Treasure of the Milky Way | Catherine Viel

By Catherine Viel, January 17, 2022

(Golden Age of Gaia)

January 16, 2022

What will I remember and what will I forget?
Apple trees in blossom or wind at break of day?
I sang a song that no one heard—I shall be singing yet,
Out behind the high stars and through the Milky Way!
~Louise Driscoll, Treasure



All this time I’ve been trying to get past a bump in the road, and I come to realize that the bump is the road.

I don’t like this bump. It brings tears to my eyes to even contemplate this because I so don’t want it to be true.

The fact that I’m getting choked up about it tells me all I need to know.

The journey is the destination. And my journey, at this moment, is the ongoing experience of hip pain.

*****



I am riding along this mundane road in a vehicle called the body. Like a car, with its four tires, I utilize four limbs that extend from my trunk. The limbs support me, provide mobility, and enable me to function.

When a tire goes flat, from either a blowout or a gradual leak, at some point the car is going to grind to a halt.

The deterioration that is attributed to arthritis is a slow leak in the tires of my vehicle.

I’m not wishing the blowout version of ill health on myself or anyone else, but I have a sneaking suspicion that such a catastrophe galvanizes one into unquestioning, immediate action. Emergent care, probably the current-medical-system variety. Then post-event checkups and visits to physical therapy; perhaps some comforting regenerative treatments, and lots of strengthening and stretching homework.

With a slow leak, you can still drive your car on a gently deflating tire. There’s a deceptive sense that everything is really not too bad. After all, you’re on the road, puttering along to a destination.

You could even utilize one of those instant-flat-tire-fixer canisters once in a while as a temporary fix. Maybe that’ll work long enough for the vehicular equivalent of the med beds to arrive, and the tire can be instantly and miraculously healed.

*****



It’s hard to ignore signs of distress while traveling along in this vehicle. You’re not in the fast lane anymore, and there’s a decided unevenness. The vehicle cants sideways toward the tire that is losing its air. Gradually, almost unnoticeably, the tire gets flatter and flatter. You’re forced to drive with increasing caution until you’re just creeping along.

One day you go to get into your car and realize that one tire is sitting on the rim.

Whoops. Maybe I should’ve patched that leak before it disabled the car.

*****



I’m not disabled. I’m not anywhere near disabled. What I am is frequently uncomfortable and experiencing pain, but by no means am I the equivalent of the car with the tire sitting on its rim.

However, I don’t want to become that.

As long as I look at my body as a problem to be fixed, a bump in the road and an annoying block to what I really want to do, I will approach the slow leak–incipient injury “problem” with resentment and reluctance.

Or I won’t do anything at all, justifying my inactivity by the will-o’-the-wisp solution of a future med bed. Which might arrive, oh, last October by many accounts.

I have a number of exercises, homework assignments from the chiropractor, that I haven’t done with any consistency. The med beds are coming, the med beds are coming…Why bother doing boring, time-consuming, uncomfortable exercises, when pretty soon a magic wand will be waved and I will have perfect health and well-being without any effort at all?

*****



I really don’t want “recovery and strengthening from a slowly debilitating joint disease“ to be my path. It’s so…undramatic, banal, workmanlike.

It’s not a near-death experience with flashing lights and amazing spiritual revelations. No journeys through the Milky Way on friendly ET starships. Now, there’s something to write home about!

“I did three sets of twelve exercises and walked for twenty minutes” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

I would much rather wait for the med beds than embark on the dreary and very slow path to the possibility (no guarantees!) of better health and mobility offered by continuing with chiropractic and forcing myself to exercise.

And with that attitude, I’ll never do it.

Only if I can quiet down the impatient mind and the ego that wants everything done yesterday might I be able to look at that mundane pathway with equanimity, never mind enthusiasm.

*****



I remind myself that I do not have to do this alone. I have not only the real-world cheering team of the chiropractor and my friends, but a perennially enthusiastic panoply of light beings and angels, divine essences of my own self and many others who are scattering gold dust even as I look at that boring pathway…

Come, they beckon. You will be amazed at how glittering with incredible treasure this very pathway is.