Lucy in the Chocolate Factory

I need your help in making a decision. I’m soliciting your comments. I’ll continue resting over the weekend but I plan to come back Monday and read your responses. Making this decision does not need to be heavy and significant. It can be fun, even if what I’m discussing is somewhat serious.

The workload, even with Sarah and Ryan’s help, is out of sight. One person cannot do all there is to do. Like Lucy in the chocolate factory, I need to let go of some of it or I’ll succumb to chocolate.

Before I pose the question that I need your answer to, I’d like to give you some background.

If you have no time for the discussion, just skip to the section, below, which is plainly marked, “The Question.”

“The Incident”

I realize that serious Earth changes are happening around the globe and the tempo of events is picking up. That’s part of the reason why I find myself in this situation and need to talk to you.

Let me start by saying what actually happened yesterday to cause me to burn out. It happened over something innocuous and benign.

When you’re under pressure to produce, any small roadbump can cause one to spin wheels and roll the car.

The actual roadbump that sent me spinning was of the smallest nature. A member of the Observer Corps sent in a great article suggestion. While doing several things at once, I got the article and prepared it for posting. I forgot who suggested it and wanted to give that person credit.

I went back into my email to find out who that person was –  Jean, Ann, Jeannie, Roth, Stephen, Olivia?  I could neither remember who it was nor find a title that revealed who had sent what.  Searching on a keyword in the email did not produce a name.

I was obliged to open emails. But my in-basket is humungous. Remember the one-thousand-foot tsunami in The Abyss?  Well, to me (not in actuality, but just to me), my email seems like a thousand-foot tsunami followed in short succession by another thousand-foot tsunami and another.

It seems as if I answer all emails before lunch and come back after lunch to what seems like another tidal wave. Meanwhile, I’m supposed to be researching articles, adding material to First Contact, answering questions, reading comments, and so on.

On this particular occasion, I searched for the name of the person who sent me the article. Reading titles didn’t help. They were all plain vanilla: “Gee! Read This”  Or “Hey, Tell Me What You Think.”

I started out reading certain people’s emails and couldn’t find it so I started at the top of the thousand-foot tsunami and began reading every email. Then it struck me.

The whole magnitude of the email treadmill set in. I was facing a solid wall of email. I froze up and couldn’t continue. In a flash I saw an army of tsunamis coming at me and I gave up the ghost. I burned out and couldn’t continue.

The Story of a Reporter Covering the End Times

That’s the incident and now I need to tell the story of a reporter covering the End Times. Again this does not need to be heavy.

Readership is swiftly increasing on the site.  In a week’s time, the average readership increased by 3,000 hits a day (from 11,000 to 14,000) and it only promises to grow. Why is it growing?

Well, we’ve entered the End Times proper and Earth changes are happening. An area of Australia the size of Germany or France is under water.  Floods, mudslides and other phenomena are happening in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Brazil – have I forgotten any?

The tempo of events is increasing. It’s not just a flood or slide happening here today and one there next week. All are happening at the same time.

Meanwhile the cabal, which I read in Matthew the other day, actually had sent one or more celestial bodies on collision courses with Earth which the galactics stopped (I don’t remember the number and haven’t time to find the reference), is probably fielding assassinations, causing whatever havoc they can (as SaLuSa said in his last message they were).

All of this requires researching and following. I must keep up with the moving baseline of events.

More people are recognizing that we’ve entered the End Times and some fear the result will be planetary catastrophe. The Earth changes are bad enough but they are not globally catastrophic and never will be.

As each new set of events occurs, it requires research to become aware of what’s going on in the area – oil spills, fleet flyovers, birds dying, green water, assassination plots, gigantic spaceships around the sun. ”Working up” a new field is itself time-consuming and energy-intensive.

New readers are coming here out of concern. They want to know if the planet will survive, if they will survive, and why shouldn’t they want to know?

What I failed to predict was some of the ways that increased readership would translate into increased workload; specifically, increased email, both direct and redirected from the site.

