Category Archives: psychic awareness

Aug3

one way only

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Success! My rain spell worked. Which is to say, I left my laundry hanging out on the line all night. Never underestimate me.

A beautiful friend came to visit yesterday afternoon. I was a bit verklempt. I almost cancelled, but I really wanted to see her. It’s been too long. The overwhelm was only because it came at the end of an insanely busy week. By insanely busy I mean 2 things: 1) I had at least one activity scheduled every day, and 2) I never got a nap all week. I usually nap every afternoon.

As it happened this past week I had 2 medical appointments scheduled which had been weeks on the calendar, and I had to cancel them for more pressing medical issues which required immediate attention. I also had to cancel lunch with my friend on Tuesday as I couldn’t drive to meet her. She was concerned about me and drove the hour out to my house on Saturday.

My house is very purposely located on a spit of land that elbows out into Lake Michigan, affectionately referred to by locals as The Land of Oz. I say purposely because I moved here precisely because it is a destination of some determination, ie; not on the way to anywhere. Nobody just drops in. I detest dropper-inners.

When I moved out here on this precipice of life and beauty I had to drive to the post office for my mail. They didn’t deliver mail here just outside the village limits. Yes, that was 2018. I had to join with 3 neighbors and petition the post office for mail delivery, clear and level a path next to the road and install mail boxes. We get mail delivery now, but not necessarily daily. They will deliver your mail when they darn well get around to it. It’s a privilege, and don’t you forget it. I do appreciate it. I know they are short staffed, and I appreciate having a local post office. Many villages around here do not.

Friday I received a new deck of tarot cards in the mail, so I opened them after lunch with my friend. We sat on my very long, deep sofa (a.k.a. Mom’s Cosmic Healing Sofa) and shuffled, talking, laughing and kvetching…and we each drew a card, which took our mundane conversation in a deeper direction.

One of my many withdrawals in recent years has been from the practice of reading and channeling professionally. Because, well, people. Most people don’t really want to be challenged to grow, to face their shadow, to look at the habits no longer serving them. They don’t want to sit in the present moment until the tears come. It isn’t comfortable. It is, however, priceless. The tarot is so beautifully designed for exactly this work, and I cannot use it otherwise. I mean, sure, you can use it to access any information you want to know. I can astral travel anywhere and spy on anyone. I won’t. I can psychically answer all your questions. I won’t. Those are parlor tricks. As Geraldine Jones would say, “that is not my job!”

During her visit, we talked about my friend’s daughter-in-law, who has also been living with chronic Lyme disease. She is much younger than I and has suffered far worse for much longer. We spoke about healing, but my compassionate friend asked about how I deal with pain and not being able to function some days. I told her it has been my greatest teacher. When I am ill (sometimes on the bathroom floor at 3 a.m.) I pray. It’s the only help. I pray with each breath. All I say is: “Thank you.”

Thank you for this body. Thank you for this pain in my liver. Thank you for my life. Thank you for my home, for this bed, for this sweet feline companion, for my beautiful son. Thank you for my big, violent, fu#ked up family – and for the fight in them. Thank you for friends, long-standing and patient, brand new and welcoming. Thank you…for the purpose this illness serves though I do not understand it. Thank you.

Thank you…”so that I can have this one way, along with every other way, to know that I am here.”

Dec7

pull your head out of your past

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That was the message I “heard” in my morning meditation. Do my spirit guides know my language, or what?! I’ve been perseverating for days…weeks…months…years – okay – decades now, about doing something…anything…creative or productive or proactive to help myself out of this malaise. “This” malaise is commonly known as poverty. Struggling financially, but more so, spiritually.

The J.O.B. (Just Over Broke) hasn’t been working out so well the past decade or so…you don’t want me to work for you. Everyone I’ve worked for lately dies. Just sayin’…

Over 13 years ago I started this blog in an attempt to write my way out of a nervous breakdown. It worked, and I’ve been writing since. Several years ago I began making videos on my own YouTube channel, Crow Quill Tarot. I have also painted some paintings in that time period; I’ve drawn. Made jewelry. But I don’t feel creative. Getting started is always a challenge and requires a shove. But finishing…well, I’ll let you know when I’ve finished something.

Most of my adult life I have assigned myself a “winter project.” I enroll in a class or two, or study on my own, a new subject or skill I think I would like to master. This fall I decided to study astrology. After all, it’s all the rage. I’ve toyed with going back to making videos on the tarot channel, but there are hundreds (maybe thousands?) doing it, and well. People with far more technical expertise.

