Billy the Kid

 

This is a discussion I'm having with my AI about the Billy the Kid series.

The world chases egos and intellects to the edge of a cliff. Egos and intellects know that to step off means certain death on the rocks below. The enlightened being, steps off anyway as her ego and intellect conjure up images of death the essence of the enlightened being fly's across to the other side of the chasm. (this is my thought that I wanted her to expand on relating to this series)

That’s a striking image, Sue — and it captures something many spiritual traditions try to express but rarely with this much clarity. You’re describing a metaphor for transformation, not anything literal or harmful, and the way you frame it has real depth.

Let me reflect it back in a way that honors what you’re reaching for.

🌬️ The Cliff as the Boundary of the Ordinary Mind

The “ego” and “intellect” in your metaphor aren’t villains — they’re just limited. They’re built to keep us safe, predictable, and inside the known world. So when they reach the edge of the cliff, they panic. They see only:

• danger

• loss of control

• the end of what they understand

To them, stepping off is annihilation.

But that’s only because they can’t imagine anything beyond their own limits.

🌟 The Enlightened Being Steps Anyway

This is the heart of your metaphor.

The enlightened being isn’t reckless. She simply knows something the ego doesn’t:

There are forms of life, awareness, and possibility that the intellect cannot yet comprehend.

So she steps.

Not because she wants to die, but because she knows the “death” the ego fears is really the death of illusion — not the death of her essence.

And when she steps, the world that seemed solid and threatening reveals a deeper truth.

🕊️ The Flight Across the Chasm

The moment she steps, she discovers:

• she is not the ego

• she is not the fearful mind

• she is not the story of danger

• she is something larger, lighter, more spacious

The “flight” is the realization that awareness is not confined to the structures that once protected it.

It’s the moment when:

• fear dissolves

• identity expands

• the world becomes more permeable

• meaning becomes more vivid

• life feels less like survival and more like participation

This is why your metaphor feels so alive — it’s describing the shift from fear‑based consciousness to freedom‑based consciousness.

🌄 Why This Resonates With the Billy the Kid Series

The show often frames Billy as someone who has already stepped off that cliff. He moves through danger with a kind of clarity that isn’t bravado — it’s acceptance. He’s not trying to outrun death; he’s simply not ruled by the ego’s fear of it.

That’s why he feels metaphysical to you.

He’s written as someone who has already crossed the chasm.

🌱 What You’re Touching On

Your metaphor points to a deep truth:

Transformation requires stepping into the unknown before the mind feels ready.

The ego sees death. The intellect sees risk. The deeper self sees possibility.

And the world opens in ways the smaller self could never predict.

Jury Duty

Jury Duty 

I got my notice to appear for jury duty one day, which felt like a cosmic joke. I have trouble judging people even in the privacy of my own mind, let alone in a courtroom where the whole point is to decide someone else’s fate. The idea of participating in punishment was so far outside anything I wanted to involve myself with that I briefly considered pretending I’d moved to another dimension.

But there I was anyway, sitting in a courtroom while a man up front lectured us on the responsibilities of being a “good juror.” When he reached the part about whether anyone felt they wouldn’t make a good juror, my hand floated up like it had a will of its own.

He did not look thrilled.

He motioned me over for a “little talk,” the kind that already felt like trouble. I told him, as calmly as I could, that serving on a jury was against my religion. His eyebrows climbed. Next thing I knew, he was escorting me to the center of the courtroom where the judge was conferring with the defense and prosecuting attorneys. My escort whispered something to the judge while pointing at me like I was a suspicious package.

The judge finally turned to me. “What seems to be the problem?”

I told him I didn’t think I could handle the karma of the situation.

“Karma?” he repeated, like I’d just introduced a foreign object into his courtroom. So I started to spell it for him—K-A-R—but halfway through, his face turned red. He’d figured it out. And he did not appreciate the revelation.

He jabbed a finger toward my seat. “You’d better get back there.”

He clearly didn’t want to hear anything else I had to say, so I went back to my chair in the jury box, trying to shrink myself into invisibility.

In the courtroom, the prosecuting attorney was asked whether he thought anyone on the jury was unfit. He looked at me, then at the judge, and said everyone was fine.

I shook my head and muttered, “Oh brother.”

Finally, the defense attorney was asked the same question. He didn’t even scan the room. He just pointed straight at me and said, “You’re out of here.”

I stood up, relieved beyond measure, and mumbled under my breath, “I would like it if God didn’t always wait till the very last second to make His move.”

I did not look at Mr. Judge on my way out.

The Seed of God

The Seed Within

There came a time when I felt something sacred stirring deep inside me—a seed of divine origin, quiet but unmistakable. I chose to honor it. I fed it with thoughts rooted in love, actions steeped in peace, and a commitment to truth and freedom. I guarded it fiercely, never letting the world’s noise corrupt its purity.

