I was born in Columbus, Ga., and grew up in Jesup, Ga. My mother was in labor 48 hours with me because I didn't want to come out. Some people never really do come out, do they? Not me. Once I've made a decision, I stick with it. Once I was out I wanted to be in the world as much as possible. My mother, after 48 hours of labor pains, finally gave up on me and let them pull me out. She spent a good deal of her life after that giving up on me. Only at the end of her life did she ever realize I might be worth not giving up on. The doctors pulled me out of her with forceps and left some little indentations in my forehand that have now mostly disappeared. I was named after my grandmother Clara and my mother, whose name was Sibyl Grace. I was nicknamed Cotton because my hair was a curly white cotton ball. I have very curly, long hair. My hair is always coarse and dried out because my head emits heat enough to fry my hair. Fortunately, I had the good sense to grow up in a humid place - the swamps of southeast Georgia.

Water is necessary to cool my fire, though I'm a grounding earth sign. But I am talkative like an air sign. So I started out with all the elements working with me - fire within me, earth as my star sign element, air as the nature of my way of communicating, and water as my environment. Living between two swamps, the Altamaha and the Okefenokee, I was born a natural transcendentalist like the American poets Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, and others. A transcendentalist is someone who is always finding God in the little things. It's because we spend so much time meditating water lilies and pond bugs that we find God in the swamp. We don't have time to find God in church, where most people do. We're too busy fishing, camping, swimming, hunting and hiking. Fortunately for busy people, God/dess is wherever you happen to be looking.

Nothing teaches transcendentalism like a swamp. There is more perspective to be gained there than anywhere else on earth, in terms of the Tiny. The mini- and micro-biospheres are everywhere. You can sit for hours, for weeks, for years on the bank of a swamp and ponder it. I know, I did it. You can look straight into the eyeballs of an alligator looking back at you, and come to know the Transcendent. Ever been chased by hornets, wasps, wild hogs, mad dogs and a panther? I have. Makes your heart beat soooooo fast, and you learn two things real important - how fast you can run and how hard you can pray.

How many times have you had the breath knocked out of you? I bet not more than me. The worst one I remember was when I was playing near the river with my friend Bob. We jumped off a cliff holding onto vines and playing Tarzan, but instead of landing smoothly on the top of the other red clay cliff like Bob did, I slammed right into it, knocking the breath out of me. I slid all the way down the cliff on my stomach and I could not breathe for the entire time it took to run down the road and into the house to my mother. I was turning blue when I got there. She pounded me on the back til I inhaled and then she bandaged all my scrapes. That was when I was 11, and it was the first time death and my mortality occurred to me. After that, I became more interested in God and the afterlife, and how God might be able to keep me from really dying. I think it was then that I started to give more consideration to seeing if I could make friends with God.

When I was running down the road and turning blue, Bob ran down the road with me, banging me on the back and trying to get me breathing again. He died at 50 of a heart attack. I wasn't there to bang on him to get him breathing again or I sure would have. All the men in his family die young with bad hearts. His father, his uncles, his cousins. Bob has three younger brothers still living. Bob's father, who died at 42, (I was there when he died) was my father's business partner, so I grew up with this family. All my life I experienced their remarkable non-attachment to life and watched them live their lives to the fullest and become fathers as they joyfully expected to drop dead any minute. I learned a lot from them about positive non-attachment and negative expectations. They were my first teachers.

Bob always told me he would die of a heart attack, and I used to try to talk him out of it. I told him if he believed it, then it would happen, and if he didn't believe it, then maybe it wouldn't happen. He said he didn't believe in that. Bob believed in heart attacks instead. He worked at ITT Rayonier, a huge international weapons corporation fronting as an international pulp mill operation. Their headquarters is low-profiled in my little hometown, but they squat there on the Altamaha River like a gross, cigar-puffing monstrosity. The mill mulches the slash pines grown on 854,000 acres in Georgia that originally grew hardwoods. It turns trees into chemical cellulose. Rayonier's smoke stacks stand straight and tall alongside the river like lonely grey sentinels puffing stinky cigars. Its billion dollar a month cash flow sustains the little town and the corporation's weapons operations. The main product, chemical cellulose, is insidious; it's in our food, our clothes, our cars, our houses, everywhere. It's not listed on the labels of anything because it is part of the label and whatever is the product. It's everywhere and we buy it all over the world without even knowing it. It's not a choice we are given, to buy or not to buy it.

