Ancestor Reverence and Ancestor Work

Part of the path I walk involves a deeper sense of metaphysical belief and requires more understanding of what we call super-natural, as well as a strong sense of communion with the natural world. It’s important to me that people find their own way towards creating a personal relationship with their ancestral spirits, to help process and find peace with the death that affects their lives. I have taken my reverence a step forward and use my ancestral line as an energy source for my work. I will often differentiate between reverence and work when I speak about my practice.

Ancestor reverence is accessible to everyone. I also call it honoring, worshipping, and remembering. At its simplest, ancestor reverence is the act and mindset of honoring your family lines, known and unknown to you. It’s the act of remembering them as living and breathing people who paved the way for you to be. It’s the way of thinking of them as a greater whole, one entity that is Those Who Came Before.

This is something that everyone can include in their lives, regardless of religious beliefs. In this model of thought, the dead are dead, and what you are remembering is a name and the history of the life beneath it. That has tremendous worth in itself, and is a way of finding connection in uncertain and unsettling times. It’s also a way of teaching your children their history, of teaching them that same connection; that we are each wonderful and unique, but not more so than the ones who bore us.

To take that next step into ancestor work, you must be open to the possibility that there is more to the world than we comprehend. You must be open to believing with certainty that the world is more wonder full than our brains can comprehend, and while science will come close, it will never be able to explain that wonder away. You must be willing to step into the wonder and be a child again, releasing your ego to learn a new world.

My work involves developing a personal relationship with what happens in death and the kinds of transformation that take place during and after. I understand spirit as passing on from its physical body and reincarnating into… something other. I see spirit as a residual echo of the living, in the way that we know the star light we see in the night sky flickered in a past long gone. Both exist simultaneously.

That spirit reincarnates and becomes something new. And it evolves and becomes something better. And it transforms and becomes something inconceivable. And it retains a familiar shape of the body it wore. All things are true. Some residues still ring strongly with persona, so much so that you can call on individual or specific spirits to work with- ones you have connections to. I do that.

What I mostly do involves energy work and energy manipulation. I break up elemental energies into qualities of earth, air, water, fire, and ancestor, striving for some kind of equilibrium between them, depending on what the moment calls for. If I’m feeling pulled in all directions, I seek some earthy grounding. If my emotions overwhelm me, I let them flow like water so they might pass through me. If I’m stuck on a problem and a solution seems impossible, I open the top of my thoughts and let them float free through the air until they arrange themselves in a different order. And if a family member is ill, I tap into the ancestor energy so that they might watch over them, and aid their healing.

Energy is energy. I break them up into elementals as a tool to help my brain understand them and to help me understand the qualities of their differences. The important part is recognizing that they are different aspects of the same thing. Energy is life, is deity, is divinity, is interconnectedness, is one, is everything. Everything that grows and decays is connected, depending on each other for the space to grow and flourish.

There is a unity and sameness to all living things. It’s why bigotry seems stupid. We fight between gender and race, trying to hold one up against another, when we are all humans. We are all humans who are no less entitled to live on this world than the elephants and the whales and the crows and the goldfish and the honeybee.

 [Revamped draft of an article originally published March 30, 2011.]

Malidoma Patrice Somé, Supernatural is Natural

“Earth is where we belong. She is our home. She gives us sustenance unconditionally and makes it possible for us to feel connected. Earth is where we go to and where we come from. The nourishment and support of the Earth Mother grants us the feeling of belonging that allows us to expand and grow because we feel strong.”

Western civilization superimposes us onto the natural world, as if we are above it, and it is below us. As if it is nothing more than a storage shed for resources at our disposal, and not a living, breathing world we are a part of. We see this viewpoint in the entitled way we dam rivers and when we clear-cut forest dwellers of their habitat, of their trees. We even blow holes in hills and mountainsides to make a way for ourselves and we call it progress.

