Friends, this via my long-time friend Rich Spees, who was also a friend of Hank and Jill. The original had photos, but I couldn’t figure out how to get them here.

Rich said: “Jill has made her transition. Thought you may want to see this announcement. It has been a crazy several days…. Hopefully now things will start to settle down. A bit of a fire-drill trying to get everything together for the virtual memorial, which will be on Hank’s birthday, the 20th.”

From: “SharedWisdom” <contact@sharedwisdom.com>

Subject: Virtual Memorial: Celebrating Jill Kuykendall

Date: August 14, 2023 at 12:47:25 PM HST

Aloha to you,

In the early morning of August 10th, at her farm in South Kona, Hawai’i, Jill peacefully made her transition across the rainbow bridge to be with her beloved husband of 42 years, Hank Wesselman.  Jill was 71 and of strong spirit. With fierce determination, great self-knowing and compassion, Jill wrestled with multiple myeloma for 10 years, vastly outliving the prognosis. She is remembered for her effervescent laugh, great good humor and strong knowledge of the healing arts, most especially, her Soul Retrieval work.

Jill received a Bachelor’s Degree in Physical Therapy from U.C. San Francisco, a Bachelor’s in Psychology from U.C. Berkeley and a Master’s in Physical Therapy. For over 20 years, she had a thriving practice in and around Sacramento, California. She functioned as a co-facilitator for the Mercy Healing Circle, participated in the Mercy Healthcare Healing Environment Task Force and served as a member of the Sutter Healthcare Wellness and Healing Network. Her career culminated at the Center for Optimum Health in Roseville, California, which soon morphed into a full-time Soul Retrieval practice, based on her innate healing gifts and ability for manifesting magic!

She is survived by her children, Erica, 39 of Kona, HI, and Anna, 36 of Brisbane, Australia. In the last weeks of her life, they were by her side along with her niece, Kate, and dear friends, Cindy Reynolds and Carol (CJ) Barfoot

Jill was a force for good in the world with her most famous saying, “This is good news!” which was often refrained by Hank and those who studied with her during “aha!” moments.

Hank and Jill’s love was written in the stars; starting out as friends, it became clear they were meant to be together. They were partners in marriage and in bringing their shared spiritual knowledge to a new community of seekers. Hank’s love and admiration for Jill shown in his eyes, as he often looked at her with awe and gratitude, always referring to her as “My Lady Jill.”

Jill had many authentic initiations, perhaps even a baptism by fire when Hank first began having his experiences with the supernatural realms. Her support of Hank during this time would change their lives forever, as he focused on bringing his unique and resonate experiences to the public in several books, most notably, Spiritwalker, Medicinemaker and Visionseeker. They soon became a dynamic teaching duo, sharing their spiritual explorations, creating a large community of students, followers and friends, and traveling the country and the world together, sharing their wisdom.

Together, they would introduce the wider world to their dear friend and fellow wisdom keeper, Hale Keoalohalani Makua, enlightening people around the global to the ancient and profound wisdom of his Hawaiian ancestry. Hale Makua loved and admired Jill as his equal, spending sacred time together; it was evident that Jill’s presence in their trinity was an essential element in the healing work sourced through their collective union.

Hank and Jill relocated to their farm near Captain Cook, Hawai’i in 2007, making the Big Island their home base and enjoying the fruits of their farm. Jill loved gardening and growing their sustenance in view of Kealakekua Bay, just up the hill from City of Refuge State Park, a very special place for their family.

Jill was a wisdom-keeper, a wisdom-sharer, a healer, a teacher, a mother, a sister, a daughter, a good aunt and loyal friend, a lover and a partner, sharing everything she learned with those ready to hear it. She performed thousands of Soul Retrievals, most recently creating an amazing video series, www.sharedwisdom.com/soul-retrieval, and co-authoring the book Spirit Medicine with Hank.

Her humility, reverence and joy-filled laughter have inspired us all. Immortality to you, Jill, and may a profound reverence alight on your soul. A hui hou!! Until we meet again, on the long journey across eternity!