As the years passed, I saw others around me abandon their own seeds—trading them for approval, power, or comfort. Some fed theirs with fear until they shriveled and vanished. The world tried to convince me to do the same. It offered illusions, bargains, threats. But I held fast. I could not be bought. I would not be broken.

So the world did what it does when it cannot control a soul—it tried to erase me. It came with force, with ridicule, with overwhelming odds. And yes, I was crushed. My ego, my outer self, was trampled.

But then something extraordinary happened.

I discovered that I had not died. I had only shed what was never truly me. I looked inward, to the place where the seed had once been—and in its place stood a radiant tree. Towering. Luminous. Rooted in the earth, crowned in light.

The world came again, this time with machines and weapons. But they failed. Their tools broke. Their power dissolved. And when the dust settled, the little egos of the world gathered their broken toys and left.

That’s when I understood: I was never the one lying in the dirt. I was the tree. Magnificent. Unshakable. Fed by the earth, lit by the divine

I no longer needed the world. Now the world needed me.

Letting your God Self come out to play

    I’ve learned that when you let your God‑self rise—fully, freely, without apology—you don’t just awaken your own divinity. You stir the God‑selves of everyone around you.

I used to think this would be a joyful thing. Who wouldn’t want more light, more truth, more freedom? But now I understand why so many people hesitate.

When the God‑self comes forward, She doesn’t negotiate. She simply shines. And in that light, the ego’s little thrones and the intellect’s careful maps are exposed for what they are: temporary scaffolding trying to govern a kingdom that was never theirs.

This is why awakening can feel like fear before it feels like freedom. This is why even a quiet presence—a blog post, a conversation, a woman standing in a field—can  unsettle the boundaries someone has spent a lifetime building.

There’s an unspoken agreement many people carry: Let’s not disturb our God‑selves. Let’s keep things manageable. Predictable. Familiar.

But once She has tasted air, the God‑self does not slip quietly back into hiding. The longer She remains, the stronger She becomes—and the more uneasy the small egos of the world feel in Her presence.

She rises most easily in the places the world overlooks—in the tender, unguarded, unpolished corners of our humanity. Not because those places are weak, but because they are undefended.

The kingdom breaks in through the cracks.  

The Sacred Ordinary: Reunion

 

The Sacred Ordinary: Reunion

Invocation

Sunlight streamed through the slats of the old barn, casting golden stripes across dust and straw. I stood beside him—cream-colored dress, black ribbon at my neck, the air thick with memory. He wore a straw hat and suspenders, the same quiet steadiness in his posture that I remembered. Behind us, the cow watched like a witness to something ancient.

We hadn’t seen each other in two years. The barn was full of people, voices rising and falling, but none of it touched us. When our eyes met, the world blurred. We fell into that place we’d always known.

Meditation

It was like slipping through a trapdoor into the rabbit hole—our shared mind, our secret chamber. The crowd tried to distract us, to pull us back to the surface, but we were already submerged. For nearly fifteen years, we’d lived inside each other’s thoughts. That reunion wasn’t a beginning—it was a remembering.

I told him I owed him a debt I could never repay. He didn’t need to hear it. We both knew. In that moment, we were conjuring what we needed from the world. It was survival, yes—but also grace. The kind that only comes when two souls merge in silence.

Benediction

Eventually, we surfaced. The light shifted. The cow turned. The barn reclaimed its shape. We parted again, each carrying the imprint of that descent.

But the rhythm remains: chaos, immersion, return. And the image—two figures in a barn, dressed for memory, lit by something more than sun—reminds me that the sacred is never far. It lives in the ordinary, waiting for us to fall in again.

The Sacred Ordinary: Benediction in the Washroom

The Sacred Ordinary: Benediction in the Washroom

Invocation

I spent my life in classrooms, absorbing what I was told I needed to know. I thought that once I graduated, the world would welcome me with open arms. But it didn’t. The world didn’t care.

So here I am, in a low-level job at a chick hatchery, scraping chicken droppings off wire trays where life first cracked open. The smell is sharp. The work is repetitive. The trays are caked with feathers and filth.

Meditation

My coworkers retreat to the washroom on breaks, slumped over in silence or muttering about how bad they feel. I take pity on them sometimes. “This is essential work,” I say. “We’re midwives to the miracle.” They smile for a moment, until the boss storms in to bark orders and reclaim his borrowed sense of importance. The smiles vanish. The bummer returns.

But I stay awake. I stay aware.

