Mysterious Ways

I've been extremely leery of writing about the following because I prefer to have some degree of distance from things before I tackle them.  It allows me perspective, or the illusion of perspective.  It allows me to fancy myself wiser for having had the experience.  I get to humorously self-deprecate past folly, while acknowledging with gratitude that it has ultimately gifted me some sort of deeper understanding and clarity.  But for a variety of reasons that may or may not be true, I feel I don't have the luxury of time.  I also don't necessarily believe that time will provide me with insights deeper than what I've cobbled together so far.

While this piece is already annoyingly vague, I feel it needs further disclaimer before I get down to it.  I have a limited readership, but for those who read what I write regularly and for anyone who stumbles upon this particular blog entry I feel the need to declare the following:

I don't want to hear religious warnings or objections to what I'm about to write.
I'm not advocating for or soliciting anything.
I don't want to provide any "service" for free, even.
I don't want to hear from staunch atheists or scientists claiming there is a reasonable explanation for what I've experienced.
I don't want to be accused of making things up.

That being said, some or all of the following is bound to happen.  So be it.  Here we go.

A couple of  years back at my old apartment some strange things began to happen.  They began to happen shortly after I had an hours-long late night conversation with one of my best friends about almost everything.  One of the topics that was broached was my tentative longing to have an experience with a ghost-- one that was of the friendly, reassuring variety.  I thought such an experience might help alleviate some of my fear and grief over death that I carried day in and day out in a compact knot in the pit of my stomach.  Sometimes the knot would detonate and spray unimaginable darkness throughout my being, like the ink of a provoked squid.  Other times it would shrink to the size of a dime, so that, had it been in my pocket instead of my stomach, I might have tossed it good-naturedly into a wishing well so it could be surrounded with other coins that gleamed with easy hope.  Its manifestations varied in size and intensity, but its presence was constant.

A few days after this harmless little musing, our apartment thermostat began to creep up exactly 10 degrees, from a reasonable 70 to an oppressive 80.  It happened many times.  We tried to figure out how and why it was happening.  It was a twist knob in an out-of-the way location, not easy to be turned (and precisely 10 degrees) by brushing past it.  And for it to suddenly begin happening repeatedly after years without issue seemed doubly strange.  We spoke to our landlord about having our locks changed, and we were assured that they had been changed right after the previous tenant had moved out.  We scratched our heads and felt a general sense of being weirded out.  I told a friend about the experience and she said with confidence, "It's a ghost."  Thus began the process of learning about my friend's clairvoyant proclivities and of having her come over to do a reading.  My skepticism turned to anxious amazement as I watched her crystal pendulum come to life.  She'd get a feeling and ask a question;  the pendulum would swing forward and back to answer in the affirmative and side-to-side to answer no.  The wide, swooping circles also seemed to indicate an enthusiastic "yes" of some kind.  I was as fascinated as I was terrified.  I also asked my friend to facilitate conversations between me and some deceased relatives.  The experience made me cry with disbelief and joy.  They're still here, or there, or at least somewhere!

My friend ultimately determined the presence in my apartment to be a ghost of the kind and helpful variety who was trying to fulfill my request for confirmation of an "other side".  There are plenty more stories and details from this time, but I don't wish do delve into those.  Partially, it's because I find it speculative and a little tiresome to rehash something I still don't understand.  Partially it's because some of it was frightening and I don't want to dwell on that portion: like the time that Dion and I were out and my mom was watching Casper at the apartment and she called to tell us that the kitchen light had just loudly switched itself off and the Christmas lights had all begun to flash wildly.  My friend intuited the incident to be an old friend of my mom's who was so excited to see her that she got carried away trying to say hello.  Perhaps.  Who knows?

During this turbulent, invigorating, bewildering time I did crazy or totally reasonable things, depending on who you ask, like burning sage to flush out bad energy and having an elderly Buddhist nun come to bless the place.  But to the best of my ability I tried to compartmentalize things.  I stuffed the unknowable spiritual stuff in a box and put a lid on it and slid it into a dusty alcove in my brain; then I went about the business of caring for my new little baby and trying not to be overwhelmed with questions and curiosity and fear over the enormity of this otherworldly development.  I did so-so.  Dion was on the road for nights at a time and I was a new mom with rampaging post-partum hormones and a writer's imagination, so some days were better than others.  We more or less closed that chapter when we moved into our current home.

