial actually is probably in Ottawa and there's probably some government buildings on top of it because that's what they like to do, right? And that's just something that's just what I've been told when I've looked through these government papers. At this point, there's not a whole lot I can do to prove that except for the fact that they have found Egyptian money here in the United States as well as we know that there are tombs, mummies in the Grand Canyon. So just something interesting. And I just want to kind of put that out there because I think that's going to be really shocking, especially for Christians who are very fundamentalist in their beliefs to understand that the story of Jesus that's been fed to us by the by the canonized Bible, which of course the copies we have now come directly from the King James Bible, which we know King James was a Satanist already covered all of that. This is not correct information. This is a satanic timeline that they're trying to give you and they're trying to rewrite the collective consciousness so that we praise the satanic timeline versus understanding the true timeline of what happened with the Christ consciousness with Mary Magdalene with Yahshua. And so this, I think, once all this information starts to come out, it's going to be super, super, super hard for a lot of Christians to really understand this. But in my opinion, like I've never feared God. I've always believed God is love. And so I find this really fascinating.  In last week's episode, she talked about seeing the skull of the woman they think is Mary Magdalene. They talked about the brown hair because they want us to believe that Yahshua and Mary Magdalene were of Jewish descent, but they were not Mary Magdalene especially. Her father again was Greek. Her mother was Nordic. And so the paintings that we see of Mary Magdalene with blonde hair or reddish hair and blue, green eyes, that is more accurate to what the real Mary Magdalene would have looked like. She was not Jewish. Neither was Yahshua. So that's just super interesting. But anyway, let's get back to what she has to say. And St. Maxim wanted her safe. So Mary Magdalene followed a river upstream that runs from St. Balm mountain down to the Mediterranean. Veronica told me about the ancient forest that surrounds Mary's cave. She said people traveled from all over the world just to see the forest because there are species of trees and plants that exist within it that are unique to this region of France. I was listening to her voice, but taking in the stunning landscape of Provence far more until she said that Druids considered this forest sacred. It is why they were living in this area before Mary Magdalene arrived. The mountain was sacred long before Christianity claimed it. Shocked, I pulled for some slack on my seatbelt and turned to face her. You mean she wasn't here alone? Veronica smiled at me. The church likes to tell the story that Mary Magdalene lived the last 30 years of her life as a hermit in the cave at St. Balm. That just isn't true. It isn't even possible. She wouldn't have made it one winter alone up there on the mountains. The Druids protected her after her brother Lazarus was killed by the Romans. Again, Lazarus was on her brother. She fled to this area because they wanted to offer her sanctuary. It felt odd to be so shocked by something that made so much sense. My picture of her was morphed inside of me as the car began its ascend up the steep winding road. Instead of this almost otherworldly being who basically levitated in meditation, barely ate and lived in a cave on her own on a mountain in the south of France, I began to see a fully human woman sitting and laughing among others sharing stories and food around a blazing fire. Of course, she was part of a community. Of course, a community had supported her. She was not alone. The Druids, too, they've been kind of given a bad rap. The cabal wants us to think, you know, they want us in this one-world religion, right? And they're using the main religions to kind of morph into one now to get us on this one path. But the Druids, too, we've been told these horrific stories, but they were not bad. I tried to let the reality of that take root in my perception about Mary Magdalene's jeers spent here on this mountain as I found the path that leads up to her main cave. I walked with intention, conserving my energy, but also beginning to draw my consciousness inward to the heart. And I'll say this, too, if Mary Magdalene and Yahshua were both the Christ, if they were the ones that really carried through this idea of the Christ consciousness, which was also a part of the precept of Isis, why the hell would the bad guys allow us to have access to where these people really lived? I mean, that's kind of common sense at this point. This cave, I know it brings in a lot of tourists, and I know that at this point, Megan Waterson probably is very heavily educated into the system of universities. This isn't where Mary Magdalene lived. It's just not, all right? It takes about an hour to hike up to the main cave. The clearly marked path winds back and forth, getting slightly steeper with each next turn. The slow gradual ascent through the thick trees that filtered the light and provided shade from the blazing 100 degree heat, let me chant the prayer of the heart with ease. Towards the very end of the trail at the top of the mountain, there are signs for silence. A few pilgrims passed me and we nodded with smiles and childlike looks of trying not to laugh. There's nothing like floor silence that makes you want to bark with laughter. The higher I climbed, the heavier the soundlessness grew. It became a presence I was entering into, a substance thicker than air. I had thought I would cry when I finally reached the entrance to the cave, but I only felt awe.  