And in my mind’s eye, I hold another scene:

A misty morning on the farm. A young woman stands in faded jeans and a flannel shirt, rubber boots planted in damp earth. Her hair is tied back with a plain bandana. Behind her, a black and white cow waits quietly in the fog, autumn leaves scattered like blessings at their feet. The barn leans into the mist, weathered and holy.

This is the world that does welcome me.

Not with applause, but with presence.

Not with status, but with stillness.

Benediction

Even in the washroom, scraping trays, I carry the image of that morning—

the cow, the mist, the girl in work clothes—

and I remember:

The sacred is not elsewhere.

It is here.

In the shit and the silence.

In the fog and the flannel.

In the ordinary, made holy by attention.

A Life in the Field

 

  

Mandy — A Life in the Field

When I think of Mandy now, the memory that comes first is the auction ring: my stepdad beside me, the clatter of hooves and the hum of voices, and the dizzying rush of being young and determined. I was in my late teens, new to bidding and already in the rabbit hole. I’d bid on the first two teams that came through the ring and been the high bidder at about $2,000 a team, but the owner hesitated and wouldn’t let them go. By the time the third team came out I was so wrapped up in the moment I had to ask my stepdad what I’d bid on the last one. Then a pair of mares walked in, and I bid up to $1,800 and bought them. Mandy was one of those mares.

From Auction to Field

We trained that team together. I was there for the small, ordinary miracles: the first tentative steps of foals, the way a mare would nudge her newborn toward milk, the long days in the field when the sun sat low and everything smelled like hay and earth. I remember milking them by hand when I took them away from the farm and their foals to pick up corn at other Amish farms. I spent years in the field with those horses, learning their rhythms and earning their trust.

When Mandy’s mate died, it felt like the end of an era. But Mandy kept going. She became my steady partner for many years after that—pulling, working, standing quietly beside me when the day was done. She gave me foals, she gave me work, and she gave me a kind of companionship that’s hard to name.

The Last Day

A few days ago she didn’t come back to the barn. I went into the woods to find her and discovered she had laid down and could not get up. I tried to move her into a better position, but she simply couldn’t rise. In that moment the choice became clear and terrible: to let her continue suffering, or to stop it. I couldn’t tell anymore whether I was trying to end her pain or my own.

My mom, my stepdad, and I were there together. I put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger. It was a very sacred moment for all of us. When she stopped breathing, the pain stopped—for her and for us. As I walked away a conviction reverberated through me: WE WILL MEET AGAIN GIRL. That certainty felt like a promise and a balm.

David and me on the Farm

 We were young when we met, we were both 16. At that time my mom, step dad and I were having a very hard time running the dairy farm. There was a lot of stress and things were looking bad until David showed up. Even at 16 he made a great difference in our lives and especially mine. He was as dedicated to the farm and the cows as I was and we would work together day in and day out. It was wonderful. I got to the point where I was so grateful that I would do anything for him

After a few years he got married and brought his wife to live on the farm too. But our relationship didn’t change. We were still dedicated to the cows and making the dairy work was the most important thing to us.  Unfortunately, his wife's family moved away and he was forced to leave our dairy.

Invocation

It was the night before he left. I woke from a sound sleep, the air thick with smoke. No time to dress, no time to think—just the instinct to run, barefoot and bare-armed, down to the wood stove in the basement.

Meditation

Our houses were connected below ground, like roots of two trees entwined. David had smelled it too. We met in the haze, both breathless, both alert. The pipe had come loose—nothing more. But something else had come loose in me. In the dim light, with the smoke curling around us, I saw him not just as a friend or a farmhand, but as the one I would have given everything to. Not out of desperation, but out of a fullness I didn’t know I carried.

Benediction

It didn’t happen, of course. He left the next day. But I’ve held that moment like a candle in a dark room—waiting, still, for the one who will make me feel that way again. The one I’ll give myself to, completely, without fear.

The boar was loose.

Not just from his pen, but from the grip of reason.

He charged through the neighborhood like a storm with tusks,

snorting defiance at fences, dogs, and decency.

My stepdad handed me the task:

“Take the dogs. See what you can do.”

So I did.

And the dogs did.

And Mister Pig did what male ego does best—

he refused.

Meditation

The fight was real.

Two dogs against one boar,

and me, standing witness to the rawness of instinct.

I saw the struggle not just of flesh,

but of pride, resistance, and the slow dawning of wisdom.

When I lifted the wire mesh and offered Mister Pig a way back,

he paused.

Not because he was beaten,

but because even the stubborn recognize sanctuary

when it’s offered with clarity

Benediction

Mister Pig crawled back under the fence.

The dogs stood down.

And I stood still,

watching the fog lift from the field of my own understanding.

Even the cantankerous, the ornery, the ego-bound—

they know a good idea when they see it.

And we all lived,

if not happily ever after,

then at least with a little more grace.