My reprieve was pretty brief.  While I now believe that much of the insomnia and anxiety stuff that began happening is due to the colloid cyst in my brain, at the time I had no leads, no explanation.  At one point a friend suggested I try Reiki to help release any stuck, negative energy.  I had always been wildly skeptical, about (a few times outright mocking) this particular alternative therapy technique, but I decided to give it a shot in an effort to get a handle on my life and mental health.  The Reiki practitioner I saw was patient and sweet and deeply kind.  She spoke to me at length about the treatment, answering all my questions before we began.  As I lay on the massage table feeling her hands hovering over me or gently making contact I definitely felt something, but that something was mainly discomfort.  There was no relaxation or gentle euphoria or glorious sense of release.  At one point it felt like something softly zinged open on the crown of my head, but the sensation was very subtle.  After the session I felt better, more open-hearted, less fearful.  And it seemed like the world took instant  notice.  Humans began inundating me with smiles and kind words or by confiding sad and deeply personal things to me.  To some extent I've always experienced this, but now it was as if the floodgates had been opened. There was a constant rush of people, mostly strangers, turning to me for comfort or speaking to me as if we were long time friends who needed to catch up.  I tried my best to take this all in stride, but it was quite overwhelming.

Not long after this began I visited a favorite bookstore on the Eastside of Milwaukee with one of my best friends.  I bought an armload of books, a decorative owl, a coin purse that said "Mo Money Mo Problems, and to my surprise, a necklace.  I've never really worn jewelry; it's just not my thing.  But this necklace called to me.  The pendant was oblong with a bubble of glass over these sketches of three trees drawn over unreadable text.  If held at just the right angle you could make out someof the words--"moon", "meow", & "music" being a few.  I loved it and I had my friend help me put it on as soon as we got back to my house.  A few minutes later I anxiously asked her to help me remove it.  I was feeling tugs on the pendant--not just one or two, but maybe a dozen, and they felt urgent.  I put the necklace in a drawer and tried not to think about it for several days.  But one day when I had a rare morning to myself, I fished out the necklace to see if I might be able to get it to move the way my friend had.  I recalled the way she held it and tried to do it the same way.  I carefully chose a deceased loved one to speak to and when I asked if she was there the necklace sprang to life, moving in expansive ovals.  There's a fine line between ecstasy and terror, I came to learn.  A finer line between interest and obsession.  I repeatedly tripped over these lines as I strove to understand this ability, or if it could be termed as such, this gift.  The way I came to construct and understand all of this in my head was as big-hearted as it was naïve, as generous as it was intrusive.  I came to believe that one of my new purposes in life was to comfort and reassure those who had lost their loved ones that they are still here in some real and observable way.  I began writing lists of family and friends who I felt were haunted by devastating losses and planned ways I could meet with them to perform this awesome testimony to their continued existence on some other plane.  Luckily I went through with precious few of these, and the people who witnessed my pendulum swinging independent of any manipulation on my end, were interested and appreciative, but certainly not weak at the knees with gratitude or awe.

I think my excitement over this ability was understandable and that my plan to bring comfort to others was adorable & well-intentioned.  But as I've come to learn, I don't really know what I'm doing or what this is.  I know that the bulk of the experiences I've had with the pendulum have been comforting and I like to believe that I've made real contact with my great grandmas and grandpas and aunts and uncles and cousins who have passed.  But I can't really know for sure what any of this means.  And it's more than a little presumptuous of me to think that other people want or need this in their life to help them heal or move on or find hope.  And I'm certainly a less-than-perfect vessel for this type of mediumship, if that's what this is.  I haven't attained grace or enlightenment or serenity through this.  I'm only slightly less scared of death than I've always been.  But all things being equal, I think this ability is one I'd rather have than not.  I think I'd like the option, even if I choose not to use it.  On one particularly devastating day when my health problems and this ability-with-no-roadmap converged in a place of exasperation and anger in my heart, I took my pendulum down to Lake Michigan on a sleety night and dramatically threw it into the frigid waters.  There, I thought.  Let's just be here and focus on what's right in front of me, on what's human and important: my Casper, my Dion, my parents and brother and grandmas and friends.  My LIFE.  The other side can wait, I breathed with conviction.

Then after the CT scan revealed the cyst in my head I went scrambling for some sort of necklace I must have lying around somewhere.  When it began rocking "yes" or "hello" or "still here" or "You're an idiot" or whatever it was trying to say I wept with confusion and relief.

All the old religions are rife with mystery and miracles, and if we are honest, faith is pretty much rooted in what amounts to the supernatural.  I'm not sure why something that is ancient and spiritual is automatically imbued with reverent faith, but something that is modern and spiritual is dismissed as bullshit, but I don't understand a lot of things, up to and including everything I just wrote about.

I've heard so many people mouth the words, "God works in mysterious way" in any combination of hushed reverent murmurs and smug I'm-in-a-special-God-club taunts.  In either case, my reply is: Understatement.