ITT Rayonier has pulp mills all over the world, in Auckland, New Zealand, Concepción, Chile, Dublin, Ireland, London, United Kingdom, Mataura, New Zealand, Shanghai, P.R. China, Singapore, Tokyo, Japan, Vancouver, Canada, Vladivostok, Russia, Baxley, Georgia, Fernandina Beach, Florida (where my parents lived), Hoquiam, Washington, Ketchikan, Alaska, Seattle, Washington, Stamford, Connecticut. In my little hometown of Jesup, Ga., they can hide their headquarters out in the swamps in the middle of nowhere, like the criminals they are, and do their dirty business where no one is looking and no one is talking. All over the world they are churning the forests and selling us a product we don't need (along with Georgia-Pacific), but that we have to buy (because we don't know how not to) so their weapons division is properly funded to build attack vehicles the US government can buy and then resale to some foreign customers looking to kill people. That's it in a broken nutshell. It's just the kind of thing a transcendentalist would despise.

Bob was a manager there in the timber division, a job he would really love because he grew up like I did, out in the woods. But Bob was in the division in charge of cutting down all the hardwoods and re-planting with slash pine, a tree good for nothing except becoming pulp and for housing nesting squirrels. Chemical cellulose cash flow creates necessary funding for their weapons division, and that's more important than the animals and their homes. Rayonier's biggest customer is the Pentagon and their rationale leaves no room for nesting squirrels. When the hardwoods fell on 854,000 prime acres in Georgia, the birds and animals were displaced, and mostly all that is left in abundance is the adaptable squirrels, who build their nests in the slash pines.

"There are two many squirrels already," said the pediatrician who lived across the street from me, when he saw the three baby squirrels I was raising. Their nest fell, with them in it, out of a pine tree when the pulp mill loggers harvested the slash pine (even though it was baby squirrel season and everyone knew it). "Why not just let them die?" he said to me. I nearly fell off the sofa in the living room at that question, but I was holding a baby squirrel in my hand and didn't want to drop it. I stayed composed long enough to remark that I might say the same thing to a pediatrician about people and be more right than he was. That set him spinning and after that, he didn't invite me to dinner in his home anymore.

But really, I think this dichotomy in life - money versus environment - causes a drinking problem in the community of Jesup, Ga., and maybe everywhere else in the world, because everyone in Jesup is a transcendentalist of some kind, by nature and by nurture. However, the best place to make a living is at the pulp mill, where there is a union offering high wages. The whole town lives off that mill. The transcendentalists work at the pulp mill or benefit from the cash flow. They cut down the environment and earn their wages, then in the evenings they buy alcohol and go home to drink. Many of them do, but not all of them, of course. Still others are just depressed. Or either they have cancer. Jesup is noted as one of the cancer capitals of the world. No one can figure out why.

I grew up on this pristine river that the pulp mill now spills its poison into. It's a brown river called Altamaha by the Creek Indians. Altamaha probably means mucky water or something like that. It's not a pretty river, in the Colorado sense, but that's because it's a River Primeval. According to legend, the Spaniard Ponce de Leon and the Englishman Oglethorpe both saw this river. Some local legend says Oglethorpe stood and peed off a cliff that became known as Oglethorpe's Bluff (pun intended, I think.) Another legend has to do with the Spaniard and his local descendents he made with the Creek Indians. They live along the river in a community, out in the wilderness of the swamp, and supposedly can't add 2 and 2 and get 4 because they're all inbred. I have met some people like that but I'm not sure there's really a whole community of them somewhere out in the woods. I was always fascinated by that legend and by some of the people I met while living there who seemed to confirm it. I wrote a book about it, my first book, unpublished and entitled "Toad Saga."

THE GORILLA ON BALD'S ISLAND

The place has several legends that would seem to be more about the imagination of the people than about reality. One legend is the ghost light, another is the ghost at the Chief Tomachichi Motel on 301 south, and then there's the legend of the gorilla that sits on a log on Bald's Island, reading a newspaper and sipping gin. Bald 's Island is a dense jungle island off the river a bit and back into the swamps. I don't believe that legend, mainly because I actually went out there to see if I could find the gorilla and didn't find it. I took my bass boat out fishing and just decided to go over there and see if I could find any evidence of a gorilla. I tied up at the bank under a willow tree and got out and walked around the island looking for gorilla tracks. That was the day the four-foot long poisonous snake, a Water Moccasin, fell off the tree branch into my boat and almost directly on top of me. I am proud to say I did not jump out of the boat or turn the boat over. I did rock the boat violently when I beat the snake to death with the boat paddle. I also did a good bit of screaming that was likely unsettling for the wildlife on the island.