Along the way, we stopped living with the earth and began to try to tame it to suit our needs and comforts. It is saddening. Yet there are people who walk with feet in both worlds, that of our constructed culture and that of the world we wandered far from as generations of nomads settled into cities. And these people are using their gifts to serve as guides, and awaken our perception to the larger truth.

“Human beings are most of the time unaware of the extent and intimacy of their connection with nature, especially the world of plants and animals. We act as if we are the proud and dominant other and thus can and should manifest our superiority in ways that are rather careless and devastating to nature. Indeed, trees live in harmony, and we create dissonance. Yet we want to live in a world where everyone and everything is harmoniously linked to everyone and everything.”

Malidoma Patrice Somé is one of these remarkable people, straddling both worlds and successfully acting as a mediator and translator between them. He was born to the Dagara people of Burkina Faso in West Africa. Malidoma was kidnapped from his village at the age of four by a Jesuit Missionary who had befriended his father. He was placed in a boarding school, on path to become a priest, to be used as a tool to convert the African people to the white man’s God.

When he was twenty he managed to run away and walked the entire distance back to his village, where he found himself home once more, and yet a stranger among strangers. He had been gone for fifteen years and could not even recall enough of the Dagara language to communicate with his mother and sister.

His Western world upbringing left him inadequately prepared for his return. He and his people did not understand each other. Well past the age of manhood in his village, Malidoma was required to undergo a month-long rite of passage before he could fully become a member of his community.

He had to first unlearn what he had learned.

His trials are compellingly written in his book Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman. In its pages he describes one of his first breakthroughs, where he was bidden to sit and watch a tree. He was aware of his own head processing through wondering what the purpose was, of wondering what the correct thing to do was. There had to be more to it than staring at a tree, right? Then he became angry and felt like he was being made to go through a public humiliation, as he was sat in the center of the village. Passed that anger, he broke open and began to speak to the tree. It became a sort of confessional where he poured his feelings of frustration out and apologized to the tree.

What he experienced next was a transformation of the tree into what he calls the green lady- a green human form spirit who felt like love and home. He ran sobbing to the spirit and she held him in her arms. When he came out of the moment and was hugging the tree he immediately tried to blame the vision on the heat and lack of food- which is the Western way of thought- except that the elders of his tribe who were watching had seen the same green lady in the moment he did. How could he explain that?  

“My experience with the green lady raises an important issue, namely, the true identity of the elements of nature. What if they are not inanimate objects, as people in the West have been taught to believe, but rather living presences? How would we need to change if we granted to a tree the kind of life that we usually reserve for so-called intelligent beings? If you peek long enough into the natural world - the trees, the hills, the rivers, and all natural things - you start to realize that their spirit is much bigger than what can be seen, that the visible part of nature is only a small portion of what nature is.”

            What we would call the supernatural, his people call the natural world. They have no word for supernatural. The closest word they have is Yielbongura, “the thing that knowledge can’t eat.” Western thought may have decided that it is separate but that doesn’t make it a truth for the larger world.

In fact, that way of thinking will only serve to separate us more from that which we all want most- to rediscover the sensation of wholeness. Spirit is real. What is spiritual can be explained by science, but not explained away. After all, you can put blinders on a horse so that he cannot see the distractions around him, but the distractions around him are still occurring. He does not see, yet they happen.

That’s true of the fullness of the world around us. Either we are open to it or we are closed to it, but it does not stop existing if we do not believe in it. If we choose to, we can do work to open ourselves up to the spirit world, the larger world, the greater web around us. We can see and hear with more senses than we use. People who have had these experiences, as Malidoma had, often decide in the aftermath that they must have hallucinated. So much of the spirit world is ephemeral that it takes a certain amount of faith and openness to make the connection.

"You can acquire what is usually seen as magical. When in fact the more you dwell in this kind of world, the less you see it as magical because it is the familiar, it is the kind of thing that every human being is entitled to and it is the kind of thing that is at the core of human nature, the search, the intense search for the magical." 

