Category Archives: Enlightenment

Courting the Unseen

Summer Newlings © Alexander Jansson

“As humans we inhabit a very narrow range of reality. It is as though we walk this Earth with blinders on, never seeing the incredible depth and beauty of all the levels of reality that surround us.” – Naisha Ahsian

Ever since a troop of fairies flew into my novel, I’ve been determined to see one. They’ve appeared in my dreams and I’ve experienced almost-sightings in my garden, but my quest has gone largely unfulfilled.

In his book, Power Animals, Dr. Stephen Farmer suggests that dragonflies are messengers from the elemental world. In a dream, a single dragonfly morphed into an entire flight of winged creatures and arranged themselves in a circle. As I watched this transformation, I sensed their energy and felt their longing to be recognized.

My dream led to a another encounter with a dragonfly, this time in my garden. As I was contemplating a new location for a lavender plant that had been languishing in the shade, a red dragonfly landed on a poppy seed head right in front of me. She sat motionless as I admired her four stubby wings, her bright red body and her big compound eyes. She darted to another seed head and back a few times before twirling up and away. I’d never seen a red dragonfly in my garden before, and while other species flitted through, I’d never seen one sit for more than a second. I took this as a sign that my longing to see fairies was being acknowledged.

Another day in the garden, I was puttering about when I noticed a fluttering of leaves in my butterfly bush. This would hardly seem worthy of attention, but there was no wind, not even the slightest breeze. As I walked over to investigate, something else caught my eye in the banana tree. Whatever is was, it moved. And I felt it watching me, peeking up over a banana leaf. Something, something was in that tree. But before I could move in to get a closer look, it withdrew and faded out of sight.

As I waited impatiently for a real sighting, I queried my friends and learned that several had actually seen these magical beings. Tom (not his real name) who lives in rural Nova Scotia sees 4- to 6-inch tall fire fairies cavorting at the edge of the flames when he burns brush in the fall. Fran (not her real name either) saw what she assumed was a fairy sitting on a stump at the edge of a hiking trail in New Hampshire. This entity was a foot high and all black: black wings, long black hair and black fur covering its little body. And my friend, Steve, saw two tiny beings floating above him as he reached for his bedside lamp one night. Holding hands, wings outstretched, they had munchkin faces lit with big smiles. They watched him intently for a moment or two and then vanished.

These accounts made me more determined than ever to see a fairy. When I read Meeting Fairies by Robert Ogilvie Crombie (ROC), I was encouraged. A scientist, writer, musician, mythologist, psychologist, historian, esotericist, and mentor to the Findhorn community in Scotland, ROC not only saw supernatural beings, but communicated with them.

One day as he sat resting on a bench in the Royal Botanical Garden in Edinburgh, he saw a three foot tall figure with pointed chin and ears and little horns on his forehead, shaggy legs and cloven hooves dancing around a tree about twenty yards away. Realizing the creature was a faun, ROC tried talking himself out of this sighting, but it was no use. The creature danced over, sat down, said, “Hallo”, and then asked ROC if he could see him. After ROC assured him that he could, the faun introduced himself as Kurmos and the two had an enlightening conversation. Kurmos explained that his job was to help the growth of the trees in the garden and told ROC that many nature spirits have all but given up on humans because they don’t believe they’re wanted.

A little over a month later while walking home at night, ROC encountered another faun, the great god Pan. He was only a little taller than ROC, but the next time he saw him, he appeared as a twenty-five foot tall figure with great horns on his forehead, cloven hooves and fine silky hair on his human legs. Through Pan, ROC was introduced to a myriad of nature spirits: elementals, nymphs, dryads, other fauns, eleves, gnomes and fairies. Some were but a fraction of an inch in height, others three or four feet tall.

According to ROC, what we see when we encounter these supernatural beings is determined by our expectations that have been created by myths and legends. Although they have the ability to assume any form they choose, these entities are essentially light bodies or vortexes of energy. But to carry out their work with the plant world, they need etheric bodies and they adopt specific forms and characteristic behaviors to best accomplish their agendas.

After his conversations with Pan, ROC understood that Kurmos had appeared to prepare him for his meetings with him. And after determining that ROC believed in him and wasn’t afraid of him, Pan chose to impress ROC with his extraordinary size and power because he wanted to enlist him to foster a reconciliation between humans and nature.