Ah, those were the good ole' days of River Primeval. If I had to do it over again, I think I would try to let that snake get out of my boat, but at the time I was just too emotionally upset to do anything but freak out. I don't want to sugar coat it because that's not the only snake that didn't escape my fear and wrath, although mostly my argument was with spiders. I've always liked snakes because they eat spiders. I wrote a poem about spiders, which I include here for your spider education. You don't have to read it if you don't want to. You can just skip over it to the next poem, which you also don't have to read. Do your best to muddle through these poems. They will give you a clearer idea of what kind of person is writing this material about channeling watery beings of light from under the earth. You might want to theorize, after you've read these poems, that my early life in the swamp, of which I am so proud, was actually what unsettled me into the person who thinks she's in communication with people from a lost continent. Anyway, here are the poems.

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I HATE SPIDERS BUT I HATE TO KILL THEM WORSE

When I was child in the swamp where I lived
there was one spider for every leaf it seemed.
Some of them were so tiny you could hardly see them.
Others were so big that to gaze upon them made you almost fall down
but instead you made a 180 and limped away as fast as possible
like the scared scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.

Some of the spiders were pitch black with long angular
spikey legs that spread over a square inch.
Others were fat and brown and very hairy like Tarantulas almost
except they were more sinister and they didn't have
any attractive markings like movie star spiders do
and they weren't furry and kind of cute like Tarantulas.

If you went into the switch house where the fuse box was
it was better to be wearing a moon suit like astronauts do.
That's if you wanted to make sure some of them didn't just happen
to drop off the ceiling onto your head or arms
causing you to shit a brick, pardon my French.

Because there were so many of them just hanging there alive
and crawling, half-dead, half-eaten (they eat each other)
and dead just ready to drop on you if the breeze
from the switch house door blows too strong.

Up high in the corners live brown ones the size of mice
that resemble the alien monster in the movies, you know,
with that crusty exoskeleton and serrated edges
that passes for skin in the insect world.

If you went into the boathouse it was better to fear
the water moccasins lying on the planks that slid into the water
just as you walk through the boat house door to float the boat out.
And hopefully you didn't walk into a big spider web across the walkway
and come mouth to mouth with a huge banana spider.

That is a yellow and black striped monster with long straight legs
two at a time, four pointing north and four point south
because this spider, if he gets on you, doesn't jump off.
No, he runs down the front of your shirt inside it or outside it
whichever until he gets to the ground. Not a nice spider.

If you happen to turn over a log looking for red wigglers
(the better to fish with) and you put your hand
on the fat, furry brown recluse spider about the size of a quarter
and if he bites you, now you're really going to be sick
and you might die or just wish you would.

Everyone knows about the black widow and how
the gas and water meter-reader people fear them though
they're small and very black with an orange dot
right on the underside of their abdomens
and that's how you know it's them.

Then there's the two huge black river spiders
like in the switch house I told you about
living in the rafters in my bedroom. I call them my guardians,
a noble and useless attempt to accept them as belonging up there.

And I have tried to learn to love them because I hate to kill them
since I discovered how terrified of me they are
so much more so than I of them, believe it or not.
So for weeks I have tried to learn to love them and understand them
and to hope that they flourish. And I wonder

how in the world they can make a living in my bedroom
where there are to my knowledge no bugs?
And still they want to stay here. I know this because
I got the vacuum after them and I was feeling
very wicked doing this and somewhat guilty

since they have done absolutely nothing to me
but hang upside down on the ceiling, how I don't know
except that I saw in National Geographic
that they have little hooks on their legs
and they hook these hooks into the ceiling fabric

and manage to live upside down until they get back
to their hole homes where everything is
safe, dark, snuggy, cushioned with moths and right side up.
But the vacuum cleaner did not deal out the death
as reluctantly planned so I was forced to resort to Rid-A-Bug

which is a horrible poison and delivers a death worse than death,
a torturous end to a short but honest life of scrounging for bugs.
Nothing shameful about that, nothing not worthwhile about that
since there are surely too many bugs to go around.
But deliver the terrible death I did.