There will be a world-wide Zoom Memorial for Jill this Sunday, August 20th at 3pm Pacific Time. https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86813117922

Re-reading, for the first time in many, many years,  Henry Thoreau’s first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, I am struck by the following passage. I sometimes have the same experience: Mention Jesus and his teachings, take them seriously, and you embarrass people who think you are naïve, or you outrage people who think these are not things to be thought about, but to be accepted in the way they learned them as children.

Yet, in any nation’s literature, where can you expect to find a more serious examination of life and our part in life than its is scriptures? If the scriptures of your own society do not call to you, are there no others? Perhaps you think you are “above” considering your life in light of people’s most determined effort to come to life’s meaning. What exactly are you concerned with that is so much more important? Today’s news? Yesterday’s? Tomorrow’s?

I have taken the liberty of breaking up Thoreau’s long paragraphs, for easier reading. From A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, (Sunday):

The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by the church and the Sabbath school, so that it seemed, before I read it, to be the yellowest book in the catalogue. Yet I early escaped from their meshes. It was hard to get the commentaries out of one’s head and taste its true flavor.—I think that Pilgrim’s Progress is the best sermon which has been preached from this text; almost all other sermons that I have heard, or heard of, have been but poor imitations of this.

It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the Life of Christ because the book has been edited by Christians. In fact, I love this book rarely, though it is a sort of castle in the air to me, which I am permitted to dream. Having come to it so recently and freshly, it has the greater charm, so that I cannot find any to talk with about it. I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them. The reading which I love best is the scriptures of the several nations, though it happens that I am better acquainted with those of the Hindoos, the Chinese, and the Persians, than of the Hebrews, which I have come to last.

Give me one of these Bibles and you have silenced me for a while. When I recover the use of my tongue, I am wont to worry my neighbors with the new sentences; but commonly they cannot see that there is any wit in them. Such has been my experience with the New Testament. I have not yet got to the crucifixion, I have read it over so many times. I should love dearly to read it aloud to my friends, some of whom are seriously inclined; it is so good, and I am sure that they have never heard it, it fits their case exactly, and we should enjoy it so much together,—but I instinctively despair of getting their ears. They soon show, by signs not to be mistaken, that it is inexpressibly wearisome to them. I do not mean to imply that I am any better than my neighbors; for, alas! I know that I am only as good, though I love better books than they.

It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals. I know of no book that has so few readers. There is none so truly strange, and heretical, and unpopular. To Christians, no less than Greeks and Jews, it is foolishness and a stumbling-block. There are, indeed, severe things in it which no man should read aloud more than once.—“Seek first the kingdom of heaven.”—“Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth.”—“If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.”—“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

Think of this, Yankees!—“Verily, I say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.”—Think of repeating these things to a New England audience! thirdly, fourthly, fifteenthly, till there are three barrels of sermons! Who, without cant, can read them aloud? Who, without cant, can hear them, and not go out of the meeting-house? They never were read, they never were heard. Let but one of these sentences be rightly read, from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of that meeting-house upon another.

Yet the New Testament treats of man and man’s so-called spiritual affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to alone content me, who am not interested solely in man’s religious or moral nature, or in man even. I have not the most definite designs on the future. Absolutely speaking, Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you, is by no means a golden rule, but the best of current silver. An honest man would have but little occasion for it. It is golden not to have any rule at all in such a case. The book has never been written which is to be accepted without any allowance.

Christ was a sublime actor on the stage of the world. He knew what he was thinking of when he said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” I draw near to him at such a time. Yet he taught mankind but imperfectly how to live; his thoughts were all directed toward another world. There is another kind of success than his. Even here we have a sort of living to get, and must buffet it somewhat longer. There are various tough problems yet to solve, and we must make shift to live, betwixt spirit and matter, such a human life as we can.

