As you travel your Spiritual Path some people join you but for a brief time and then exit from your life. It is only in hindsight do you realise how important was their role – how life changing and what an indelible mark they have left behind. Such are the people in this chapter.
They made a grand entrance into my life at a time when I was alone and filled empty spaces with love. I send love and gratitude to these people (I have changed their names as I respect their privacy.
And so the stories begin…………..
The magic begins. It’s Christmas 1993. I am not married or in a relationship – nor have I been in one for years. My passion is my spiritual journey and this has led me to attending a meditation and channeling group. Two women from this group and myself have become friendly and I find that I really enjoy their company. One a writer of text books who has a strange (but very understandable) fascination with Egypt and the Pyramids and the other is studying Aura-Soma and is destined to become a Teacher, and her destiny lies in fulfilling a karmic destiny with a young man she meets there and later marries.
As it is the festive season, we decide to meet and have lunch. Little did we know what a wonderful life-changing adventure was to come out of this meeting.
Big things sometimes have small beginnings and so our conversation during lunch was very ordinary to say the least. It went something like this:-
“You weren’t at the meeting the other night.”
“No”.
“There was a man there who showed us some photos of some hieroglyphs found carved in some rocks outside Gosford (2 hours out of Sydney, Australia).”
“What was the man’s name?”
“He only introduced himself as Len”.
We all felt some sort of magic around these hieroglyphs and decided to track down Len and drive up on January 1st but many, many phone calls later failed to track him down. No one knew his last name or where he lived and I felt disappointment in the pit of my stomach as January 1 rolled around and I expected our outing to be abandoned. Imagine my surprise when Lisa rang early on the designated day and said – “let’s go anyway”. Destination unknown….
As my house was on the way, they picked me up and I hopped into the back seat and we all set off to an unknown destination, but still hoping that some miracle would get us to the hieroglyphs. We had decided to head for the freeway heading north.
About an hour or so later, Maggie who was driving, turned around to me and said –
“I thought that we should have been at the freeway by now Rosemary, how much further?”
I felt totally perplexed. I thought she knew the way and had not liked to say anything when she went passed the turnoff I would have taken, some half an hour earlier. I did not know that she thought I was navigating as the area was a little unfamiliar to her.
Steam came out of her ears when I told her that we had gone “a little too far”.
“I hope you are a better Spiritual Navigator than you are a road navigator” was her little barb to me because I work as a Spiritual Guidance counselor. We did not know then that this delay was to play a very important part in the day.
I was now on full alert and so were Lisa and Maggie. We tuned in so-to-speak, with our own inner Guidance and Guides to get whatever help we could with directions. Picture this; here we are travelling along a freeway at 110 kilometres per hour without a destination. There are no turnoffs in sight. Maggie is getting frustrated driving without a destination and asks me O.K. WHERE TO NOW?
My reply: “Take the first turn off on your right”,
‘ROSEMARY, THERE ARE NO RIGHT TURNS ON A FREEWAY!!!”
Just then, we rounded a bend in the freeway and there, in front of us, the freeway ended for a small section to allow for a turnoff to Ourimbah.
“Well, I’ll be”, was Maggie’s reply as she smartly turned the car right. “NOW WHERE?”
We were off the freeway now, and immediately on our right was a road sign indicating this way to the Forest of Tranquility. My courage had left me and I declined to give further instructions, however Lisa jumped in and said “Back there, back there, at that last sign, we should have gone down that road.
Maggie turned the car around and with angry push on the accelerator, we roared down the road towards the Forest of Tranquility. It was only a short distance away so in a few minutes we found ourselves there and were very glad to get out of the car. What a beautiful spot. It was obviously a very well known tourist attraction. At the entrance was a map of the area and the various walks you could do and how long it would take. There was an entrance fee of $8.00. The walking tracks were defined by ropes to stop tourists from walking off into the forest and damaging the local flora and fauna. We picked out a track and set off, releasing in our mind any idea of ever finding the hieroglyphs or going to the beach for the day, which had been our second choice.
The bush was so serene, so quiet, so beautiful, our spirits rose quickly as we walked along allowing ourselves to become attuned to Nature. Our destination on this walking track was Sarah’s Cave, however, we kept stopping, branching onto another track for a while, then back onto the original and finally Lisa said: “I think we should meditate here; right here. And so we did. We hopped over the rope defining the track and sitting on our sweaters as protection from the damp, we shut our eyes and meditated for what must have been about 20 minutes. We must have looked quite funny to the other tourists walking past, but we didn’t mind that as that day we were simply following what we were guided to do and were definitely in a state of trusting.
Lisa opened her eyes first. She glanced at the people walking past and was quickly on her feet – calling out to a man who was now a few yards down the track.
“Are you Len,” she called. Surprised, the man turned around. Now Lisa had only seen Len that once at the meeting and had only a very hazy memory of what he looked like and it took courage to call after a strange man but call she did.
The man retraced his steps. “Yes, I’m Len”, was his remarkable reply.
It isn’t easy to describe the joy, the excitement, the confusion and babble that followed. We all talked at once telling him how we had tried to track him down all week with no success, how we wanted to go and see the hieroglyphs for ourselves. The magic of it all was that Len lived no where near the Forest of Tranquility but had felt when he woke up that day that he just had to go. NOT ONLY THAT, BUT IN 15 MINUTES TIME WAS GOING TO MEET THE MAN THAT HAD TAKEN HIM TO THE HIEROGLYPHS AND DID WE WANT TO COME.
We could look back at the day and see how all the delays had made it possible for us to sit beside the track and wait for him to come as if somehow we knew that he would pass by at that time, that day. If only we could trust like this all the time.