            I can’t recommend Somé’s writings enough. He has two other books The Healing Wisdom of Africa, which chronicles his life after the awakening, and Ritual: Power, Healing and Community. The story of his life’s journey and the purpose his Ancestors gifted him with is laced and woven with a breathtaking, wondrous, and seemingly simplistic awareness of the larger world that stretches beyond our everyday perception. Malidoma’s words act as a gateway, a doorway that the reader can grasp, an opening they can step through.

“Indigenous people see the physical world as a reflection of a more complex, subtler, and more lasting yet invisible entity called energy. It is as if we are the shadows of a vibrant and endlessly resourceful intelligence dynamically involved in a process of continuous self-creation. Nothing happens here that did not begin in that unseen world. If something in the physical world is experiencing instability, it is because its energetic correspondent has been experiencing instability. The indigenous understanding is that the material and physical problems that a person encounters are important only because they are an energetic message sent to the visible world. ... Ritual is the principal tool used to approach that unseen world in a way that will rearrange the structure of the physical world and bring about material transformation.”

            [This article was originally published July 20, 2011.]

Spring Cleansing & Home Blessing

Equinox is upon us, mid-point between the longest night of the year and the longest day and we bask in the warmth like turtles on a log, like snakes on the rocks. Winter mostly behind us, we throw open our windows and curtains, letting the first of the warmer air blow through. Light hits the corners of our darkened caves.

If our bodies are the temple of our spirits and deserve the best of our attentions and care, our homes are the temples our bodies depend on. My home is more to me than wood and flooring, than roof and wall. It is not my property but it is my sanctuary, my resting place. It is sacred.

Spring is the best time to scrub your house of its dark corners. House cleansings and home blessings can be done to simply rejuvenate the space, as well as more specific reasons like moving into a new home or after a remodel, a traumatic death in the home, the loss of a loved one, haunting, feelings of being watched, etc.

I like to teach people how to do it themselves, because no one is better suited to build the temple of their home than the ones who live in it. Set up an altar in the room that you consider to be the heart of your home. All you need on it is a candle, to serve as a hearth. You can add items that are personal and meaningful for you, anything that warms your heart. Personalize it to suit your preferences and tastes. Intention is the most powerful magical tool.

Step One: House Cleansing

The purpose of the first step is to cleanse, clear and empty your home of unwanted energies. Start at the back of the home and sweep towards whatever door you use as your main entrance and exit. Use a broom to stir the air. Go through every room, pushing towards the main door. When you’re done, open the door and sweep it outside.

Now that the energy is stirred and moved, grab rattles, drums, pots and pans… anything that makes noise. Start at the back again, make some noise, and move towards and out the front door. This will chase out anything lurking in your home that wishes you harm or ill, be it an entity or a repository of negative emotional gunk. If you have trouble moving the energy it may be helpful to chant “bad energy out of my house” while you’re working.

To finish off, you can burn some white sage, commonly found in smudge stick forms (mind your smoke alarms). You can also use copal or camphor if you can’t find sage. Both of them are strong herb and resin purifiers.

Step Two: Resting

This is optional, but it adds a substantial boost to the cleansing. Burn a candle made with real cinnamon oil and walk it through your home. It’s not just for baking. Cinnamon, Cinnamomum zeylanicum, is the dried bark of the laurel tree. It’s native to Sri Lanka and was originally the only place it was grown. Most of the cinnamon we use today is Cinnamomum cassia, and comes from the cassia tree.

Step Three: House Blessing

            The blessing is the most important part, coming full circle, closing and sealing the gaps. It is about sacredly blessing the portals where energy comes in and out of your house. In doing it, you create a protective filter. Your altar candle is burning. You can set the cinnamon candle, if you used it, on the altar as well.

You will also need a bowl of salt water, a small dish or vial of oil (olive oil works fine). If it is just you, you will use each of these one at a time. This is a good excuse to invite some friends over and, sharing their love for you, to fill your house with warmth.