And many, if not most of them – certainly the most popular and successful, are incorporating astrology into the tarot readings. In fact, that is how they have “delineated” the collective. And there’s where I got hung up – right there, at delineation. Collective = our common humanity, if I understand it correctly. How we are not only alike, but psychically connected. That understanding I have no problem with. But once I start defining myself and others, and using a fixed set of criteria, I am in the business of predicting the future. I call that fortune telling. And not only has it never interested me, but it is a sad and gross mis-use of the infinitely present tarot.

“The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.” – Indigo Girls

So, I have been struggling to understand how astrology fits for me. I had a teacher in ninth grade who asked each student on the first day of her class what their sun sign was. Some didn’t know, so she asked their birthday and told them. Then she proceeded to assign us into study groups accordingly – that is, those students she didn’t send to the office to transfer to another classroom because their sign wasn’t compatible with hers.

When I listen to tarot readers using astrology to “clarify” messages I break out in a rash. It goes something like this: “this person may be a Leo or a Sag…or a Scorpio…or they could be…” until they’ve listed 9 out of the 12 signs. They have missed the point of the tarot entirely – which is a precise methodology for developing self awareness and hence, intuition. Intuition. Helllloooooooo! How intuitive are you if you need to list every possibility?! Make up your everlovin’ mind! WHAT are you saying, exactly? To me. I’m not listening because I want to know about my mother’s sister’s neighbor’s cousin. It sounds like they are trying to connect with everyone and anyone. Because that’s how they make money. And so, in the interest of learning, I have listened to many different readers addressing all the 12 zodiac signs. And identified with something in each of them. So now what?!

I want to make money. So I keep going back over this in my mind. And this morning I was meditating on why don’t I get astrology? Why isn’t it clicking for me?! And I heard, “because you are every sign.” Yes, yes I am.

And the bubble in my chest popped. I’m every sign. You are every sign. How can this be? Because we are not the past. We are not even who we were yesterday. We have been transfigured. We have risen. We do not need to keep reliving the crucifixion and the resurrection. We are on the other side of that now. It’s over. Pull your head out of your past.

“What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them, and they have changed since then.” – T. S. Eliot

Nov17

dimming up…

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“What fresh hell is this?” – Dorothy Parker

Living with chronic illness is exhausting, but by far the worst illness I deal with on a daily basis is the OPD. OPD (Obnoxious Personality Disorder) and it’s symptoms are debilitating. When I am miserable, feel like life is not treating me fairly and God has abandoned me, I know where to go for help. I go to church. Right here, today, with Carolyn Myss. She is my spirit animal, and lucky for me, she’s got clues to spare.

And then I channel my inner Elizabeth Bigelow and remind myself what a privilege it is to be alive in the here and now, even if I don’t know how the technology works…

Jun28

we all have to find our way…

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In my efforts of late to get myself organized and live more simply, I’ve been cleaning out old notebooks. I came across a journal entry from years ago explaining polychronic time. I just this week discovered that many cultures around the world, especially indigenous cultures, still practice polychronic time. Here in our western society, and the (eh-hmmm) more advanced cultures, we live according to monochronic time.

Anthropologists tell us that cultures such as the Inuits of Alaska, that use polychronic time, tend to value relationships over schedules. They understand that time is unpredictable. For instance, they might go to work according to the tides, so their schedule changes regularly. The scientific term chronemics is used to describe how time is perceived; it’s considered a sub-genre in the study of nonverbal communication.

This is fascinating to me. Let’s just say that I have always had a loosey-goosey relationship with time. Oh – I mean fluid…yeah – that’s the word I’m looking for. Full disclosure, I often time travel while my body is sleeping, but I’ve had it happen during meditation, and even during bodywork sessions. I don’t know how it happens, don’t know why, don’t care. I visit other countries, even other planets, telepathically communicate with other species. Do we all do this as children and I’ve just never outgrown it? No idea. I do know, sure as I am sitting at the keyboard writing this today, that time and gravity are the same thing. Or intricately interdependent. Blur the limitations of one and you blur the limitations of both. Time and space are false concepts we were indoctrinated with here in this cult where we temporarily reside. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.

It was a psychologist I was seeing in my 30’s who taught me the difference between this phenomena and fantasy. Because I will close my eyes in one place and time and open them in another, fully present, all 5 senses fully intact. It took years of practice not to panic when this happened, so that I could stay with the experience and not jolt myself back. The first thing I learned was to look down at my hands and focus on my breath. This allowed for a few seconds at least to listen, smell, maybe look around if I felt it was safe to do so, and try to grasp the situation I was in. This was precluded, of course, by the belief that it must be happening for a reason. I had slipped into another time and space for a reason, somehow to be of service there, even if for a few seconds. Now I trust it. It might be something as seemingly innocuous as speaking the right sentence, something the stranger I was with may not have known to say. I never know.

