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Have you met someone that you know you have never met before, and yet… This was how it was for me meeting Carla the first time.

She was a speaker at a healing conference on Big Island, Hawaii. She was extraordinary! A healer with a body desperately in need of healing; a body vulnerable in so many ways from birth; and a presence that outshone her body. Carried on to the stage in her wheel chair, this little lady from Kentucky proceeded to do her healing work in the most delicately powerful and lyrical way.

Later we talked. Peering at me through the thick lenses of her glasses, she had the unblinking gaze of an owl seeing all there is to see. The connection was forged. Six years on from that time, and Carla has left her body. Speaking to her beloved husband Jim, I learnt that her departure was as illuminating as her life. To love was her joy and she did this magnificently.

From Jim’s eulogy, here is a story that epitomises this poetic being who expanded our cosmology prodigiously.

“She dropped out of the University and got a job at a sleazy nightclub called The Shack in downtown Louisville. It was a popular hangout for gamblers, numbers runners, pimps, and prostitutes. Her dad was an engineer by day and a jazz drummer by night. He convinced the owner to give Carla a job even though she wouldn’t be a pro like the other girls. When guys would ask her for a date she would politely tell them that she wasn’t a pro, but she could get one of the other girls to go out with them. Or she might just listen to their problems, and give them reassurance and advice. When the band took a break Carla would get on stage and sing folk songs Acapella. She became much beloved, and that was potently demonstrated one day. A stranger came into the bar and asked her for a date. She told him that she wasn’t a pro, but that she could get him a date with one of the other girls. But he wouldn’t let her go, and began giving her a hard time. And then the whole place went silent. You could have heard a pin drop. And then, the sound of a beer bottle breaking across the room, and then another, and another. Her friends were about to defend her, and the man got the message and quickly left. For Carla that was validation of her belief that if you gave love you got love back, even if it came in the form of a broken beer bottle.”

“There is no one who is not a channel; there is no life which is not primarily a channeled existence … [It] is a way of engaging the highest and best in a collaboration with a deeply impersonal source of love, which we are, that has what we may call the larger point of view.”
A Wanderer’s Handbook by Carla Rueckert and Jim McCarty

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