Work room to room and anoint every portal with a tiny dab of water, oil, and then smoke from the sage. By portals I mean electrical outlets, heating grates, windows, doorways, televisions, computers, faucets and drains, toilets, tubs and showers, etc. Do not stick your wet or oily fingers in the outlets- for the love! I just run a dab along the outer casing.

While you’re doing this, speak words to the effect of: Protect my home and family from harmful energies.

Be mindful while you are working the magic but do not be somber. After all, the intention is to fill the house with light and warmth. When you are finished, pour the remains of the salt water across the bottom threshold of your porch of stoop and ask the Ancestors to watch over you.

May it be so. Ase.

[A combination of “Home Cleansings and House Blessings,” originally published September 21, 2011 and “Spring Equinox Cleaning,” originally published March 19, 2014.]

Looking Back: Unexplainable Things Have a Purpose

“If the wonder’s gone when the truth is known

there never really was any wonder.”

~ from the television show House

Unexplainable things have a purpose. It’s something I believe. It’s not the same thing as “everything happens for a reason.” I don’t believe that is true, as it insinuates that something somewhere is orchestrating the event. In the natural world, things just are and what matters is how we take them. I believe that sometimes the purpose of unexplainable things is just to exist and/or happen, in order to serve as a moment against which we respond and reveal how we react to things unknown. They can be teachable moments, reflecting our vulnerabilities and levels of openness. We cannot control what happens to us all the time. The only control we have is how we respond to it.

Some people think of death as the ultimate unexplainable thing. We try to make sense of it in order to find some solid ground to stand on when we face it but we also meet the stories of those who have come back from death with disbelief and skepticism. We want to know but we want to know and have difficulty accepting an outside voice as truth, assuring that we can never truly have an answer.

Unexplainable things happen but even calling them that is a misnomer. It’s not that they can’t be explained. It’s more that we lack the understanding or language to put the experience into words that make sense. Maybe because we try to put into words something our intuitive bodies just know. We have multiple senses and each of these have their own language and way of responding to and translating the world around us. We spend so much time trying to figure out if what happened to us could have happened to us, that we lose sight of the fact the experience happened at all. Some of these teachable moments are not as grandiose as death. They can be small events that evoke a larger change within us.

In the summer of ’97 on a Smoky Mountain peak, I wandered away from my house at dusk, away from the chaos of people, towards the small creek that ran along the property. I was having one of those nights of feeling like there was no place to be alone in a house twenty-one people lived in and I was looking for a little inner quiet. I must have sat on the bank of the creek, listening to the gurgling, rippling and singing of the water off the stones for an hour, unmoving, just being.

I almost didn’t notice the shadow that flew over me and by the time I reacted the creature was sitting on a low branch above the creek five feet in front of me. It was the first memory I have of seeing an owl in the wild. It was by the far the largest bird I have ever seen in nature. She appeared mostly white, with bits of grey tufted here and there. She wasn’t moving and her eyes took me in. They were large and round and the color of dandelions. She might have had horns, and in some recollections earlier on I was more sure- before my brain started telling me what could or couldn’t be possible.

I held my breath as the owl turned its head around. For the moment that we sat there, the smell of the air seemed to shift, filling with a muskier scent of moldy earth and grated wood bark. I exhaled and the owl spread its wings out and flew silently, not even a whisper, over my head. I fell backwards as it passed, watching it glide overhead, in fearful intimidation. I remember her wing span was almost as wide as I am tall.

In that moment, I felt like I had glimpsed an unaltered state of the natural world. It woke something in me and my eyes were open, seeing the wild in tandem with the modern. For years I studied every kind of owl looking for the scientific name of the one I saw. No picture ever fit the creature I saw.

One day I asked myself, if someone told me that the owl I saw was impossible in nature, would I disbelieve the experience? The answer was no. Even though I couldn’t find the correct scientific answer, my nose remembered its smell. My skin remembered the rush and blur of air as the owl swooped in. My eyes remember with artistic grandeur the unfurling of those wings. And my ears recall the kind of silence that accompanies the presence of a predator in nature. I chose to embrace the truth that my interaction with this magnificent creature woke a connection in me and served as the catalyst for the spiritual path I have taken. Knowing the facts and the science about that moment would not diminish the wonder and magic of the experience, and it shouldn’t.

