From The Grandmother's Circle:
Grandmothers Message: Let Loss be Your Teacher
Over the past year I often found myself bombarded by change after change after change. So much of it that it seemed that I was being swept down a river of loss, overwhelmed by sickness, sadness, death, and seeming separation of every kind. "Grandmothers," I said, "how can I maintain my faith, maintain my gounding while the very earth under my feet is shifting. Help!" I cried.
"We are holding you," they said as they came in close and surrounded me. "We are holding you now. Feel us underneath you," they said, "feel us behind you and at your sides. We are holding you up and we will continue to hold you up through all the changes that are coming. Lean back now and rest on us," they said and smiled to reassure me. "We are here and we will never leave you. You will never be alone again, nor will you have to go through these changes alone."
They looked hard at me then and shook their heads. "You are still looking for help to come to you from outside yourself," they said. "You are looking for us outside yourself. Waiting for us to show up," they laughed. "Often you call on us as though we are far away. You continue to do this," they said, marveling at the consistency of my backwardness.
"When we came to you initially," they explained, "we appeared to you from 'outside' yourself. We had to do this to get your attention. At that point in your life you wouldn't have listened to our message had we not 'appeared' in some form to you. Had we come to you as 'presence' or an inner knowing, you would have denied your experience." They looked me over, seeming to size me up, and then said, "But you are no longer at that point in your life. You have evolved well past the place where you must look outside yourself to confirm the presence of the Divine.
"Remember," they said, "a human being's progression toward union with the Divine only goes forward-always forward. It does not go backwards and it does not stand still. Because of this law you cannot have the same relationship with us now that you had ten years ago. That would be impossible because within this time you have become much more than you were then.
"You will find yourself slipping into fear and doubt whenever you forget how far you have come, whenever you forget that you are in fact one with us," they said. "When your mind tips you into fear, your faith becomes shaky. And we tell you that the times you are living in now will shock you and will challenge your faith. The times you are living in will pepper you with fearful thoughts, testing your resolve to be at one with God. Many of you are now experiencing large amounts of what human beings call "loss" and feelings of sadness and fear that come up when you experience loss can shake your faith.
"However," they said and wagged a finger in my face, "you will become stronger by weathering these so-called "losses, and you need to become stronger if you are going to move forward with this work. We promise to hold you throughout this time. We will never let you go, but we remind you that you asked to be of service in this radically changing world you are living in, and we assure you that what you are going through is preparing you for greater service. Be brave," they said. "Let loss be your teacher and turn to us-turn within. We are here. And we will never fail you."
Ah-ho! Willy TwoHawk