…

Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything, because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end. The sort of morality which the priests inculcate is a very subtle policy, far finer than the politicians, and the world is very successfully ruled by them as the policemen. It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always. The conscience really does not, and ought not to monopolize the whole of our lives, any more than the heart or the head. It is as liable to disease as any other part. I have seen some whose consciences, owing undoubtedly to former indulgence, had grown to be as irritable as spoilt children, and at length gave them no peace. They did not know when to swallow their cud, and their lives of course yielded no milk.

 

Interesting article form RAND corporation.

https://www.rand.org/blog/rand-review/2023/06/truth-decay-is-putting-us-national-security-at-risk.html

Among the tour group that went to Egypt in February and March of 2017 was an lively artist named Mimi. I well remember spending a couple of hours with her in the proximity of the Sphinx, (everyone else on the tour having gone off to see something that she and I decided was of less interest than hanging out with that globally recognized symbol.) I don’t remember what we talked about, but I remember the afternoon.

I said she was an artist. About half our two-week trip centered on a boat, which was towed up the Nile from Luxor to Aswan. Every day, Mimi would spend a certain amount of time dashing out watercolors of whatever was in sight. At the end of the trip, she invited us to each pick one. I picked one of Luxor from the far side of the Nile, and it resides in my workroom, near my desk.

A friend of Mimi’s who reads this blog sent me her obit, which gives a glimpse of what must have been a very interesting life.

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/greenwichtime/name/anne-sammis-obituary?pid=204817105&utm_source=MarketingCloud&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ObitShare_PPNBlock_061323&utm_content=ViewObituary&sfmc_id=125098664&env=8d8591b2e492da9ca09cc5a4e1a1248fcc9da2f0bcaca1874e37a772a1987d62

My old friend Ed Carter’s family had a tradition, when someone died. They’d raise a toast to the departed, and all would say “Bon Voyage.” I like the idea, and have used it myself. Bon Voyage, Mimi! I can’t help wonder what you’ll be getting into.

A new low in imbecility. It started with political correctness (read: censorship and self-censorship) and keeps on going downhill. All the sheep flock together and take comfort in the fact that they all think the same thoughts (which of course means they aren’t thinking at all) and follow the same shepherd.

We’ve seen all this before. In the 1980s the feminist movement thought they’d killed off Hemingway’s reputation, and some remarkably stupid accusations were taken as if they made sense.  One is tempted to say, “this too shall pass,” except that the level of cultural literacy continues to decline so precipitously.

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fpjmedia.com%2Fculture%2Frobert-spencer%2F2023%2F06%2F29%2Fthe-woke-bell-tolls-for-ernest-hemingway-n1707204

CULTURE

The Woke Bell Tolls for Ernest Hemingway

BY ROBERT SPENCER 10:30 AM ON JUNE 29, 2023

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Readers have now been warned. Anyone in our enlightened age who is crazy and daring enough to read Ernest Hemingway, an author who is not a person of color, not trans, and not a victim of white patriarchal oppression, will now be waved off by Hemingway’s own publisher. New editions of the work of the man who was once considered one of America’s greatest writers, before such things came to be measured solely by the author’s race, gender, and political proclivities, contain a “trigger warning” alerting fragile wokesters to the fact that if they are actually so foolish as to read the book, they will encounter thoughts that today’s elites have most decidedly not approved.

The UK’s Telegraph revealed Saturday that Penguin Random House, which publishes Hemingway’s novels and stories, has slapped them with “a trigger warning” due to “concerns about his ‘language’ and ‘attitudes.’” Hapless new Hemingway readers are also “alerted to the novelist’s ‘cultural representations.’”

I can imagine what Ernest Hemingway himself would say to all this, but I wouldn’t be able to publish it. The arrogant, self-infatuated, blinkered, miseducated woke dopes at Penguin Random House don’t seem to understand that the whole idea of reading Hemingway, or any other great writer, is to encounter “language,” “attitudes” and “cultural representations” that are not one’s own, and are not the same as the language, attitudes, and cultural representations of contemporary culture.

