Category Archives: People

Adrienne (39)

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In more recent months, I stumbled upon a healer who practices the laying on of stones combined with her own version of energy. She names it quantum healing. It was the same experience I had with Lisa, the angel intuitive. I remember standing in the back room of the store, the art gallery where the healers often work, getting a feel for the three women working there that late September day. They were each working on someone, and again it was Adrienne’s energy that drew me. I chose her. And I was never sorry. It is a vulnerable act, an act of faith, to put yourself on the table in another’s hands. But I trusted her. She helped to bring me back from the last terrible summer months. She told me I had a chance to heal now at a deeper level, and being me, I felt like she was saying I should be doing something I wasn’t. She was patient with me, with my weird defensiveness. “Well, if you’re driving, and you get to an intersection in the road, it’s only then that you can turn left or right,” she said. “You can’t do it before you get there.” I believe it was my work with her that helped me find that full moon healing in December, the shedding of that old, heavy cloak. I went back to see her later that month, eager to hear what kind of progress she might see in me after having had that experience. But she was gone. And I know I have to trust the universe in this. I have to believe those three visits are what I was meant to have with her, and now they’re over. But I can’t help but wonder why. Could I not have kept Adrienne and Lisa a bit longer in my life, companions on this journey? Is it selfish of me to wish I could be buoyed longer than these brief bits of time? I can’t help but ask, is it something in me that makes this happen, that makes them go away? And the thought that comes is this. Maybe it is only to prevent me from becoming too dependent on them. Maybe it is the universe telling me to trust myself.

Lisa (38)

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A couple of years ago I happened upon a woman doing readings at our local “new age” store. I looked around the room, and she was the one who drew me. She was an angel intuitive. I’m not sure I’d ever heard that expression before. But what she had to tell me was simple and direct. I don’t remember most of it now. I know she talked about my writing, my book. But there was no moment when I felt as though she was just telling me things she said to everyone. It all felt personal and accurate, a validation of things I felt or knew already, as the best readings tend to be for me. When the information resonates inside me, that’s when it carries weight. I was delighted to have “found” her, to know I now had someone I could go to like this. And she even taught a class about angels. I was all ready to attend. But I called the next week, and she was gone. Her husband had died, and she never came back. I still think about her, hope she was able to be as kind to herself during that hard time as she was to me the day we met. I hope her angels and her human companions saw her through it, and she has come out on the other side. And if I am honest, I have not given up hope that one day she’ll come back, and I can sit across from her again, feel her deep sweetness, hear the news she has to bring over for me from that other realm. But all selfishness aside, may she be well loved, happy, thriving. Vayas con diosa, Lisa. Que te vayas bien.

Surprised (37)

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I’ve never lived before in a place where there are so many citrus trees. Here there are grapefruit, oranges, lemons, tangerines, tangelos. One grower at the farmer’s market even has a cross between a Mandarin orange and a kumquat, the size of a slender plum tomato, sweet skin and tart fruit. People pile up mounds of grapefruit on their lawns for passers by. They send home friends with bags of lemons. I am blessed with a kind man from my old neighborhood who still brings me grapefruit and Meyer lemons even though I’ve moved away. The trees are everywhere, but unless they are bulging with unpicked fruit I don’t tend to notice them. I do wonder who started the tradition. I notice people are quick to complain about all the golf courses but never mention this hidden forest of citrus trees we seem determined to grow here in the desert. But in February I can’t imagine being without them. In February, their fragrance finds you everywhere. It catches you in odd places, not a citrus in sight, the ambrosia wafting on some secret current of air. And every year I am surprised, again and again, breathing deep, as though the scent alone might sustain me. I look around. Is it that little neglected lemon tree beside the empty home? I’m never sure I really want to find the source. There is an added delight in the mystery, I think, knowing the sweetness has traveled unseen and who knows how far across the neighborhood to find you.