[This article was originally published February 23, 2011]

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.

It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art

and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder,

no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-Albert Einstein

Ancestors in the Woods

As the internet posts this blog, I will be far from electricity that could handle more than one hairdryer plugged into an outlet at a time. I will be in the mountains of Massachusetts, celebrating Rites of Spring with the EarthSpirit community for my eleventh year. I don’t have to be psychic to say that I am having a good time right now.

I will be tending the Ancestor Shrine for the gathering, down in a thicket of woods along the beach. The space is open as a natural spot where the living and the dead can commune together, alongside the living creatures of the physical place. It’s a way of using the magic of the natural world as a tool to peer into Spirit. We will hang the names of our ancestors in the trees, and ask them to watch over those we have lost in this last year. And we shall feel our feet on the earth and we shall have gratitude for the breath in our lungs. We are living because They Were.

While I am off teaching in the woods, I wanted to share my favorite poem with you. If you are someone who likes poetry and likes nature, and you haven’t checked this poet out already, I highly recommend Mary Oliver’s work. It’s hard to choose a favorite, really, but this one resonated most authentically with me. It’s how I feel when I spend time in nature.

Sleeping In the Forest

by Mary Oliver

I thought the earth remembered me, she

took me back so tenderly, arranging

her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds. I slept

as never before, a stone

on the riverbed, nothing

between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated

light as moths among the branches

of the perfect trees. All night

I heard the small kingdoms breathing

around me, the insects, and the birds

who do their work in the darkness. All night

I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling

with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

(Tune in next week for my 200^th blog post!)

Meeting Great-Grandma Margaret

My hometown at the holidays.

I am Sarah, daughter of Margaret, daughter of Patricia, daughter of Margaret, daughter of Eliza, daughter of Mary, daughter of mother unknown. I never knew my Great-Grandma Margaret. Neither did my mom. Margaret Loretta Burke died when her youngest daughter, my Grandma, was eight years old.

The Burkes were Irish immigrants, who moved into Western New York to help carve the Erie Canal out of the bedrock. In doing my genealogy research, I discovered that the Burke family had lived on the same street since coming to the town, for multiple generations, mostly in the same house. That house was right around the corner from where I grew up. I realized that I must have passed it every day while visiting my childhood best friend. (I also learned that Margaret worked as a glove maker before she married in 1913.)

When I was home for the winter holidays I took a walk at dusk, amid the mounding snow, to see if the house was still standing. I had hoped it was. I had imagined that I would see it and say, oh, this house!, as if we had some previously unexplained bond. Or, at the least, that I would be able to touch the rail and say, my people lived here once. My Great-Grandmother dreamed here once.

But there was no house on the lot. Whatever had existed there, didn’t anymore. There was a newer house on a double lot set slightly back from the road, the only modern house in comparison to the other homes on the street. The lot my Great-Grandma’s house would have been on, sat at the extreme right side of the house (when facing it), and where the driveway is.

The funniest thing about that house, though, is that it’s only one of two houses on that block I have seen the inside of. One night when I was a kid, I was invited to a slumber party at that house for a girl I didn’t know very well yet. I remember sitting in her bedroom and talking. We played games and I won a Men Without Hats album. I realize now that when I slept that night, I was laying over the Burke family land. The girl’s bedroom was right where the lot would have been- 154 Washington Street.

In retrospect, that is pretty cool.

My spiritual work involves magic, which I consider to be the manifestation of our desires through action. The act of searching for my family and ancestral history has been helpful in creating doorways that have allowed me to better connect to the spirit world. When I took that cold winter walk around the corner to find my Great-Grandma’s home, I opened a doorway to that spiritual energy. 