Back in those dark days before schools turned to teaching the really important stuff, like whether you’re of the opposite sex and how evil you are if you’re white, children were taught that there was a pantheon of great writers throughout history, starting with Homer and going through Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantic poets, and the like. Hemingway was often included as one of the few Americans on the list. Someone who picked up Shakespeare or Milton was not expecting them to sound like or reflect the attitudes of Ibram X. Kendi and Dr. Fauci; readers were instead expecting to be carried to a very different world that would help them see their own with new eyes.

All that is gone now. The problem with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the rest is that they would all today be considered members of the worst group of people on the planet, white males. As we live in what used to be known as Western civilization, this is not all that surprising. It is also not in the least surprising that this pantheon has now been swept away and replaced with writers whose sole claim to relevance is not their insight, wisdom, or the power of their words, but their race and their gender. Hemingway was another white male, and so his star has dimmed from the days when he was considered one of the greats, and now he has been hedged around even more to keep him from leading anyone into wrongthink.

Penguin Random House added a disclaimer to its new edition of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. It “states that publishers decided not to censor the book” — hey, thanks! The note on The Sun Also Rises warns readers that this book could be dangerous to your health as a dutiful woke NPC and might actually lead you to have a thought of your own, one that the guardians of acceptable opinion might find double-plus ungood: “This book was published in 1926 and reflects the attitudes of its time.” Yeah, that’s the idea – in part.

The Penguin Random House wokesters also added a please-don’t-hurt-us insistence that they weren’t the ones thinking forbidden thoughts: “The publisher’s decision to present it as it was originally published is not intended as an endorsement of cultural representations or language contained herein.” Whew! Bullet dodged!

The Telegraph adds that “Hemingway’s collection of short stories, Men Without Women, now carries an almost identical warning, differing only by alerting would-be readers to the fact that the book was originally published in 1927.” We can at least be relieved that the whole thing wasn’t wokeified into Men Who Are Women.

Related: And Then There Were None: Woke Censors Come for Mystery Writer Agatha Christie

Hemingway biographer Richard Bradford remarked acidly: “The publisher’s comments would be hilarious, were they not also alarming.” He added that the warnings “would be understandable had they brought out a new translation of Mein Kampf. They seem to imply that, because it’s a literary classic, they’re willing to take a deep breath and warn readers with delicate sensibilities that something in it might unsettle them.” Yet he warns that if you examine “any novel or poem written at any time, and search for a passage that could create unease for persons who are obsessed with themselves…you’ll find one.”

Indeed. And the woke censors will. The object of the game is to put a fence around any thoughts and ideas that aren’t approved by the elites. The next step will be to ban Hemingway and others altogether. Keep your old books. The time will come when you’ll need to hide them.

Yesterday (Thursday July 7) I went poking around one of my journals for 2019, looking for notes from my trip to Egypt, and found, tucked into the pocket, an article I had written for our local metaphysical newspaper about my old friend and former partner in Hampton Roads Publishing Co., Bob Friedman, who had died Jan 7 that year. That was three and a half years ago, to the day. Seems endlessly long ago.  I thought, I should share this with a wider audience, so here it is. As I said at his memorial service, Bob was a great man, who lived his metaphysics.

Echo World, February 2019

Bob Friedman and the endless chain

By Frank DeMarco

Our lives are tied to others by invisible connections. Who we are, what we think and feel, what we do – it all affects those around us. Some of these connections (with family, friends, associates, casual acquaintances) we see. But our influence upon others doesn’t stop there, not by a long chalk. Bob Friedman’s life is a good example of how our lives are part of an endless chain of influence.

Bob Friedman’s life (Feb. 15, 1942 to Jan. 7, 2019) affected uncounted and uncountable others. He co-founded The Donning Company in 1974, co-founded Hampton Roads Publishing Company in 1989, and founded Rainbow Ridge Books by himself in 2009, in all publishing more than a thousand books, some of which have already changed our world.

In the 1980s, Mary Summer Rain was unknown. Her manuscript had met so many rejections that she was almost ready to give up. Bob read it, showed her what needed to be cut, and added her to his list of authors. If her books had never been published, how many lives would have been diminished?