I was so silent that even my thoughts stopped. My dove in the hidden places of the rocks and the secret places of the cliffs show me your form and let me hear your voice. The Song of Songs. La Gratée de Saint-Marie, Madeleine first became a pilgrim site in approximately 415 AD because of the desert father and hessie cat John Cassian after his return from Egypt. Now the Dominican monk maintained it and conducted services every Sunday. Pilgrims can stay in the convent built into the side of the mountain right beside the cave. I kept expecting the emotions to attack me like some rogue wave. I kept expecting to feel chills or get feverish. It's something. But all that came to me was this deep reverence in the form of silence. It was silence that stilled everything. That's what it was. I was still, maybe for the first time ever. I wasn't thinking, searching, wondering, questioning, fearing, longing. I was just there fully. I was spacious and silent inside. In a world, I set loose from a world. Sounds like the start of the best movie trailer ever made. What Mary chapter 9 verse 28 is articulating is that while Mary was in the world, she was set free from it. Meaning she didn't have to wait to die or to be cut loose from this egoic finds that tied her here, which again is the exact teachings of yoga. It's the exact teachings of yoga, which I now believe that Patanjalin, the writer of the yoga sutras and the book on the Ayurvedic studies, which was about 5,000 years ago, so long before Yahshua Mary came, that he himself was also a carrier of the Christ consciousness. That's one thing I think I've mentioned it many times when I asked, one of my Hindu friends, what the biggest difference between Christianity and Hinduism is, and he said, that's easy. Christians believe God came to earth one time. Hindus believe God has come to earth many, many, many times. And I kind of like that theory better. And so that's why I believe a lot of these teachings, especially with the missing books of the Bible, the Gospel Mary, Gospel Thomas, Gospel of Philip, all these Gnostic Gospels or Gospels of Gnosis or Interknowing are mirroring the yoga sutras because this is the teachings of the Christ consciousness is to understand your eternal soul, that your eternal soul has literally nothing to do with your body. Your body is just a Shakti or expression of that soul for you to learn things, right? So all these lives we've lived, all these past lives we've lived, these are just outfits we've worn. These are just parts we've played, right? Shakespeare even said that all the worlds of stage and men and women are merely actors in it. That's all we're doing, where the soul is learning itself through its experience in human form. So when you start to understand that, you start to, different things start to happen. First of all, you start to take yourself less seriously because you understand that it's basically your own reality show.  You understand that death is merely just a passing moment in time, that the soul will go on and it will re-express itself again through another identity, right? And so that is so freeing. And that's what she's saying here, in a world I was set loose from a world. You're living in the world, but you're not really a part of it. You're not invested in it. You're going about your life. You're experiencing your emotions, your relationships, but you're also kind of just passing by because that's all you really do in life anyway. And that's one of the most liberating things ever. Megan Watterson goes on to say, world here, it's important to explain is the world that we each perceive. It's personal. It's not a world as in our shared planet. It's a world and as our individual realities, exactly because there is no such thing as reality. It's all perspective. We talked about this on David Zublick's episode a couple weeks ago. That's what yoga teaches you too. The idea of sense memory, that your reality as a human being is different because it's all through your own perception. And that's what your soul is creating to understand itself. And yet we all have the same template of the seven powers of the ego that impose suffering on us in a varying measures. And we all have the same potential to be set free from this world while we're still very much in it. In a type from a type, which is above, is reminding us of what ultimately frees us, the know, the high aspect of the soul that can perceive while here embodied. Exactly. Exactly. We remember that we are not just this ego, this mass of seemingly endless desire the ego creates, but we are a soul. We are from a type which is above. Remembering this is the antidote. Remembering that we are all essentially good. Essentially, this know at the heart of each of our own world is what breaks the chain of forgetfulness. Remembering that the body exists in time, but the soul does not. That's why sometimes we talk about channeling into the quantum, which is where our soul really, our higher selves live. It's hard time with, it has a hard time with time, right? Like that's why we don't want to