Two months later, I met my Great-Grandma Margaret in the dream world.

I am at an event, like a wedding or a family reunion. There are a lot of people here. I am at a bar table, talking to a woman with a young face… about my age. She has short, curled bangs and her hair is curled up at the ends around her face. I cannot tell if it is short or if it is pinned up. In this room of people, she glows with a Technicolor hue (a sign for me it is spirit). Her hair is glowing a dark, deep chestnut.

I have a moment of clarity within the dream and I ask her pointedly, with a knowing, if she is Margaret. She says yes, staring into my eyes. She smiles at me. She says her name is Margaret. I tell her that she looks younger than I ever remember my Grandma being. She asks me how my Grandma is doing, squeezing my wrist warmly with her hand. She is very still in this room of movement, but I sense a nervousness beneath the exterior, as if I have called her here and she is not sure why.

I have a dream-memory of having seen my Grandmother earlier that night and I tell Great-Grandma Margaret how she seemed to me. In the dream I am worried about my Grandma and I think maybe this is why I have called her here. I say as much to Margaret and I thank her for coming to meet me. I tell her that my mother was also named Margaret. She thanks me and touches my face. She leaves to go and check on Patricia. The party continues, but the Technicolor edge is gone. The spirit has left the dream room.

The German Guy

A photo by Thamizhpparithi Maari

Nine years ago, I began a journey of meditation and trance to learn how to connect to the ancestral bloodstream within me. I believe in genetic memory, in the echoes of the patterns of living we have built generation after generation. I believe you can tap into that and touch it, for I have.

Everything in life is ebb and flow. In and out, up and down, left and right, forwards and backwards. The most helpful tool in connecting to this energy for me was the labyrinth, followed closely by the spiral shell of the ammonite. Knowledge lives at the dark center of each. In order to attain it you have to go in. And you have to go furthest into the darkness in order to get out. That pattern is also true in life; in order to get past something, you have to push through it.

Though it took me years to perfect the application of the meditation, the form of it is simple enough. Meditate on the blood, flowing through your veins. Trace it’s route through your body as you breathe in and out. Sink into that rhythm. Follow the blood back to your parents’ blood, to their parents’ blood, which is where yours came from. Watch as the bloodstream divides. Follow the branches of blood backwards like waves, rippling away from shore, into the depths of generations. Each layer multiplies. Known or unknown, there are always two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. Lose yourself in the black inky depths of the ancestral ocean. And open. This blood meditation is one way to connect to the taproot of our ancestors in this physical lifetime.

When I was better practiced at my meditation, I received a visual that stayed with me long after. I saw a man with dark curly hair, stepping out of a large forest with four or five handmade brooms slung over his shoulders. He was wearing a simple shirt and loose pants with boots on his feet, all of an indeterminate time period. He was leaning against a rough lumber fence but he looked at me, looked me in the eye. The sensation that only happens in the physical world was there. He was looking at me.

I began to meditate at night on that image, willing it to me, calling him back. I opened myself up to receive any message he had to share, but what I got were more brief flashes of images that meant nothing to me. Eventually, I started to feel a presence in the house that brought with it the sweet smell of pipe smoke. In my gut, I knew it was him. Whether he was an actual ancestor, or a metaphor for that cultural bloodline, I didn’t know, but I started paying attention.

I thought that the male spirit I was entertaining was Polish or German, both of which I know are heritages that live in my blood. Later, when he spoke in my journeys, it was German, and we found ourselves at an impasse. I had sung enough songs in German to recognize a few words but that was the extent of my knowledge. Several of my houseguests eventually experienced physical contact with the spirit, accompanied by the smell of sweet pipe smoke and I used to joke that he must have thought I was dense, requiring him to seek help in getting my attention. We all called him The German Guy.