So why haven’t I been able to see these beings? ROC understood that he wasn’t seeing Kurmos and Pan with his physical sight. And his communication with them occurred telepathically by means of thought transference. Maybe if I release my expectations and keep my heart, mind, eyes and ears open, just maybe I’ll see a fairy or something very much like it.

P.S. I don’t know if this counts, but a very large, not particularly attractive fairy has been sitting in a giant oak tree waiting patiently for me to start my next book.

One Billion Rising

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When I read about Eve Ensler’s global initiative to end violence against women and children, something stirred my soul and I cried. And not just for the women and girls around the world who have endured unimaginable pain and suffering, but also for my dear friends who are living (and some who are not) with the aftermath of sexual abuse. These wounds can be healed, but it takes a tremendous amount of work. How much better to put an end to this barbaric behavior by supporting the evolution of mankind. So tomorrow on Valentine’s Day, I’ll be dancing along with women in 197 countries. I hope you’ll join us!

Bay Area Rising Flash Mob

Navigating the Dreamtime

“Specific guidance for living your life well lies in your dreams. Like a blank canvas, they provide a medium where both intuition and your unconscious can freely experss themselves. You have only to listen.” – Judith Orloff, M.D.

A year before I moved to New York, the crowd dreams started. Night after night I found myself surrounded by throngs moving en masse on a city sidewalk. Nothing in the dreams indicated where I was or what I was doing in this place, but considering that I was living on a farm in Maine at the time and had no plans to relocate, they seemed bizarre. Yet I didn’t question them. I was too busy growing and preserving vegetables, baking bread, cooking meals, running a food co-op, writing a cookbook and nipping into Bangor for the occasional modeling job. Then one day I woke up and realized that almost everything I was doing revolved around food. It was time for a change.

After I landed in New York, I remembered the dreams. Clearly they had come to prepare me for the transition from my isolated country existence to the gritty, mind-numbing, high-octane reality of my new life.

Many years, another cross-country move, and several career changes later, I began having food dreams. Dandelion roots. Carrot and celery sticks. Watercress. Potato seeds. Sliced radishes and hard peppermint candies. Loaves of bread and bags of rolls stashed away for so long that they disintegrated when picked up. What could all this mean? Despite the distance I’d put between myself and the farm, I seemed to be preoccupied with food again. What was I being prepared for this time?

The answer came with the cupcake dream:

I’m in a large room filled with people. An announcement is made that lunch will be served shortly and waiters bring out big platters with salads and place them on long tables as people begin lining up for a buffet. I’m not hungry, so I wait until the line has dwindled before going up to see what’s left. I take a small piece of rare, thinly-sliced beef, I look up and see them––CUPCAKES! They’re inside a cabinet with glass doors behind the buffet table and Sandra Bullock is sitting on a stool in front of the cabinet. I approach Ms. Bullock and politely ask if I may please have a cupcake, specifically the one with silver frosting and a purple charm in the center. She turns around, unlocks and opens the cabinet, reaches in and hands me a wholewheat muffin encased in brioche paper. Even though it’s not a cupcake, I nibble a bit from the top and then ask Ms. B if I might please have a cupcake with frosting. As before, she turns around, retrieves another muffin just like the one I have already and hands it to me.

Western psychologists interpret dreams in a number of ways, but all seem to agree that the world of dreams is a mysterious place. Indigenous peoples see this realm as a powerful one that can be manipulated to change our daytime lives. In their book, Awakening to the Spirit World, Sandra Ingerman and Hank Wesselman tell us that dreams connect our everyday selves with our souls: “Dreaming carries the experiences of the body to your soul and conveys your soul’s guidance to the body personality.”

Without much thought, I came to the conclusion that my very wise Higher Self was telling me to stop eating sugar. I already knew that sugar was not my friend and I had cut back on my consumption of sugary treats, so I was a bit perplexed by this message. But recently I learned that my total cholesterol level is too high. And sugar raises triglycerides.

Okay, I think I’ve got it. No more cupcakes! And maybe I should eat more greens and a few more carrot and celery sticks. Oh, and fresh is good. And maybe I need to clean out my closets.