The Impact of Increasing Workload

CNN has several people who handle only comments and Twitter – Jack Cafferty on comments and I forget who on Twitter.

The email I receive could be the workload of one person. It is daunting to empty your email before lunch and find it full after. The feeling of being on a treadmill builds. The feeling of desparation increases.  It’s all very dramatic.

But don’t get me wrong: I couldn’t do without your article suggestions and leads. You’re the Observer Corps. You spot the incoming planes.  So I’m in a bind. I have to find a way of receiving email from the Observer Corps while protecting myself from a wall of letters.

I hope you’re starting to see the gargantuan nature of the task of reporting the End Times. And so far we’re only talking about email.

Not only does email increase in general, but it increases from new readers.

Why are so many new readers coming to the site? Probably for several reasons, some exciting, some saddening. The light energy on the planet is increasing and raising people’s awareness, energy, and inquisitiveness.

The truth of our situation is emerging and more people are seeing that we face a situation they never dreamed of – from the cabal, from our relatives in space, from Earth changes, from a failing financial system.

Some people are watching The Nostradamus Effect, Life After People, and 20122. The Movie, and wondering of they should become survivalists, turn their houses into fortresses and stock up on supplies. Should they buy a gun? Should they cash in their investments and move to an isolated location?

Some people are hearing about the planetary transformation expected in 2012 and want to know what is meant by it. They hear of  workshops on the Mayan prophecies, Ascension energies, or the extraterrestrial presence. They want to know what’s going on.

Answering the questions of people new to the field is also energy-intensive and involves going over ground I have covered many times before. It means I have to stand still even as the baseline of events continues to move rapidly forward. I end up not being able to keep up with the moving frontier and in my position and during these times, I have to keep up.

I need one person to stand still and answer this type of question and another person to keep his eye on the moving ball.

There’s also Comments

Lets leave aside email now and turn to comments from a readership of many thousands.

Your comments below articles require reading unless I want to risk some cabal member getting onto the site and becoming a wolf among lambs, causing mischief or publishing fear-inducing disinformation that escapes my attention but causes a ripple among readers.

You’re also beginning to make requests for information via comments and that too requires a response and can involve researching.

Moreover, a single article these days may receive a fair number of comments, some of them one page, some two pages in length. Reading from the back end (the dashboard or administrative page) I often cannot follow the thread of those that refer to a previous comment and have to stop my flow to go back to the article on the front end and follow the thread through.

If two people argue with each other, it means I also may need to act to prevent the site from becoming a free-for-all. A free-for-all in the End Times, with Australia partially under water, is not the same as a free-for-all in a time of peace and plenty.

When one person says, “I’ve reached my limit in waiting for disclosure,” and a discussion arises with apologies, etc., that requires attention and has its emotional impact on me. I feel drained after an episode of refereeing or addressing an individual’s difficulties waiting (I have difficulty waiting too, by the way).

Then others ask me why I said what I said to the original commenter and I drain more vital energy that I don’t have in great supply by answering for my original actions.

However, how would anyone know or see this whole range of activity? It’s not possible. Most assume that I’m responding the way I do because of the issue at hand, and not because I’m overwhelmed by my email basket or under pressure to get articles finished and published or work up a new field.

I now see why people like David Wilcock don’t answer emails and may not read comments. How can they and still produce their work?  Again I’m bailing so rapidly that it’s funny. Even Lucy can laugh at Lucy.

Adaptations to Increasing Workload and Tempo

I’ve been finding myself sleeping an inordinate amount of time and seldom leaving the apartment and it’s not due to ascensionitis. I can’t continue in that vein.

For the first time, I said no last week to covering events which were genuinely important, but there just wasn’t enough of me to go around, no matter how you sliced it (or me). I need to clone myself – repeatedly.

At this juncture (and there will be more junctures) I see myself facing a choice. I can report the news and offer interpretive comments or I can furnish the personal contact and individual answers that many people want to help them through these times, but I’m afraid I see now that I can’t straddle both horses.

