There’s a rainbow as I get up on our last morning. It’s the last day of our trip. It’s also the last day of questions and answers with John Morton…but there’s no such thing as an end to questions. It could be the last day of answers, though. Let’s hope so. Answers are endings, and at some point this thing has to end, right?

Did J-R really end? He’s been on the trip a lot, though I don’t sense him always, and every time I miss him I can trace it back to focusing on the outer world in some way. But at the same time I can’t lie and say everything is just wonderful. That outer part of me is real. It’s not as much fun here without him. Things are messier. I can’t clean up the outer world like he could. He could clean everything, and make it like brand new. The best I can do is close my eyes and ignore the dirt—which is OK, because the dirt doesn’t exist when I close my eyes. But also it’s not OK, because I still have to open my eyes here and deal with life, and with my own darkness.

It’s the usual round of inner cleanings in the Q&A on this last day. There’s rain that turns the lake black-green, with golden leaves and white herons adding lighter touches. With all the clouds, the room is darker than it was in the other sharings, and even though the spiritual energy is very present, you can feel people’s attention starting to wander to taxis and planes and home. John seems to have infinite stamina and infinite patience.  Bring ’em up to the microphone, clean ’em out, move on to the next one. It’s done with an unusual combination of softness and firmness—sort of like a soft cake or a tempurpedic pillow. That softness behind his eyes draws you in, and there’s a firmness and strength that holds you up. It’s almost seductive, but there’s a moral strength that doesn’t want anything; it’s been ruthlessly trained by J-R until it’s just giving. So it’s a kind of spiritual seduction, an emotion that pulls you through his eyes and towards God. J-R was like air—not soft or hard, just nothing there. John is like a spiritual geisha. There’s a reserve that teases you to chase what’s behind those eyes. Two different ways of expressing the Traveler consciousness.

And I get cleaned up along with everyone else. That’s what trips like this are about. They’re work, and fun, and transformation, and everything in between, but mostly they’re about cleaning out. It’s either that or sit in the dirt, so I might as well get to work. But working for J-R and John is still the best deal around, and I have enough Jewish genetics to know a good deal when I see one.

Speaking of which, in the last few years my family found out that my Jewish grandfather (husband of the grandmother I told you about who was in the Gurs concentration camp that we visited last week) committed suicide as the family was stripped of everything, including the musical instrument store that they owned. They all played instruments, the music store was his livelihood, and apparently he was broken when it was all lost. I seem to have absorbed the stories of that time. No matter how much I have, I always make sure I’m prepared for having it suddenly taken away. I wrote just a short paragraph on yesterday’s gourmet lunch at the palace. It seemed irrelevant to me—but it was an important part of the trip, a piece of the puzzle, as I look back on it now.

At the beginning of this trip, I bought a guitar so I could have one while I traveled, a luxury that I’d normally hesitate about.  John ended up mentioning the guitar at one of our gatherings, making a pun that I came on the trip because I thought it was about guitars, not Cathars, and he said maybe I’d play it for the group sometime. In my last Q&A with him he encouraged me to share myself more, although I resist because at some point I’m going to die anyway and run out of songs, or pictures, or words, or money, or whatever, so I might as well just get ready for the time when it’s going to be taken away.

I ended up using the guitar to sing a song at the end of the Q&A about losing J-R, and endings of all kinds.  Songs always seem to get finished on these retreats. During the trip one of the strings kept breaking and I’d have to find a musical instrument store, which isn’t easy when you’re mostly on a bus, changing hotels, in unfamiliar locations. In a string of coincidences, I’d keep getting led to the right places at the right time to get that guitar string. All for one song…or maybe for healing, both in my own life and going back through generations.

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I wish I could narrate the whole story of each dreamlike turn of coincidence, the perfection of each step, the ways that the Spirit has guided all of us on this journey in such a loving and meticulous way. The full meaning often doesn’t come into focus until the last day of the trip, when the story is complete. Maybe that’s part of the blessing of dying, which is the ending of the story, and maybe that’s why J-R had to die in order to complete his gift to us. But the whole story can’t really be communicated completely, and there’s never going to be any final proof of the love of God that I can put into pictures or words. There’s so much Light and Sound, but we can’t fit it all into an outer form.

To me, the biggest part of J-R’s legacy on the physical level is the usability of his teachings. They fill in gaps in our understanding of how the spirit works in the world—gaps that, up until the modern era, were only hinted at in parables or poetry. He’s reminded us over and over that what we feel and know inside can never be fully communicated outwardly, so we can relax, do what we can, but let go of the sense of lack that comes with trying to bring the inner world out here. But we can’t stop creating either. J-R’s solution: go for excellence, not perfection.

To me, France represents the perfection of form.  We’ve stayed in exquisite places that are so harmonious and balanced that they’re almost static, held in suspension outside of time so that we can appreciate them forever in a kind of earthly imitation of eternity. But I’m glad to be getting out of this place that’s so beautiful but where slight changes in food requests can crash the cerebral system of an entire hotel staff.  Our trip under the Traveler’s guidance is as perfectly crafted as any of the beautiful forms here, but it’s just less easily seen because it’s non-material.  In a way, you could say that European culture has died and been resurrected as the Christ manifesting perfectly in each moment—or as our ability to perceive it. We started off the journey with the Cathars in the middle ages, with persecutions and massacres and sieges and poverty, when so many of our instruments—our means of expression—were taken away. We’re ending it in glorious places from the 19th and 20th centuries that epitomize abundance and the consummation of form.

Putting spirit into a form is what we do by our nature, and we’re not going back either to the privation of the middle ages or to the immobilizing dependence on form of France at its peak. We’re walking a balance, with J-R’s practicality as a guide to help us navigate this new kind of journey. I only experience lack when I focus on that outer expression and interpret the story’s ending as a death rather than a resurrection. The persecution that birthed in the middle ages and culminated in my family’s experience in World War II is still echoing inside me, while at the same time, my lifetime has also spanned the period of unprecedented wealth and technological innovation that allowed a John-Roger to be born into a body, live a full life without being killed, and have his teachings broadcast worldwide instead of being found in fragments of parchment in a desert. J-R is only accessible inwardly now, not physically, and no one knows how this planet or the people on it are going to respond to this huge event, or gift, or loss, or combination of all of that. I think we’re just at the beginning stages of it. All we can do is use his legacy through the body to convey the Light and Sound as well as we can, to take what we find, and to share it. The world is a music store, and it seems it’s always well-stocked. See you later.