Similarly, Neale Donald Walsch. As soon as Bob saw Conversations with God, he saw the potential that other people (including me, as I had already rejected it) had missed. How many people’s lives have been changed by the Conversations series? And these are only two of those he shepherded into print.

Only an author can know what it means when someone is willing to invest time and money to get his baby out into the world. Bob’s long-time friend John Nelson, author of five books Bob published, wrote (as part of his yet-unpublished book of Zen poetry):

98.

A friend passes on, and one feels sad.

What do you recall from your first meeting?

A promise of success, or the kind eyes offering it?

Bob spent more than 40 years making it possible for authors to get their brain-children into print. In that alone, he changed their lives, regardless of the book’s subsequent fate. (And, remember, many books with limited sales nonetheless are deeply important to some.) More invisible links. And those affected readers lead lives that then affect others in turn, continuing the chain.

As an Aquarian, Bob valued friendship. I don’t know how many publishers number their authors among their friends, but certainly he did. For that matter, some of his friends dated back to high school years. He kept his friends.

And how many people he influenced! I should know. Over more than 30 years, he and I were friends, then business partners at Hampton Roads, then again friends, and publisher to author. If I had never met Bob, my life would have been unimaginably different.

Up to this point, writing this was relatively easy. But it is difficult to write about our various relationships. Bob and I were extremely close, and bitterly incompatible, and instinctively aligned, and living in different worlds, depending on the time of day. We worked together and pulled off some amazing things, and we worked against each other and wound up losing what we had built from nothing, and then, being forced to work together again, without others (and, in fact, against others), we rediscovered what we had valued in each other, so that our final dozen years were again productive and mutually satisfactory. But nobody else could really understand the good and the bad that went on between us.

What stays with me is the feeling I have had since learning that Bob was on his way out. On the one hand, “Bon voyage!” which is how our mutual business partner, friend and author Ed Carter and his wife greeted the news of someone’s graduation to whatever comes next. I don’t regard death as a tragedy, just as another departure in lives filled with departures. I am fully confident that the spirit that clothed itself as Bob is on to other things.

But for me, as for others who are left behind, what a sense of loss! Over the past dozen years, whenever I transcribed and posted new sessions – with the guys upstairs, with Rita, with Nathaniel – I had this strong sense of Bob as supportive background presence. One after another, he published my books, even though they made him little money. Early mornings, transcribing, I would wonder what Bob would make of the latest sessions. I won’t have that background presence now. (Or perhaps I will, in an entirely new way. Time will tell.)

That’s a small example of how Bob changed lives, in the way our lives all contribute to the great chain of consciousness and connections and consequences.

Bon voyage, old friend. And, well done.

—–

Frank DeMarco lives in Charlottesville. He is the author of many books on communication with those in the Non-3D world. His website is www.ofmyownknowledge.com. On Facebook, frank.demarco.10.

 

Two-thirds of a lifetime ago – 50 years ago, somehow! – I spent a couple of years as audio-visual librarian for the Tampa, Florida, public library, and among the many films I oversaw was a half-hour documentary that remained with me.

This film, made in the early days of the space age, though toward the end of the Apollo program, looks at the early impact of that venture in various arts, as seen by writers Arthur C. Clarke and William F. Buckley, a dancer (Edward Villella), a poet (Archibald MacLeish), various painters, including a very young Jamie Wyeth. Now, your first reaction may be, “Who cares? What does this have to do with me?” But if there’s anything more to do with us than consciousness, I can’t offhand think what it would be.

Today for some reason it occurred to me that maybe the film could be found on the net, via duckduckgo, and sure enough, courtesy of the Charlotte and Mecklenburg County (N.C.) public library system, here it is. The first couple of minutes are a little the worse for wear, and every so often it skips a word or two, but in general it is in good shape.

I include the link for those who may will find it of interest. A remarkable film, one I am glad to have had the chance to see again after so long a time.

https://archive.org/details/ReflectionsInSpace