And stagger out of the holes they did into the light
which they would never do unless they'd lost their minds
and are dying. And they fell off the ceiling onto the carpet
and I sucked them up in the vacuum cleaner these poor
harmless horrible creatures which I try so hard not to fear

but to forgive, and I've gone and murdered them for really no reason
except that they were awful to look at and worried me up there.
And I sure do feel bad about it but then I'm trying to think
that they must have suspected all along just how deadly I might be
and they could have got the hell out of there sooner
before the terrible resolution overtook me to dispatch them to eternity.

Then I realize, 'Oh, they're teaching me what Fate is.
Fate is someone else deciding your life for you.
Destiny is you changing the whole world to change your life.
But then I think, 'Who am I, God or somebody to be so concerned
about dead spiders? Are the spiders God, too? Did I just kill
some part of God? Oh, my God! It's too hard to think about.

---

PARADISE

Here is a poem I wrote about the river several years ago, remembering the way it used to be when it was still a pristine wilderness before the pulp mill got it. The poem represents what I got out of spending the first half of my life on that river. The poem is a river pill like liver pill - you swallow it and get a concentrated dose of what it's like to be a south Georgia swamp-raised, river-rat transcendentalist.

Flow me now, deep river, to a paradise I know,
Long, cool, summer water, take me easy and slow.
Never swift and shallow, rushing sudden downstream,
Just sleepy and drifting, like this place in my dream.

Where dawn's dreamy light, sweet cool sunbeams make,
Yellow, gold, brilliant white, in green pine tree brake.
Tiny sparrows, finches flitter, they circle away, fly.
Quails rustle dry brush, black crows callous cry.

Bristly boars root and snort in palmetto bush near.
Look! Into the river leap three white-tail deer.
Armadillos scurry by, squirrels scamper up trees.
Possums, rabbits, raccoons, spanish moss, and oak leaves.

Bright and bold sings the sun its fiery orange tune.
When day sunshines hot, hawks soar at high noon.
Woodpeckers tap rat-a-tat on distant hollow trees,
Bluejays and redbirds chase dragonflies and bees.

On far slippery shores of this light and dark river,
Snakes nap sunning and then away slither.
Willow tree branches are dripping green snakes.
They wriggle then drop on an otter's furry face.

Scorpions, spiders, snakes, here deserve our forgiving.
They're honest and brave, just trying to make a living.
Mosquitoes, gnats, chiggers have over us some power,
Yet measure their lives by the minute and the hour.

Early evening 'bout dusk in fishes graveyards,
Lay crunchy white bones of dead alligator gars.
Swollen river rolls by, water gargles and gurgles.
Bobble half-swallowed logs toting green turtles.

Down under the water, buttery catfish play.
Blue cats swirling sand in the bottom channels stay.
River up, redbreast swims into an old cypress knee.
River down, fish is trapped in the stump of a tree.

Who Who! Night owl calls, sweet honeysuckle dreams,
Blackberry bush thickets and far away panther screams.
Two yellow moons, they both ripple and shimmer,
Firefly night sky lights a black river mirror.

Lie back on cool grass, see that shooting star above?
Love gave us all these, we were born just to love.
We're made of inside of what we do in life first,
And our birth foretells our death foretells our birth.

---

DREAM CLASSES

I grew up fishing, swimming, camping, boating, skiing, hiking and cooking out on either the swamp or the river. I had so many remarkable experiences in that place at that time that I am forever grateful for that entire passage of my life. Being there and doing that was everything to me. I loved it. My life would really have been idyllic if my parents had gotten along better and my mother had not been a problem drinker and my father a rage-aholic. Other than that, they were magnificent parents. My family is pretty dysfunctional, even today, with one of my two brothers still mad at me. He won't return my phone calls or invite me to his home, and I can't remember why, anymore. Some of us are healing, others are holding onto the old patterns. So what else is new, right? When I wasn't out being athletic, I was at home reading. I read a lot. I read so much, I just kept reading and kept going to college to read until I got a Master's of Science for Teachers in English Education. I thought about keeping going to college after that but I was getting inner guidance not to. I was now Claire Grace Watson, B.A., M.S.T. I thought that name was long enough.