ask for dates because the body, the body is living in this created time. Whereas the soul, the quantum doesn't understand time because time isn't a reality to something that's eternal. Time is only a law to something that is mortal, right? The soul is not of this world. This is what can free us, even if for some of us only for a moment. I went to the back of the cave behind the small wooden pews and behind the main altar. A friend had told me about the Mary Magdalene statue there and all the love notes pilgrims leave at her feet. It's a statue of Mary and ecstasy. Her head is thrown back. Her eyes are closed. She is clearly receiving something from within her. I had brought my red pen and a few torn pages from my journal. I wrote prayers for loved ones, folded each up and tossed them among the sea of others. In Mary chapter nine, verse 29, she says, I will receive rest in silence. I can feel the way the war within Mary has come to an end. The rest is the bliss that comes after the demons, the powers, those loud, egoic voices that have been overcome. The rest comes because she knows herself completely. She knows that the silence within her heart is the treasure. This is where she can rest in love. Silence to me means the calm quiet that comes when fear has lost its voice. Silence here again is not an absence of sound. It's the end of the clamor, the racket the ego makes. It's the rest we can receive when all we are hearing is the sound of what the heart contains. I lit seven tall taper candles on an altar against the far wall of the cave. Then I wrapped the red shawl I had fortunately brought with me tightly around my shoulders and sat down to take in the light the candles emitted. I turned from the candles in a dark cold wall of the cave and stared at the light streaming in through the stained glass window. One is of a long dark-haired Mary Magdalene sitting at a white round table being served a feast with Christ. Another one is of Mary pouring water over Christ's head. Again, Mary Magdalene did not have dark hair. She was not alone and he was not alone. This stillness lifted just like that. I was suddenly restless to find the cave of eggs. And if it was that difficult, as Rose suggested, then I only had a handful of hours before it got too dark to find it. So I set out without water or any sense of what direction I should be heading. The only people I had passed on the trail for the past hours were in full on hiking gear with water bottles and those strange hats that have flaps that cover the back of the neck. I wasn't sure what made their expressions of confusion more pronounced. The fact that I was out on a mountain dress like a lost tourist or that I was asking them in my heavily American accent in French if they knew where I could find the cave of eggs. No one seemed to understand what I was saying or when they did, they didn't know where the cave might be but I refused to give up. And this is how I found myself several hours later. Panting in the heat, clinging to the side of a trail no wider than my two feet and trembling at the reality that I could fall. Far. Sweat was beating across my forehead. There was zero shade. The fierce sun was in the sky, reminding me how exposed and unprepared I was to set off and find this mysterious place on my own. There I was out on a ledge like a stranded baby goat thinking about the possible titles to the newspaper article reporting my disappearance and realizing that only Rose even knew I had gone to find the cave of eggs that day. In my rush that morning, I hadn't told anyone back home. I couldn't move forward and I couldn't move backward. This is when I met my savior. I could hear her long before I could see her. She was whistling. It made me think of the legend of Bridget, the Celtic goddess who suddenly invented whistling so people walking through the dark can call out to each other and know they're not alone. She made the most compassionate cooing noises when she saw me on the trail. She knew two things instantly, no doubt. First, that I was an American and second, that I was evidently completely lost. The thing is she couldn't get past me and I couldn't move. I was too terrified to keep inching my way forward across the ledge. She was followed by a teenage boy, two teenage girls and a man with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Very slowly and carefully she figured out a way to step past me. I had pretty much pressed myself flat against the side of the mountain. Then she reached out her hand from behind me and made this odd ollie oop rally call that we just don't have an English but it felt so reassuring.  I was not going to die with ollie oop as the last thing I ever heard. I held tightly to her hand and shuffled sideways across the ledge with my face still pressed to the mountain. She stopped as soon as we made it to the wider clearing. My heart was flamenco dancing in my chest. The rest of the group circled up and opened their backpacks to drink water. She offered me a sip from her water bottle. I was so clearly out of breath and I gave her my last chunk of dark chocolate. We smiled wordlessly agreeing on the equity of these two essentials. I've said it before on the community tab. I am not a chocolate fan. I don't like dark chocolate. I don't like milk chocolate. I am just not a chocolate fan. I'll take Skittles any day over chocolate. In French I have a vocabulary of a three-year-old so I told them in my toddler French