In the Eyes of the Beholder

Love Forever True

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Mother and Child, Gustav Klimt, 1905

For those of you who may be wondering why this blog has come to a standstill, I want you to know that I am alive and well and actively engaged in birthing my first work of fiction. When I started writing my book, I told myself that it would require all of my attention. But I also promised myself (and one or two of my faithful readers) that every once in awhile, I would take a break and generate another post. Obviously, that hasn’t happened––until now. With Valentine’s Day approaching, I’ve decided to share an unconventional love story that’s been nagging at me for a long time.

When my mother died I had no reason to believe that I would ever hear from her again. We’d never been especially close, but after my father died, our relationship deepened. As an only child, I knew that someday I would be solely responsible for her care. And when that day came, it brought many challenges, not the least of which was logistics because my mother was living in Phoenix and I was in San Francisco.

After the onset of her dementia, my mother wisely encouraged me to help her set up everything from Power of Attorney to a Living Will so that everything would be in place when the end came. I was supposed to be taking care of her, but she was still taking care of me. Over the next ten years, her dementia gradually shifted into full-blown Alzheimer’s, and the day came when it was clear that she could no longer live alone. She, however, had other ideas. Despite nightly hallucinations (every night a band of delinquent boys raided her refrigerator leaving her nothing to eat) she insisted that she wanted to stay in her mobile home. There were daily phone calls during which she would rant and rave about those #*! boys and tell me about her children. Toward the end, she was convinced there were three of us. And then there were the trips to the bank. When she was still driving, she’d take herself to the nearest branch and withdraw a goodly sum that ranged from $200.00 – $600.00 depending on her mood, bring it home and hide it.

Eventually, I was successful in moving her into an Alzheimer’s facility. This was not a happy day for her, but she came to appreciate her new surroundings. I was relieved that she was well cared for, and she seemed to thrive in the company of others who were suffering from various degrees of the same illness. We still talked nearly every day and she often thanked me for all I’d done for her. Her expression of gratitude meant a lot to me because this was one of, if not the most difficult and stressful periods of my life. As much as I loved my mother and appreciated all she’d done for me, I often felt that she was sucking my life away.

Toward the end, she began pleading with me to come see her. A dear friend told me I should go–I would regret it if I didn’t–but I put it off. I told myself that I couldn’t get away because I was running a business, but the truth was I simply didn’t want to make another trip. When I finally made arrangements to go, it was all but too late. My mother had a stroke the day before I was to leave.

She was in hospice when I arrived. Up until the stroke, as confused as she was about most things, she always knew me. Now, she appeared not to recognize me. The stroke had made her ability to communicate nearly impossible. But reading her body language as she sat in her wheel chair refusing to look at me and leaning as far away from me as possible, I sensed that she knew who I was and she was angry. I could feel her thinking: Now you’ve come. After all the times I asked you to come, you come when it’s too late. And it did seem that way. No matter what I did or said, I couldn’t reach her. When I tried to hold her hands, she pulled them away. My mother was gone and in her place was a vengeful stranger.

I stayed with her for two days, but she never looked at me. As far as she was concerned, I wasn’t there at all. Before I left, the doctors told me that she was doing well and that she would be moving back to her cottage in a day or two. But that didn’t happen. The day after I returned home, she had another stroke and she was gone.

And then before I had a chance to absorb the news, the most extraordinary thing happened. Shortly after that call came, I began hearing a song in my head – a song I hadn’t heard nor thought about for decades. And the melody and lyrics ran through my mind over and over for three days:

*. . . I give to you and you give to me

True love, true love

So on and on it will always be

True love, true love.

I didn’t get all of the lyrics at first, but when the last stanza came through, I knew my mother had sent me the song:

For you and I have a guardian angel

On high with nothing to do

But to give to you and to give to me

Love forever, true.

And I knew that she had forgiven me for not being with her in her final moments, and that nothing else mattered now but our enduring love for each other.

*True Love, written by Cole Porter and performed by Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly in the movie High Society.

** For a touching journey that explores the challenges of caring for a parent with Alzheimer’s, I highly recommend Nancy Gerber’s book, My Mother’s Keeper. Her previous book, Losing a Life, A Daughter’s Memoir of Caregiving, is equally moving and an excellent resource for caregivers and families of stroke survivors.

Breathing in the Moon

in search of enlightenment