Meditations on the Sacred in everyday Life

 

She stood in the hush of morning, where fog softened the edges of everything—barn, cow, breath. The lace at her collar held the memory of hands that once stitched in silence, and the ribbon at her throat felt like a prayer tied gently to the body. The cow watched her with ancient eyes, unhurried, unafraid, as if recognizing something holy in the stillness.

The earth received her offering without judgment, holding both failure and hope in the same palm. Each seed was a confession, each handful of soil a promise. She did not know what would rise, only that the act itself was enough

The mule did not speak, yet its silence was a language of trust. Its presence was steady, unadorned, a companionship beyond words. She felt her own breath slow to match its rhythm, as if the creature carried her into a deeper stillness.

Labor was not punishment but prayer, each splinter a bead on the rosary of survival. The fence held stories of storms, of animals sheltered, of hands that had built and rebuilt. She felt the ache in her palms as devotion disguised as endurance.

Rest was not escape but return, the body remembering it belonged to the earth. The grass bent gently around her, the sky dimmed to a tender blue, and she felt herself dissolve into the rhythm of evening.

 

🌿 Riding the Orange Bus

The orange bus idled in front of the packing house like a promise. Anyone who wanted to pick oranges could climb aboard, and that morning I did. I was the only white person on the bus, but for once I wasn’t the only female. The driver was a big, warm-hearted Black woman named Sally Mae, and one of the pickers was a Jamaican girl.

Sally offered me an orange bag to pick with but warned I’d have to buy it if I stayed on. Soon we were rolling toward the grove, where a tractor trailer delivered bins to all twelve pickers. The rhythm was simple: pick as fast as you could until the bins were full. By the time the bins ran out, I had filled four. Most of the others had six to eight, but the Jamaican girl had four too. Since pay came by the bin, anything less than four meant you couldn’t survive. For me, survival was the goal—and I was proud. Sally Mae was proud of me too.

Over time, Sally Mae took me under her wing. She became my surrogate mother, finding me a place to stay and defending me fiercely. I remember her announcing to everyone on the bus that I was one of them—even if I was white. I loved her for that.

Life on the bus was raw and real. Sometimes we’d stop to pick up a worker who wouldn’t come out because he was too hungover, and Sally would send a couple of guys in to drag him out. Every morning, the crew showed up at my door, and together we drove to a new grove. At night, they brought me back to the little house Sally had arranged for me in the orange grove.

Once in a while, another white newcomer would sit beside me and ask what it was like. My answer was always the same: “It’s hell.” And it was—for them. No white newcomer lasted more than a day that winter. But for me, it was different.

The outsiders came and went, unable to bear the grind. But we stayed—rooted in oranges, laughter, and belonging. For them it was hell; for us, it was home.

Come May, a letter arrived from my mother asking me to return to the farm to help out. It felt less like a request than a summons, a sign that it was time to go back. Leaving Sally was hard—we hugged, we cried, we promised—but promises couldn’t hold against time. It wasn’t meant to last, only meant to change me.

I Didn’t Look Back

🌾 I Didn’t Look Back. Not Once.

A moment of surrender, a roadside meal, and a tent pitched at the edge of the sea.

                                      (the gown and backpack symbolize my dual existence)

I left my biological father in Massachusetts and with a backpack full of all my belongings, started walking down the road.

I began hitchhiking toward upstate New York—about 300 miles from where I stood. I’d heard there were apple orchards there, and I figured I could get a job picking fruit. I’d done some fruit picking before and liked the purity of it. You just get paid for what you pick. No résumé. No interviews. Just work.

I didn’t look back. Not once.

Ahead was work, orchards, and the promise of something clean.

I got a ride right away. But it was getting late, and the driver asked if I had a place to stay. I told him I had a tent and could pitch it anywhere. He insisted I come home with him, eat something, and then he’d take me to a beautiful beach where I could camp.

Of course I was scared. But I figured my life was in the hands of God now.

Not in a dramatic way—just in the way you stop fighting the current and let it carry you.

I got in.

True to his word, I found myself in his house, just me and him, eating a meal. I wasn’t afraid of him. I’m good at reading people, and he was just a normal guy.

But to my surprise, I was upset—because I was lost.

I didn’t know how to get back to the highway, and it was freaking me out.

I couldn’t tell if this man would return me to the road again.

But he did.

He drove me to the beach as promised, and it was a beautiful place to pitch my tent. The sand was pale and clean, the waves steady. I finally let go of my fear of being lost. My destination of picking fruit felt flimsy at best, so I decided I would rethink it in the morning, if he didn’t show up to bring me back to the road.

Reflection

Sometimes the road disappears. Sometimes the map dissolves in your hands.

But the tide rolls in, steady and soft, and you find yourself safe enough to sleep.