Most of the time this experience is random and happens to me. Every once in awhile I can initiate it for my own intent, usually because I want to gather information when I know a loved one is in trouble. Or locate a lost pet. A few times I’ve had close friends ask me about some concern of theirs and I managed to make it work. I saw Elisabeth Smart in an underground bunker this way and assured my distraught friend that she was alive, and, that she would be recognized on the street by a passerby one day soon. I once located a missing man who had drowned, tangled in a pile of junk at the bottom of a lake, stuck in the torn webbing of an old lawn chair. He asked me not to disclose his location; he preferred not to be found. I’ve woken early after spending the night in a city during an earthquake. I knew I was in Asia by looking at the people around me, and so turned the news on the television to discover an earthquake had hit Kobe, Japan during the night. Apparently I’d volunteered as a rescue worker.

This shit happens to me all the time. If I say I’m tired, believe me; I worked all night. It used to freak me out. As a young child I’d run screaming to my parents, thinking I was dying. I must have been a fun kid. I remember the first time I saw the television show Quantum Leap, first feeling validated and relieved that other people were having these experiences also, and then thinking, no, they didn’t get that right. I certainly had no sidekick or homing device (other than my body.)

But I’ve gone off on a tangent here. The point, if there is one, is that time has never made sense to me. All through my working life I barely managed to keep to a schedule. I will probably never know if any of this serves any kind of useful purpose, but I am 100% certain that the reality we know through our five senses is but the tip of the iceberg. Our existence is so much larger and richer than what this obvious, or gross, reality would have us believe.

I’ve long revered the teacher Carolyn Myss, who says that “intuition is organic divinity – God in your blood and bones.” I know this is true. And decades ago, when she first published Anatomy of the Spirit, she inadvertently taught me an invaluable tool for protecting myself: “I command my spirit into my body in full at this time.” It’s all I’ve ever needed. Well, that and the Lord’s Prayer. I learned that in high school from reading the Gnostic Gospels. Christ predicates it in the Sermon on the Mount by telling us it’s the only prayer we will ever need, and I accepted that as truth with a capital T. It has served me in some some mighty scary encounters.

So where does this leave us today? It leaves me thinking about art, creativity, imagination, the intuitive workings of life. I’ve always joked, “all’s fair in love, war, and art.” That pretty much covers everything. Art is any thought, word, or action that is expansive or constructive. Art is alchemy.

Artists are natural alchemists, and time and space are their mediums. We think it’s paint or paper or metal or film, but those are merely convenient materials at hand. Artists instinctively know that we are eternal beings of light and vibrating energy. The wizard Maurice Sendak knew. By the way – he never wrote a children’s book in his life. He says he wouldn’t know how. That statement alone opens a continuous hallway of portals to explore…

Maurice Sendak, Where The Wild Things Are, from my Amazon affiliate link, which may result in a commission: https://amzn.to/45MCnle and Wild Things Are Happening, The Art of Maurice Sendak, https://amzn.to/3VHSuMe

Jun9

Now You Know That You Are Real

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This next week I wish to explore a new concept that I have just come across – yesterday, actually: the thin place. The thin place means a place in our environment where the veil between heaven and earth is thin. Decades ago I read a quote in an interior design book that profoundly impacted me: “Home is heaven for beginners.” I was a guest in someone else’s home at the time, long before cell phones existed. So, no camera or way to record it, I soon forgot who said it.

Around that same time I participated in a meditation retreat. Normally I hate guided meditations. My imagination needs little encouragement to take off, and by the time the person speaks I’m far off in my own world. They’ll start us down a path and seconds later suggest we are standing on a vast beach, when I’m already talking to a bird in a dense forest. Leave me alone.

But this time something remarkable happened. Tuning out the voice from across the room I continued walking further through that dense forest, and I came upon a castle. Tower and all. Big heavy door pushed aside I started up the circular stone stairway. It was lit with gemstones set in the outer wall, refracting rainbows of light to guide my way. When the meditation ended we were asked to describe what we saw. The woman nodded at me to go first, and when I described the castle, she said, “in dream or meditation work you were scouting heaven. That structure represented what you expect the afterlife to be like.” Ahhhh…yes. Yes, I do expect that. Beauty beyond my wildest imagination.

We’ve all experienced a thin place; we know how it feels, viscerally. Goosebumps and skin prickles and an otherworldly sense of wonder overwhelms us. To me, it speaks about the concept of environmental fit that contributes to self awareness. You have to be able to be present, to notice that something is happening. You have to be comfortable enough in your own skin to be just 10% more curious than scared.

