“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Late last night I stepped out onto the screened-in back porch of the hill house. Our black-and-white cat, Mitzi, followed me. We’re having the house painted, and I could smell the acrylic odor. The woods on the hill in back of the house echoed with the stridulations of the cicadas and katydids. When I went outside I made sure the porch door was latched so that Mitzi couldn’t get out; she sat silhouetted against the light coming from the kitchen window as she watched me walk down the driveway. It was the natural time for her to be free, I thought. We’d had Mitzi spayed three weeks ago, when she was seven months old. [Our veterinarian has told us we have to wait until early next year before Mitzi’s littermate, Billy, can be neutered; he has some more growing to do first.] Seth’s recent material on animal consciousness has assuaged to some degree the guilt Jane and I feel at depriving the innocent cats of their reproductive roles. We’ve also felt bad over our long-standing decision to keep them in the house; they can roam no farther than the front and back porches. Both porches are screened in down to the floor and furnish the only contacts Billy and Mitzi have with the outside environment.

As I moved down the driveway I was thinking of what I wanted to cover next in these notes. The night was warm, heavily overcast, and mysterious: The streetlight down at the corner of our lot cast long shadows up the road running past the house and into the woods. The rhythmic, almost harsh sounds of the insects were strongly reminiscent of the long camping seasons my father had treated his family to many years ago. [I remembered holding an amazingly delicate, green-colored katydid in my hand as a child. My father had taken my brother and me into the woods one night, at first tracking one of the insects by its sound, until finally he’d been able to illuminate with his flashlight the katydid as it perched on a branch at just the right height for us.]

(Actually, it’s taken me a long time—a little over three years—to round out these preliminary notes for the session that follows. When I finished them, then, it was nighttime again, September 23, 1982, late, and once again I stepped off the back porch of the hill house for some fresh air. [Mitzi didn’t watch me this time.] Much has taken place in Jane’s and my lives since 1979, as it has for everyone else, but here in the light of the corner streetlight the scene outside our place was just as magical and mysterious as ever. That’s what we love about it. In the warm evening the silent road still ran uphill past the house and into the woods. The cicadas and the katydids still sounded their hypnotic rhythms, I’ve heard geese often lately, moving south in noisy waves, and we’ve had deer in our driveway several times. I looked for rabbits or ‘coon or deer now, but didn’t see any of those creatures.