The neat thing about bats is their sonar enables them to see in the dark.
When I returned the other day from a wonderful visit with my younger daughter and her family in another state, this Alabama Bar Association card was in my mailbox, with a letter stating it's a permanent membership card with no expiration date, which serves as my annual occupational license or special membership. I have a special membership, meaning I am in hibernation as a lawyer. The fine print on the card shows I have been a member since 04/22/1968.
During a nap yesterday afternoon, I dreamed of receiving a phone call from my 2nd wife, Jane Shea, who endured most of the time I practiced law in Birmingham. She was the Muse for my first three books, Home Buyers: Lambs to the Slaughter?; Selling Your Home $weet Home, and Kill All the Lawyers? A Client’s Guide to Hiring, Firing, Using and Suing Lawyers, which got kudos from Ralph Nader’s outfit and many newspaper reviews. I was interviewed many times by local, regional and national newspapers and radio and television stations. However, the publishers did not get my books into the chain bookstores, and my dream of making million$$$ as a writer and proving myself to my very successful capitalist father and grandfather, did not come to pass. Those three books are out of print, but sometimes can be found online in book stores.
In the dream, Jane said, “I'm trying to reach my lawyer”, and I said, “Jane?", but no one was there.
Jane moved with me from Birmingham to Santa Fe, New Mexico in early 1986, where I enrolled in The Jay Victor Sherer School of Natural Healing and Massage, which kicked off my transition from being a lawyer very interested in the New Age, into something else entirely, of which I then had no inkling. Jane was a very talented watercolor artist, and she got into a great gallery and was where she needed to be. Our relationship soured without any outside help, ie. seeing someone else, and we separated and moved toward and got a divorce.
One early January 1987 morning in my new Santa Fe apartment, feeling I had failed in every way a man could fail, I closed my eyes and prayed, “Dear God, I do not want to die like this, failed.” I paused, said, “I offer my life to human service.” About ten days passed. I woke up in the wee hours one night and saw two white shift-shaped beings hovering above me in the darkness. I heard, “This will push you to your limits, but you asked for it and we are. going to give it to you.’ I remembered the prayer, and saw a bright flash of light and was jolted by something electrical. That happened again, and again. The two what I thought were angels, even though I saw no wings, faded out. I was shaking and sweating. It had begun, and I would write many books about it, non-fiction and novels, about a dozen of which are free reads at the internet library, archive.org.
Back to the future.
The dream about Jane caused me to revise a draft of yesterday’s God’s expert witness and spiritual healer: Stormy Daniels post, to make it more legal and less woo woo than I originally went about it. The dream also caused me to wonder if I’m to get an occupational law license and hold myself out as a lawyer open for business in some way, which will require my paying not a lot of money tp the Alabama State Bar.
Perhaps I might sign up to do various kinds of court-appointed cases like I once did, which would not require a law office and a legal secretary, today called a paralegal. I could work out of my home and meet clients in their homes, coffee shops, restaurants, public parks, public libraries, courthouses, etc. I might need to get a printer and scanner for legal paperwork. I’m already able to use the Alabama Courts e-filing portal.
Or perhaps I might offer myself as a legal consultant and field what might come my way, and if someone needs a lawyer who does legal paperwork and/or goes to court, I make the referral and stay in the case, or not, as the client’s needs require.
Thanks to an inheritance from my father, I don’t need to make money at what I do, and at this point, I quit charging money for what I was trained by the angels to do when I lived in Boulder, Colorado, 1987-1985. It the spring of 2001, the angel Michael told me in a dream, “You cannot do this work correctly, if you are looking to get anything back from the people you are trying to help." He was one of the angels who came with the lightning in early 1987. The other angel was Jesus. But it was many years before I figured that out.
Besides my law school and massage and healing training, and the angel training, I trained in conflict mediation in Boulder, and did some of that. That experience was not encouraging, in that the mediators I worked with had turned mediation into their religion, and they were unable to recognize situations where mediation would not work, had no chance to work, might even result in one or more of the clients being killed by one of the other clients, which nearly happened in a mediation case, and I reported that to the mediation outfit I was working for, and they took my co-mediator and me off the case and reported the clients to local law enforcement.
After that, I focused on the healing training and what the angels were teaching me, which required me being stood before many mirrors looking at me, which was not much fun, but it was in keeping with Jesus advising in the Gospels: first take the beams out of my own eyes.
I also read the channeled book, A Course In Miracles, the thrust of which was, we don’t know what anything that punches our buttons really is about, and we don’t know what out dreams are about, so instead of trying to figure it out, we should not react, and we should sit with and stew in the emotions that are triggered, and if we do that for a year, we emerge a new person.
But what was the fun in that? And, I was having dreams that definitely had meaning for me about what was going on in my daily life. And, I was going through intense human training in psycho spiritual healing, as a practice client and as a developing practitioner. I became pretty good at helping people take the inward first approach, and sometimes that was all they needed, and other times they needed lawyer help to finish what remained of why they came to me. I did not have a Colorado law license, and they used a Colorado lawyer for that.
The book I dreamed of writing about practicing law in a new way, The High Legal Road: A New Approach to Legal Problems, published in 1990, is out of print, but sometimes can be found at online bookstores. The next book, Prison & Freedom, published in 1991, which I felt then, and still feel, was a much better treatment, sometimescan be found in online books stores, and was digitized and is a free read at the internet library, archive.org.
As are my novels about a Birmingham trial lawyer named Riley Strange, who got into all sorts of weird legal and woo woo shit with a Florida Panhandle redneck gal named Willa Sue Jenkins: Heavy Wait: A Strange Tale (2001) and Return of the Strange (2023). I told some Alabama women I know that the only way to really get to know me, other than living with me, is to read those two novels. Maybe that applies to anyone who really wants to get to know me?
Since moving back to Birmingham in the spring of 2019, I have played a lot of bridge at a local duplicate bridge club, and I have played a lot of chess with older men I met. That's fun, but it doesn't cause me to look forward to waking up in the morning and facing the day. Instead, it feels like getting up in the morning and going to an elder day care center, waiting for the Lord to take me; being half of myself at most, and I might be burned out writing about America politics and religion.
Very simply, after being trained for decades by angels, I am no longer of this world, but I still live on it. I don’t know when I’m ever not in church, and people around me have no clue what is going on inside me and around me. But since I keep waking up each morning, I wonder if maybe it's time for me to make myself available to do what I was trained the old fashioned way to do, first in law school, then in healing schools, then by angels, and by what life served up to me along the way?
That’s where I’m at right now. Or perhaps I’m in a thrall, and when it lifts, I'll see the tricks I played upon myself?
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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