When I was in high school I took Home Economics, which is what all the girls did because our best future was to be good wives and mothers. Well, maybe so but not for me. I was the only person, said Mrs. Hires, my teacher, who she had ever felt like failing because of all the mistakes I made in cooking and sewing. She said I did the worse thing she has ever seen anybody do - manually wind thread around a sewing machine bobbin. I guess she never lived in Big City. I've seen lots worse than that. But at the time I was so wounded by her words, I wondered what made me be such a failure in the domestic arts. I knew then I would never make a good servant. I realized that lacking the necessary wifery skills I would have to find my own path in life. But little did my sewing teacher know that other kinds of sewing lessons are available for those who stay on the path and find them.

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BEINGS OF LIGHT

A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality. (John Lennon quoting Yoko Ono)

It happened in the dreamtime. I can't resist telling about it, as long as I'm indulging myself this way, and you're still reading. It happened in Asheville, NC, at my friend Marnie's house. I like her house. It's a small Victorian frame house on hilly land that God/dess sprinkled with milky quartz. Marnie decorates her front lawn with larger pieces she has collected over the years. She also finds arrowheads on her property. She thinks her property is a magnetic interdimensional portal, and she practices rituals to strengthen it. Just how strong a portal it is we soon find out.

I spent the night there and slept on the pallet in the front room. She slept in her bedroom, about 25 feet away. As dawn came, I awakened in the midst of my dream to find myself sitting cross-legged on Marnie's bedroom floor at the foot of her bed. I seemed to be about three feet away from the end of her bed and facing her. In dream body, she was sitting up in bed, also in the Lotus position and mirroring me. Between us and to my left sat two men from India, one of them an old man with long, flowing white hair; the other, to his left and closer to me, a young man with straight, shoulder length black hair. They were sitting side-by-side and both in yoga Lotus position. We were all levitating.

The young man was talking with the old man and was holding up a translucent object shaped like a football. He was sewing it together at the seams on top. They sat talking together, and the old man with white hair was pointing to the object and telling him how to sew it. The young man looked away from the old man for a moment and looked into my eyes. He said to me, "Suture."

I responded classically with, "What?" He turned to speak again with the old man, who pointed to the football-thing and said something about it. I looked at Marnie as she gazed at me, and BING I awoke. I sat up on my pallet in the living room and called out, "Marnie!" just as she called out, "Claire!" I ran into her bedroom. "Did you see them?" I asked. "Yes!" she said. "Who were they?" we both asked. We didn't know who they were and I told her he said to me, "Suture." She said, right, Yoga Sutra, the suture yoga. Even tho we didn't know those Teachers by name we felt we got the lesson of that sewing class really well. We understood that we sewed ourselves together with those guys, joined our dimensions and consciousness together.

Since that time I have attended more of their dream classes. And, I've learned their identities...the Hindu Yogis are Old Man Babaji and Babaji, and if you want to know more about them, type Babaji into the search engines. They are long since passed from this earth but are living still, AND teaching sewing classes to those who find the portal into their classroom. In the New Age community, they are well-known to do this group consciousness project of theirs.

The great Babaji, a group consciousness, you realize. My dreamwork began with him/them, but I always called him Bobby. Well, I thought that's what he told me his name was, but now I realize my dream ears didn't hear him right when he said his name was Baba. He might have even said Babaji and I turned that in Bobby. He was my guide into Mexico and the Mayan world and a main character in my book, Heavenly Partners. You can read about him there. Oh and btw, Mrs. Hires, I'll take an A+ for sewing dimensions together. Bridging the worlds is something I'm really good at.

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NEXT - INTERVIEW WITH THE ATLANTEANS

SITEMAP - HOME

Page 1 - The Tao of Atlantis | Channeling | River of Life | Spiders
     Paradise | Dream Classes
Page 2 - The Interview | The Location of Atlantis | The Moonlight
     The Earth Plane | Telepathy
Page 3 - Journey to the Center of the Earthling | Halls of Amenti
     Atlantis Reunion 2 | Everything is a Fall

Copyright Notice - Disk of the World - Text and images copyrighted March 21, 1993-2023, Claire Grace Watson, B.A., M.S.T., U.S. Copyright and under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, All rights reserved.