that I was writing a book on Mary Magdalene and wanted to find the cave of eggs. Ollie oop's eyes immediately lit up with recognition and she shot her fist triumphantly into the air. Miraculously we were all looking for the same place. So we set off together and boldened by our chance meeting and common destination. After another hour of hiking and after passing several sets of pilgrims who couldn't point us in the right direction, we stopped by a boulder with a small charn, a rock pile that pilgrims leave for Mary Magdalene to bless them with fertility. Ollie oop passed me her water bottle again. The kids were getting tired and wanted to return to the cafe that it was the base of the mountain. We looked at each other and realized that we might not make it into the cave. It suddenly hit me that I hadn't prayed. I suggested to her that we asked Mary Magdalene for guidance. So Ollie oop and I closed our eyes instead of prayer together for the way to be revealed. As soon as we got back on the trail, two hikers came into view, clearly pros decked out with those metal sticks that look like ski poles for managing down the steep terrain. Ollie oop and I took one look at each other and knew this was our last chance. Her sudden expression of excitement is sealed in my heart for good. Her eyebrows were clear up to her hairline. She asked them in rapid fire French as they passed if they knew how to find the cave of X and they responded with an enthusiastic yes. Our little band of exhausted pilgrims erupted into delirious hoots of all kinds and high fives and then we all shot our hands into the air like Ollie oop and yelled the cave of X. We hiked for maybe just 20 minutes more, made our way through some green shrubs and obscured our view and then there it was, the cave of X, the yoni of the mountain.  I marveled at the grace I felt in having met up with them. Without them I wouldn't have made it here. We were meant to find the cave together. I helped one of the teenage girls down the simply slope that led into the cave. They were chilling and bizarre egg shaped indentations in the side of the cave wall that I wouldn't have been able to see without the light that they brought down into the dark. I was mesmerized. The teen I had helped down started to get claustrophobic. Ollie oop took off her headlamp without saying a word and handed it to me so I could stay in the cave alone while she led the kids back up. I could hear the echo of water trickling even deeper down into the cave. There was an endless sound to it and a timeless feel into a place where I was standing. It was cold enough to see my breath. The walls of the cave were glistening wet. I tried to take in what I was seeing. This was the place I'd wanted to find for most of my life. A place where the memory of Mary Magdalene isn't once removed. A place where my life could overlap with hers. A place where I felt as though I was encountering not her words or her legend not her teachings or the stories that had been told about her but the actual human woman. I felt elated to sense her humility to have stood where I felt certain she had been. I thought of the salvation then. The definition of it as something that comes from within. Salvation as simply to be made more alive. Because this is what happened to me in the cave of X. I was made more alive. What was within me was here. Met from the outside. It wasn't happiness. That's too fleeting. I stared at the X at the gorgeous miraculous looking ovals in the cave wall and I felt radiant. Luminous. Nothing and no one ever can take from me what I encountered right then. This is the thing itself and not a prayer or a song or a story. This is the love that sits hidden within us. This is the love that never ends. I felt that the other side of myself, the side I met with the last time I saw the shaman and when I first saw the red thread. The side I thought I would always find in someone else and romantic love. And for all those years for all my broken hearts. I have resented and resisted this truth. Of this love I have always known and desire is right here within me. It's the other half of who I am. And this is what it means to rest in silence. Because this is when all those voices, those ideas and stories we wrestle with inside of us. The ones that keep us up at night and lead us to believe we aren't worthy of love or of anything good. This is when the whole clamorous riot goes mute. This is when we understand what freedom is. The silence that returns us to love. When we all have gathered around a large table at the cafe at the base of the mountain, drinking ice cold swaps, the man in our little band of pilgrims turned to speak to me for the first time and asked in his rich thick accent. What does Mary Magdalen mean for you? It took a while to answer. And then I asked him the same question. He just lifted his hands and placed it on his chest and said, Isis and Mary Magdalen are the same here in my heart. And I stared at him, a frank look of pure shock on my face. It's always the quiet ones. When I checked out of the convent, the total was 520 euros for the week I was there. I had a moment of anticipation that it was total 513, the number that had been harassing me since I arrived in France. As the receptionist went over the bill, I googled druids and saw that they were the Celtic priests and priestesses from a tradition that existed long before Christianity. Now the druids, the Celtic priests, those were