The ways of spirit are mysterious. Couple that with my tendency to be kind of dense and you’ve got yourself a recipe for utter bewilderment. Such was the case when the spirits came knocking on my door about 12 years ago. At the time, not only was I oblivious to the ‘call,’ but I didn’t even know I had answered. Instead, I just wrote the whole thing off as a very strange experience.

It didn’t take long after my first visionary experience (see my preceding article – The Call: My Introduction to the Spirit World), for the dust to settle in my psyche. I put the experience to rest and got back to the grounding nature of my routine. But deep down inside, a part of me knew that life would never be the same again. I had experienced something that defied logic, yet felt completely real. 

A week after my first healing session I was back on the massage table ready for my next experience. Of course I had the customary internal battle raging in my wee little head. My inner skeptic was certain that my first rather unusual experience was a fluke and was most likely the result of an overactive imagination, while the more receptive part of me was completely fascinated and secretly hoped for another vision. Of course, I was rooting for the receptive part of me to win. Skeptics are a buzz kill.     

After my first visionary experiences I enthusiastically decided to follow the shamanic path. (Little did I know that I was already on it.) I thought, “Hey, there seems to be a lot more to this reality thing than I ever imagined. Wouldn’t it be cool if anything truly was possible?” The potential was staggering. Upon retrospect, however, I have to admit that in the deep recesses of my psyche the idea of pursuing the shamanic path appealed to my need to feel special.

It took me years to figure out that not everyone wants to talk about what happens when you die. Come to find out – most people would prefer having a root canal. Personally, I’ve always been fascinated by cosmology – curious about the big picture. For as long as I can remember, the esoteric has pulled at me like the tide.

It’s no secret that our poor planet and all her inhabitants are treading the currents of unpredictability in a big way these days. I think it’s also safe to say that we’re trying like hell to keep our collective heads above water. While pretty much every system on the planet has slipped into a state of chaos, our response seems to waver between “oh shit” and “what can we do to fix our insert appropriate system here (i.e., environment, economy, oil dependence, political unrest, etc.)?”

There once was a tiny seed that secretly lived in an old woman’s heart. For thousands of years the little seed slept, nestled in the darkness of the woman’s heart, until one day it felt a slight quiver deep inside its shell. The seed opened its eyes and whispered, “Spring is coming.” The old woman smiled.

“I’m your mirror,” she said with a mischievous smile, her eyes sparkling with the ageless wisdom of ten thousand grandmothers. She leaned her round turquoise-skinned body closer as if to tell me a secret and said with a whisper, “And the Great Milky Way is your alarm clock!”

I think from the moment I decided that boys had more to offer than Matchbox cars and kickball games I was eager to be in a relationship. My eagerness, resembling at times neediness, landed me in a series of shallow, empty relationships. Intuitively I knew who the perfect mate for me was, but I never seemed to listen to my intuition. Instead, each time I started a new relationship I’d devote my time to convincing myself that this was “the one.” Experience has taught me, however, that love cannot be rationalized.