15.2.2015 or Not Quite Mine (29)

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Ah. I had no idea today was a magic number day until I wrote the date in my notebook: 15.2.2015. I still write the dates the way they’re written in Mexico (and most of the world, I’m guessing) with the day first and then the month. Maggie—a woman I met in Ajijic who split her time between Barbados and Canada but had come to Mexico for dental work—told me once my number based on my name is 15, so now I think of it as lucky. She had changed the spelling of her own name to get a better number. And she hated my beloved 29, based on my birthday. She thought it was a terrible number. I wonder if she would have changed her date of birth, too, if she could? My mind gets to wander while I write. It’s been almost two weeks since I’ve written in my notebook. My pen feels funny in my hand, my writing odd looking and out of practice. I am out of practice in all ways, it seems, knowing nothing but work these past six weeks. Work, and fitting in things between work, like sleeping and eating healthy meals. I’ve done my healing toning almost every day while I do my “morning chores,” but I’ve been doing them in the late afternoon or evening more often than not, having let work sweep me away for most of the day. I’ve begun to do my yoga again, though—a small set of sun salutes, mostly, hiding in the shade of the umbrella in the late mornings. And I’ve been swimming three times now. I’m especially pleased about these last two, about having found a way to reach the doing of them in the midst of this crazed stretch. But now, slowing down to write, I feel exhausted and numb, like my mind is not quite mine anymore.

Learning Laughter (25)

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I’m learning to laugh more. I’ve wanted more laughter in my life for a long time. But it’s so much easier to laugh with other people. I’ve been blessed with that, with people in my life who I can laugh with until I cry, until we exhaust ourselves, hands against our aching bellies, sated with hilarity. I had fun laughing in the audience at the Camelot theater and vowed to make a point of that more often, that shared public laughter an unexpected sweetness. But more and more I seem to find it by myself, that sudden burst of it while I’m alone, going about my day, or the quieter impulse to giggle. I’ve always been able to amuse myself, have been lucky that way, too. It doesn’t seem to matter to me that often I’m the only one who thinks I’m funny. But except for the occasional guffaw over a well-delivered line in a movie or a funny moment in a book, I’ve tended to be quiet about it. Or maybe I used to laugh more when I was alone, and I can’t remember. But now I find myself doing it more and more, alone in my trailer or out in the courtyard, some stray thought that catches me, that quick, loud bark of laughter, the bray and the snort of it. It makes me grin to be writing about it. I curl my toes, impish and shy, and eager for more.

The Power of Plaque (23)

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I sweep under the kitchen table and wonder about the power of our beliefs. I remember my dental hygienist in Sebastopol telling me she had client who didn’t believe in plaque. (He didn’t have any.) Meri told me the other day on the phone that someone (was it Deepak Chopra?) claims there is no physiological reason why we need to age. I believe it may be true. But could I stretch my brain enough to let it be true? I can’t even get myself to not believe in plaque. I maneuver the broom between the legs of the kitchen chair. It’s weighted down with books rescued from the swamp cooler in August, so I don’t move it, but I sweep with care beneath it. I think about all the efforts I am making to heal. Most people don’t believe in them–I know. I hear it in the things they do not say. Something tries to stir in me, some habit of futility, and I shake my head as I swipe the broom across the floor. I believe in my choices. I believe I can heal, that my efforts already bear fruit. I remind myself I have shed that old, heavy cloak, dissolved that terrible message that said no matter what I do it will never be enough. I have gathered all the endless desert dirt and the feathers from the leaking down comforter and the teeny Palo Verde leaves we all bring inside with us into a neat pile near the kitchen sink. “I am already healing,” I say. My intentions, my actions, they both carry weight, have ooomph, make me well. I walk down the narrow hallway to get the dustpan. I am humming now, and I feel the vibration in my face, my throat. I am already healing.

Something Big (19)

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I asked the woman who was doing a reading for me about her gift. I didn’t think she was clairvoyant, someone who sees things about us. She told me she’s clairaudient. I looked it up later in the dictionary:

clairaudience |kle(ə)rˈôdēəns| noun: the supposed faculty of perceiving, as if by hearing, what is inaudible

But in the moment I asked her if what she heard was actually audible. “Do you hear it with your ears?” She said she wasn’t sure. She was just so used to it, I think. She’s been doing this for over fifty years.

“I just hear a voice,” she said. And she told me we are in a key time for the ability to change. It seems between the winter solstice on December 21st and the summer solstice in June, we have a chance to truly change, to “flip the switch” she said, “once and for all.”

It’s good news–of course it is. But because of who I am the first thing I did was worry I might not succeed in spite of this rare chance. “Are you saying,” I asked her, “that if we don’t manage to change now we may not be able to later?” She said no, but it would be much, much harder.

She talked about how the universe is set to support us now. I balked, the disgruntled child, still stuck on worrying about failing. I told her it seemed to me the universe always supported us. “Not like this,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” During this window the universe is poised to support us like nobody’s business.

So. I wanted to be sure to pass this on. It feels big to me, capital B big, as though we might each step into who we want to be more fully than ever before. Happy new year, everyone.