the Nordics. Those were the Kentekians. As the Cassiopean said, the Kentekians were brought here to this planet right before the fall of Atlantis during the Atlantean times. And Mary Magdalen's mother was a Kentekian. She was Nordic, Druid, Celtic. And so that culture comes from the planet of Kenteca. And it is a very holy, holy planet. So it seems like this is kind of where they blend the truth with what they've created with fiction. And so Mary Magdalen would have understood Celtic tradition and the Celtic faith because it does intertwine with the Isis priestess hood, which is how she was raised along with Yahshua. As I've said before, I'm very curious into learning more about Mary Magdalen's own mother. Mary Magdalen's father is actually mentioned in the Bible. People are going to be shocked when they find out who her father, her father was. He is a pretty prominent person in the New Testament. Of course, his story is completely false that they give this in the Bible than who he really was because the Roman Empire didn't actually exist at all. We're in the Roman Empire right now. But her mother's name is completely removed from the Bible. And I have not run across her mother's name in any of the missing Gospels yet. Of course, there are six pages missing from Mary Magdalen's Gospel and all the copies that as we read in the first chapter, all the copies that they found, there were six pages missing. And so part of me wonders if there wasn't information about her mother in those pages because from what I understand, her mother was the one who taught her. Her mother was a priestess and taught her everything she knew and trained her in everything she knew. And so my question is, why did they take Mary Magdalen's mother completely out of the Bible? They didn't even manipulate her story. They just removed her. And I'm sure some of the books that are still under the Vatican probably still have her story in there, but we just don't have access to her story. But I'm super, super curious about Mary Magdalen's own mother. We know that the word Magdalen comes from her mother's line, not her father's line. So what is it about this female line from her mother that was so powerful? Mark Atwood informed me that ma, the ma is a Magdalen ma means first light. And if the Kundalini, the Christ consciousness has to do with that spark of life, then what is it?   All right. Then just because I wanted to the haunting of 513 to end, I made good on my bow from early that morning and googled what scripture it refers to. Then our regulations of 513 I got chills. And I knew it was a message meant for me, brothers and sisters, you were called here to be free. This is when the receptionist let me know she had accidentally charged me for a room tax with two occupants rather than just me alone. And she reconfigured the total. Yep, 513. The next chapter is called she who confirms the truth. After Mary had said these things, she went silent. Since it was up to this point that the Savior had spoken to her, the Gospel of Mary chapter nine versus 30 through 31. The Sacred Heart Cathedral is high on a hill in Montmartre in Paris. Walking up the winding path, even when it's packed with tourists is magical to me. My favorite Christ is up there. He's made of gold mosaic and a dome that arches over the main altar. His arms are outstretched and he's radiating this form of embrace that blows my composure every time. Donna, the author of Sex and the Soul and the friend I had in common with the man seated at my table on the Queen Mary met me in Paris for several days. She's a walker like me. Our little hotel was near the Eiffel Tower, so we decided to walk all the way from the seventh or on this meant of Paris across the send to the 18th or on this meant where the Sacred Heart Cathedral is located. When we finally arrived, Donna groaned at the crowds. There was a liner wrapping around the cathedral with a security checkpoint stationed in the front of the gate. Everyone was fresh to get inside. I talked to Donna into waiting. I built up the anticipation and like a child in line at the amusement park, I fluttered with sheer excitement. We were ushered around to the left, partitioned off from the main pew in the center of the cathedral for those who came to pray, not just snap photos and feline it for the gift shop. The auto circle for tourists moved slowly past the small altars dedicated to various saints. When we got to the enclave for Mother Mary, Donna wanted to stop. She paid for a small votive, lit it and let this soft light suddenly shine from her face. I knew she was saying a prayer for her mother who had passed from cancer years ago. Her mother had loved Mary, devoted. This was the word Donna used. Her mother was devoted to Mary. This particular statue of Mother Mary is exceptionally beautiful. She's in a glass enclosed altar. Her arms are outstretched with her open palms facing upward. She has a golden sacred heart in the center of a chest. There's a little gate at the entrance to her separate little enclave within the cathedral. I opened it so I could get a closer look at her. A little girl no more than three was holding this gate shut when I turned around to leave. Her mother was laughing and repeating to her into French Rose opened the door. I kneeled down to Rose's height so we could be eye to eye and I smiled at her chair of face. I get a little one. You want me to stay here and pray to Mary. The polarity of Mother