Their requirements are different and the act of riding two horses itself requires coordination and exertion. I have to dismount from one.

The Question

So my question is, and I ask you to answer via comments not via email, are you coming to the site for (1) news or (2) contact? I will have to choose between the two. News means word of events and their interpretation. Contact means advice and answers to individual questions. Please respond by giving me a little insight into why you say what you do (but not a page).

Now, Returning to the Discussion

If you reply “the news” and not “contact,” that is a vote for turning the site into more of a magazine format, without reader input as well as not answering as much personal email as I do or for that matter even very many individual questions – at least by email. I will endeavor to answer questions by generally-posted articles but not by individual responses, which from a site with this number of hits a day, that will only get bigger, has gone beyond my reach.

Also, if you reply “the news,” that may result in me turning off the capability to add comments to articles. The site will become a place you come to to find out what’s happening but not a place of discussion any longer. You may have to go to a discussion group for that. (I recommend Share11:  https://groups.yahoo.com/group/Share11/)

If you reply “personal contact,” I may (I say may only; I have to consider whether it’s a task I want to take on) drop reporting the news and set myself up as a site that only answers questions.

I actually don’t know if it’s possible to run a site that only answers questions because one still needs to do research to answer the questions and my experience is that answering questions is an infinitely-expanding task as readership increases.

I now don’t even want to look at email for a while. And that’s not good because I could not do this job without the help I receive from you. But there is no way I can do this job and continue to answer email at the volume at which it’s coming in (and maintain the First Contact site, which is my source of raw material for articles). So that’s the dilemma I face.

If you send me article suggestions, I need you now to preface them with “OC” for “Observer Corps.” Otherwise they will be lost in the wave of other letters.

Phew!

Once the first galactic peeks around a corner and says, “We’re heeeeeerrrreeee,” the readership of sites like this will take off by orders of magnitude.  It’ll be like a war zone. So this won’t be the first time I regroup. And in regrouping, certain services will be lost so this will not be the first time you face a loss of services. Next time, however, I just may regroup and leave aside the discussion.

For me, the answer may not lie in adding more hands because that turns me into an administrator and what I do best is not administrating. It’s writing. And not only writing that simply emerges newly from the mind, but writing that is informed by background research.

So I’m partly asking for your view and partly asking for your permission to shed some tasks in order to keep going. I’ve developed warm personal relations with a lot of you here and it’s not a decision I want to make on my own or a decision that is easy to make. I am going to miss you more than I can say as the workload increases and I find it ever more important to concentrate.

Living like Rapunzel

When I sat as a refugee adjudicator, I was legally walled off from contact with anyone. I remember once a claimant whom I had given a negative decision to wrote and thanked me. He said it was hard spinning a lie and I had found him out and yet rendered a decision humanely and he respected that and wanted me to know.

I so much wanted to write him and thank him for his honesty, but I could not, by legal requirement. I could have no contact with a claimant or anyone else. Adjudicators who did could be expelled from office. But that meant that I had to live like Rapunzel in a tower. (Does that mean that the choice is between Rapunzel and Lucy?)

It’s been a wonderful experience for me to have had contact with so many of you and to be welcomed into your lives and made a part of your decision-making process. I regard you as my close and only friends and I’m saddened that I may need to make a decision that could potentially impact our relationship – at least until we reach the Fifth Dimension. (After that, let’s party!)

I now see that other people who are faced with a similar decision must go through an excruciating process because they too may be condemning themselves to becoming Rapunzel. It’s not an easy choice and one that I would make only out of a sense of duty to the times. If I need to wall myself in, I will miss you.

So please help me make that decision by giving me your feedback. What brings you to this site – news or contact? I need to know to make my decision on what route to take going forward.

OK. Full stop. I’m going to a movie. The King’s Speech. I’m going to eat popcorn and have a gigantic Coke. I’m going to watch a man transcend a stutter and hope I don’t develop one!   😉