Tuesday with Laraaji

Tuesday afternoon, Rick and I drove to Boulder and met Laraaji, the wonderful cosmic musician and laughter guru I connected with so powerfully at the 2006 Southeastern Spiritual Conference where I taught. He was in Colorado to be one of the presenters at Jonathan Goldman's 12th Annual Healing Sounds Intensive, and was kind enough to fit us into his after-conference leisure time (he has lots of friends in the area, so he stays a few days after the conference at the Goldman's in Boulder to visit and hang out).

We met at the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse, which is a really beautiful and amazing place. (Stepdaughter #2 works there and was unexpectedly on duty that day--a nice synchronicity!) The ladies Laraaji had spent the day with up till that point stayed and had a late lunch with us, and while I was kind of wishing to have Laraaji to ourselves, we did enjoy our time with Alice and Mary, who were delightful, open-hearted beings. They are Emissaries of Divine Light, a group I was involved with back in the mid-to-late 1980s, so it was interesting for me to be with them. The Healing Sounds Intensive was held at Sunrise Ranch, which is the Emissary world headquarters, and a also retreat center for non-Emissary events like the HSI. Alice lives at the ranch and Mary was there for the summer to help out with the retreats.

So many of my spiritual understandings were triggered by my time with EDL, but ultimately, their teachings were missing the crucial "honor no voice above your own Spirit's voice," and so I had to leave the fold. In a way, they assisted me with that part of my understanding, too, as I learned what it felt like when I was asked to honor another's voice over that of God-In-Me! Anyway, I felt guided to give Alice and Mary each a copy of Recreating Eden--not as a way to somehow try to enlighten them, but simply as a love offering from the heart.

That I felt guided to share the book with them is significant because I always wondered how it might be received in the Emissary world, and had been "told" by my inner voice not to engineer it, but that someday, the perfect opportunity would present itself and I'd be very clear when it did. And that opportunity came Tuesday! I didn't even realize what had occurred until after I had given them the books and then I knew that my inner prophecy had been fulfilled.

After our lunch, the ladies took off and we took Laraaji to Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison because it only seemed fitting that a muscian like Laraaji would connect with Red Rocks! We got almost all the way to the amphitheater but weren't able to actually go in because there was a concert (Former Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir and his band, RatDog) and at the time we arrived (about 5:30) they were about to let concert-goers in so they refused our request to check out the amphitheater. But that was okay as we were already making Laraaji late for his dinner appointment with Ed and Deb Shapiro, so we just headed back to Boulder. Meantime, Laraaji, who had a new fancy digital SLR camera, got lots of photos of the red rocks at Red Rocks and of the open space all along the way back. For a NYC dweller like he is, seeing the open meadows and bluffs, with few manmade structures, was a treat! "There's a lot of information in the open space," he declared.

After we dropped him off at the Shapiros, Rick and I headed to "the Med," a Boulder institution, for tapas, had a delightful time and delicious food, and then headed home. It was quite a full afternoon and evening. I loved our time with Laraaji, and I really enjoyed having extra time with Rick. And I loved coming home, too!