Mary, the Virgin and Mary Magdalene, the prostitute has always seemed a bit too familiar, too contrived to be true. John Yeves in the sacred embrace of Jesus and Mary explains we have forgotten to represent the other side of Christ, his feminine side in a way beyond the reductionist stereotypes of mother and whore. Like Mary Magdalene, Mary of Nazareth, Christ's mother, was said to have always walked with him. And she was there throughout his ministry and there with Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross at his crucifixion, again in the Satanic timeline, not the real one. She was also there according to some legends with Mary Magdalene on a ship without sails that arrived in the south of France in the first century. There's a legend that relates that she returned or never left Jerusalem where she was assumed by the angels into heaven at the moment of her death. Mary Christ's mother has been represented as the Virgin, just as Mary Magdalene has been represented as the whore based on ideas of the church that didn't form until centuries after Christ's crucifixion. In 431 AD at the council of Euphias, Mary was declared the godbearer or simply put the mother of God. She was therefore subsequently declared as immaculate, the ever virgin. Other titles she has been given over the years include Queen of Heaven, Our Lady of the Angels, Our Lady of the Good Council, Our Lady Undoer of Knots, and She Who Confirms the Truth. Yes, they changed a lot of stories. Council of Nicaea, there was all these in the early Christian church. The early Christians believed that Yahshua, Jesus, and Mary were teachers, rabbi teacher. They were enlightened. They were ascended masters. They did not teach that Yahshua was God. The Trinity came later after the Council of Nicaea when they turned Yahshua into Mithra, into like a satanic God. And also the idea of the mother Mary basically having relations with an inky bus or a sucky bus that created Yahshua, which we know from the missing Gospels that Mary's husband Joseph was the father of Yahshua. And so this makes perfect sense. They changed these characters into entities they were not in order to keep us dumbed down because all Yahshua and Mary were teaching were this idea of the Christ consciousness as Kundalini rising, which was like you hold the spark of God inside of you. You are like me.  Don't you understand that it's your soul that's immortal, not your physical body? And so of course, a satanic church, as we know the church is, it's satanic, turned Yahshua, changed his name to Jesus, and made all these characters, these gods, right? Kind of like the Greek pantheon of gods, yeah? Once you see it, you can't unsee it. And like I said, the actual story, the real story of these people is so much more enmeshed with love, like true love, human love. She was born without sin, but the church fathers had established by the fourth century that sex and procreation entitled. The idea of sin did not exist before that and it does not exist in the Gospel of Mary. Yeah, no, sin just means to miss the mark. Yes, sin was brought in with these councils to make it all satanic. You guys see that now? I think y'all see that like, it's laughable once you see it what they try to do and it works. It's worked on a lot of people, right? It's worked on them. It's made them very much brainwashed into this more satanic way of thinking versus the true Christ way of thinking, which is pure love. This is important to not forget. Women were not present during this council, so women did not get to help create the story that would shape the birth of the institutionalized Christianity, which is Mithraism.  I am the wife and the virgin. I turned back to Mary's statue to her outstretched arms and her open palms. I stared at her golden heart and I imagined that moment in the Christian belief when the Angel Gabriel announced to her that she would give birth to God, which, no, she just was giving birth to an ascended master according to the original Christian belief. It was an ascended master. Now, the picture of the golden heart, which we see with Mary and Jesus, I know you guys are all familiar with those pictures. That's actually satanic as well. It's talking about the eating of the heart. There's a whole breakdown on that. I'll see if I can find it. But obviously, obviously, they're selling us satanic pictures, not real pictures. So when you see that, those pictures, and of course, they're usually with their other hand doing the bath and that symbol. So I think you guys know what I'm saying here. What's so profound about Mary is that, yes, she said to the surge of light that came in the form of the angel within her, and yes, she never got uttered outside of her. Became one of the greatest expansions of love in the history of religion. Again, according to the missing Gospels, Mary had sex with Joseph. That is how she conceived Yahshua. The idea of an angel impregnating her is the Incubus and Succubus guys. This is all the dark side of this magic these people do. So I just want to make that very, very clear. I nodded in humility to Mary, to her courageousness that still left so unacknowledged and uncelebrated. She should be riding a tiger like the Hindu goddess Durga. We don't get yet how powerful it is to be that wide open to the voice of love, to be that present to the light inside of the heart, and then to make our life about that union. Donna ushered me on. We made our way past the