Like Francois Halard, I, too was a shy and quiet child. My environment was anything but. It was constant chaos and noise and activity. I spent any and all available hours alone in my room, reading and thinking and drawing and painting and more reading and staring at things. I bonded with inanimate objects and the trees outside my window, my cat, and my own imaginings. Years later in high school when I first took LSD it would be as natural as breathing to walk through walls, to vibrate with the plants, to become the colors of the sky. I still believe it helped keep that portal open, the veil thin, and made for me a better life.

While I love the idea of heaven on earth, I’m taking it literally. I am entirely committed to living fully in my body. I’m not interested in spacing out, or fantasy, or in any way becoming less present. What if the thin place exists within us? Do we carry it always? Sometimes we happen into a place that reminds us to notice; sometimes we create that space. Any surreal experiences I’ve had (and there have been many) were solid. Not beyond my senses, but through them. They were not ethereal or “spiritual.” They did not take me to other worlds, they expanded my awareness of this one. That is The Hanged Man experience in the tarot. You know what you know, even if it is not shared. It cannot be described with the English language; we haven’t the framework.

I haven’t taken any recreational drugs since high school (and few prescribed medications if avoidable). The last time I drank too much I was 21 (I’m 70). I don’t want (or need) my state to be altered, unless it is the organic release from anxiety that allows a fuller experience of presence. Even if that means pain. I’m all in, having a look down life’s hallways…

May22

before the world got in the way

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If I’m honest, I am needy much more often than I let on…it’s ugly. Like most of us, I grew up in a household that equated personal need as weakness. The culture, the times, reinforced this belief. But make no mistake – it’s a belief system. Learned. Un-learnable.

Now in my 71st year I am finally getting around to looking at what I want from life. What do I really – really – want? How much time and energy have I spent pursuing things that I thought I wanted, but that didn’t work? Why? Along the way too many compromises were made because of co-dependency, in an effort to make relationships and houses and jobs and situations work that were not an organic fit for me. Know thyself takes on a whole new meaning when life isn’t working. It turns out self awareness is key to being happy and healthy…duh.

Living in the Detroit suburbs in my 20’s, divorced far too young after marrying far too young, I sought counseling. The counselor, Jo, lived around the corner from me. She taught the first nationally accredited hypnotherapy program for Wayne State University, and she taught private courses in NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming.) She was a huge influence. Shortly after we met through a mutual friend, she told me that the quality of my life experience would be directly reflective of my communication skills. I told her she’d lived in California too long. My usual objection to her platitudes was “I want tangible evidence.” It was my own feeble 1980’s rendition of “show me the money.”

She encouraged me to enroll in a weekend workshop on psychic development using NLP techniques that was being given at nearby Marygrove College. The facilitators were sisters who lived and practiced in a cloistered community a few hours away. I don’t remember if it was Canada or upstate New York. I do remember the experience vividly. I do remember that I was stressed. The cost of the workshop was a stretch, and it required I negotiate with my former husband to make certain I had my son’s care covered, and plan for backup with my family. And I couldn’t tell anyone what I was doing for fear of ridicule and reprisal.

Besides, I didn’t believe in psychics. Jo had tried to convince me that I had some psychic gift. I had no idea what the heck she was on about. The weekend would prove to me that I was psychic, although that didn’t really mean anything at the time. Isn’t everyone? Obviously anyone can learn these techniques; I just did. I can follow instructions – they told me what to do, I did it, it produced said results. So what? I actually still feel exactly this way, although I do see more value in the practice than before. The 2 people leading the workshop would pull me aside for private sessions and we would end up laughing and crying together. I wish I had paid more attention then, but I did not know how to get free of survival mode and be present, for myself or anyone. I’m learning to pay attention now. Better late than never.

Let me begin by giving an example of the tangible evidence I have stumbled clumsily upon: you cannot begin to understand self awareness if you don’t feel safe. Survival mode is just that – it focuses all your attention on being elsewhere and otherwise. If you are in survival mode you are stuck. Frozen in time. Unavailable. A walking zombie. Remotely controllable. I’ve lived much of life this way, and I do not recommend it.

So, yes, everyone is psychic. The important thing to know is that it is not some unique and weird complex trait. Let’s stop glorifying it as if it is magical and mysterious. It’s just a sense. It’s normal. It’s boring.

Where it’s value lies is in bringing us closer to knowing our selves. Now that we know self awareness is valuable – and not just selfish as we were taught to believe – why not utilize our natural capacities? Let’s salvage some tangible evidence about who we really are, authentically. And what it is we really need and want. It isn’t a shortcut to happiness, but it does short circuit our neurosis, our insecurities. Any time you feel needy or insecure, I invite you to ask yourself where you might have inadvertently picked up someone else’s expectation of you and are trying to fulfill it. I would ask you to pause and conduct a personal inquiry: what is it that I want here? Let’s be archeologists of our own personal culture and unearth those dreams…