rest of the semicircle of altars that lined the inside of the cathedral, then entered the Tours V, roped off area for the real prayers. She led us to a pew that was virtually empty and right behind the golden Christ, I had returned to the Sacred Heart Cathedral to see. The second we sat down this thick, sweet, honey-like silence spilled over me. I couldn't move and I couldn't hear anything, except that tumultuous, except effective silence inside of me. I looked up and took Christ in from this proximity. I noticed there's a little Joan of Arc kneeling at his feet. She suited up in her full armor down on one knee. Her sword is golden and off to one side. How could I have missed her? Joan of Arc in her hauntingly brave mantra before entering the Hundred Years War in France as a teenage soldier, I am not afraid. I was born to do this. She, like Mary, had said yes to the angel she heard within her. I asked a question then in my heart. I had been feeling, sensing, and half believing I wouldn't come back from this pilgrimage or said another another way. I knew I would not come back the same. I asked if I would see my son again. I thought about Mary as I asked this, the love of her son, being with the soul from the moment of conception to first breath, to first steps, to first words, and first love, and then last steps and last words and last breath. It's such an uncelebrated vocation to love a boy to manhood, to completion, to raise a man who has been initiated by the feminine. So I've been told that in the new timeline I'm going to have two children. I've been told that actually was told that long before we even started this great awakening and I will have a daughter first and then a couple years later I would have a son and I just know intuitively within my knowing that my daughter will probably be a daddy's girl but I know that son I'm going to have, he's mine. I just feel it that he's going to be my little boy. So that kind of got me when I read those. Marian Woodman in Conscious Femininity relates that when we as a culture can raise the divine masculine from infancy to manhood, we will have moved the Christian story forward. We will have witnessed the rise of the divine masculine, a masculinity that can only come through the merging of the masculine with the feminine. Christ in this form at the sacred heart fully cloved in robes of golden light, crowned with a halo that reaches in our four directions and with arms as wide as the ceiling of the cathedral is the masculine I love, integrated whole feeling, embracing and most importantly enduring. It's funny I was told too that my daughter would look exactly like me and that my son would look exactly like his father and I just had that thought and that it's funny that her father would be close to her and I would be close to the son but they would look like the same-sex parents. So anyway, then I heard and felt the sweet exhale of the answer yes. I know I will see my son again. I trust this even as everything is uncertain I will see him again and then something more happened. I feel this awareness of what love really does. I feel the way love functions as a bridge and that loving we can't ever be separate from those we love. In Latin this is the heart speaks to the heart directly. I am only ever as far away from him as I allow myself to believe I am. I am only as far away from him as I am from my own heart. I miss him and instead of thinking this I tell this to him directly. I remember that I am with him always from within.  I look up at this Christ this embodiment of enduring love set in gold with arms that take in the whole mass of us sitting there in the pews silently praying, silently saying everything we need to say in our hearts. We think our hearts are separate in our own but really the heart is like a walkie talkie. If we know how to use it and we have the courage just to get still enough to go inward it's like we're pressing down that little red plastic bit on the side and speaking directly into the receiver. Then when we release our grip on that little red plastic bit that lets us speak to the soul to God to spirit however you experience it or whoever you think is holding the matching walkie talkie you lift up the button and wait expecting expectingly in silence until suddenly there's a crackling noise in the stream of light from the voice within you. The Gospel of Mary chapter 9 30 through 31 after Mary had said these things she was silent since it was up to this point that her savior had spoken to her reminds us that everything we've been hearing since Mary chapter 6 when Peter asked Mary to teach them about what has been hidden from them is a conversation that took place within Mary. It makes certain to remind us that these secret teachings came to her that Christ revealed to her alone because she could hear him within her. Mary and Christ had walkie talkie hearts and what I could feel in that moment beneath this wide embrace is that I do too. We all do if we know how to use them. The next day of breakfast Don and I were planning our visit to the chapel of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal. As I waited for my omelette to arrive I checked my email and saw that Liz Beth the artist for the Divine Feminine Oracle had uploaded her first draft of the card for Saint Catherine Labiré. My jaw dropped at the timing. She's the saint who had the vision of the Virgin Mary at the exact chapel I was about to see for the first time that morning. Catherine saw a vision of Mary. Similar to the stance Mary's statue is at the Sacred Heart Cathedral where their arms stretched out and her palms open. Except in Catherine's vision rays of light were streaming out of Mary's palms. She said that light was the healing, the answered prayers rushing from her to everyone who calls out to her. Catherine also asked Mary a question in her vision. She noticed there were rays that weren't reaching our world. There were sort of ricocheting off the world's surface and going into space. Catherine asked Mary what that was all about and Mary said those are the graces for which people forgot to ask. Spirit is so mindful, so ethical that we have to ask on behalf of ourselves and others to be blessed with healing. We have to love ourselves enough to ask for assistance. Donna did the same face morphing thing she had done at the Sacred Heart when she lit the candle for her mom. Her features just sort of transformed from normal-looking human skin to glowing particles of light. She's so unassumingly Catholic, so unceremoniously spiritual, no rosary, no mention really ever of Christ or Mary.  Donna then made her way to the seat in the pews but I wanted to do some close-up praying right beneath the statue of Mary that's lit with the golden halo at the center of the altar in the cathedral. A woman beside me from Senegal I later learned had tears streaming down both her cheeks. I heard her pray in a language I didn't comprehend but my heart understood. I went to pray for myself but then I heard her suffering. I started immediately praying for her and I instantly felt lighter and this is what's so paradoxical as truth apparently inherently is. When I empty myself, when I forget myself for the sake of someone else, I'm instantly filled beyond what I could have ever asked for for myself. Maybe this is what grace needs. The moment when the sudden love we have for a perfect stranger eclipses what we think we know, what we think we need and just takes over. Maybe this is what Mary did in that moment when Gabriel asked her if she would give birth to God. Would she eclipse herself in her own little life? The story she was living with Joseph, the future they were beginning to strip for themselves. Would she let spirit write her story instead? Could she say yes to this light inside of her? This brings us to the sixth power, the false peace of the flesh. The whole point is that it never ends. Even if it only comes and goes, even if you hide it from others, especially if you hide it from yourself, even if it scares you, especially if it scares you, even if you wonder some days if it was ever real, even if you think deep down that it's someone else's, even if you think its beauty has nothing to do with you, even if you haven't seen it in so long it feels lost to you, especially if it feels lost to you, even if it's buried so deep you have to mind past the hardest parts of you, even if it's only your secret, especially if it's only your secret, even if it's just a grain of sand, a mustard seed, I want you to know that your love is enough. You can always begin again. I have this deeply held belief that there's this place I'll reach, this state of mind, meaning heart, where I become too aware, too conscious, to be hurt again, or too enlightened to fall down neck deep in the mess of my own ego. I keep thinking there will be this X marks the spot, this plateau where I arrive, this place where I free myself once and for all from myself. But there is no there. The whole point is that it never ends. It isn't a failure to feel human, to be broken by heartbreak. It's the whole point. The choice we have, the opportunity that's presented to us in those moments of exquisite pain is to also remember the soul. We can bring in the other half of what it means to be human, not right away, or at least not at first. But we can just let it sit on our shoulder or the back pocket, or even that little presence of light might help us move through the pain differently than we had before. We might be able to see new responses to a pain that isn't ancient as Scripture. Try not to curse the pain or to avoid it, or to feel like a failure because of it. Try not to run from it and numb it. Try to see it as our chance to reach a love that can withstand it. Not permanently. Nothing is permanent. Just in this moment. That's all that matters. Find the presence of love in those moments when before you abandon yourself, even if it's just a little love, a grain of sand, a mustard seed. Your love is enough.


The George Washington Carrier Strike Group has arrived in the Leyte Gulf area to assist the Philippine government with typhoon relief as part of Operation Damayin. The carrier strike group has eight ships and 21 helicopters which can provide humanitarian assistance to the Republic of the Philippines. One of the first ships to arrive was USNS Bowditch, a Navy survey vessel. On arrival, Bowditch started looking for the best way for the rest of the carrier strike group to enter San Pedro Bay. Super typhoon Haiyan brought debris into the local waters and may have shifted the ocean bottom. While San Pedro is shallow, many of the ships will have to drop anchor away from land and use helicopters and small boats to provide relief. Read more about the George Washington Carrier Strike Group's efforts in the Philippines at Navy.mil. For the Defense Media Activity, I'm Petty Officer Jonathan Sunderman.