On a whim, at a wedding rehearsal party, I asked my mom what she knew about our German heritage. And my mom told me stories about her bootlegging German grandfather, where his house was when they went to visit him and what it looked like. She even remembered the song he used to sing to the sound of his windchimes:

                        How dry I am, how wet I’ll be,

                        If I don’t find, the bathroom key.*

In the back of my head, I heard the German Guy sigh. I don’t know who he is or if he, in that shape, means anything to my lineage. But I liken him to the visual representation of my German heritage, to all the Germans standing in my ancestral tree. To the known families of Art, Arth, Schmeelk, and Pils. To honor them, I leave an offering I saw in one of my meditations, of dark German ale with chunks of hard bread softening in the bottom and I thank them for their lives. And I thank them for mine.

*A brief web search led me to the information that this was a common folk rendition that was a runaway from a small lyric of the Irving Berlin song “The Near Future”, written in 1919, during Prohibition.

What the Dead Know

The same music box.

My last year of college, I lived in a rambling old farmhouse, situated just after the sidewalk ended at the edge of campus. There were anywhere from five to eight other people living in the house, depending on the month. Strange things happened frequently, but we always chalked it up to forgetful college students or the more-easily-blamed creaky old house.

One night, we all went out to dinner together, and when we left, the house was pitch dark. When we returned, also together, three bedroom lights were on upstairs. The doors were still locked and uninjured and nothing was touched. When I was alone in the house I would hear footsteps walking around, loud enough that I would get up to make sure no one else had come home. It was spooky enough that I mostly stayed to my room in the back of the house.

In December, we decorated for the holidays, which is when the most obvious instance of haunting occurred. My friend and I were sitting on a small couch together in the living room, reading and doing homework. The only other person there was one of my housemates, in his bedroom off the kitchen. It was a lovely, quiet morning. The living room opened up to what was probably once a dining room. We had placed our Christmas tree and other decorations in that adjoining space.

 Suddenly, in the quiet, a small music box began to play in the other room. The music box was a ceramic Christmas tree, which fit tightly onto a base of presents and toys. We assumed it had gotten jostled or come askew and my friend went over to right it. When she paused I looked up, and saw that the top was lifted cleanly off the base and placed on the other end of the table. We shared a look with raised eyebrows and were appropriately weirded out, because the music starts playing as soon as you lift the lid a quarter inch off the base, much less move the top of it, and we had been alone in the room. My friend put the tree top back on the base and the music stopped.

We went back to our reading and moments later it started again. This time, we both got up and found the tree top once more sitting on the other end of the table. We assumed it was my housemate. Were we so engrossed in our homework that we didn’t notice him coming in to play tricks on us? We put the tree back on the stand and went to his room to poke him for spooking us.

My housemate was on the phone in his room and had been the whole time. He didn’t even know what we were talking about. He got off the phone and listened to our story and got spooked as well. He thought we were trying to creep him out. And then it happened a third time, and we all three witnessed it. Despite our attentiveness, we still did not see it move but there it was, off the base. This time I heard an unmistakable giggle and felt the presence of a young girl. We asked her out loud to stop creeping us out, told her that we heard her, and that we’d pay attention.

During the semester break, my housemates shifted, with only four of us from the first semester remaining. More of us began to hear and sense her around the house. Lights were turned on and off and objects were moved. When you live with so many people, it’s easy to blame it on someone else’s idea of a bad joke. We couldn’t understand yet, what she was trying to communicate with us. She was trying to warn us that we were living with a bad man.

One night, one of my housemates, and someone we thought of as a friend, attacked another housemate when he thought she was passed out. Everything changed. In the aftermath of removing him from our lives we began to uncover a lot of truths about his real personality; his lying, thieving, manipulation, peeping, and trouble with the local police. The random lights that would turn on and off were lights in rooms where things often went missing, specifically mine and one other housemate. The third room that always lit up, and the one constant, was his. Our spirit friend was literally trying to illuminate the person who was lifting a couple dollars here and a pack of cigarettes there, over the course of months. She tried to leave us bread crumbs.

Once he was removed from the house, the haunting ceased. Lights came on when they were turned on and they stayed off when they were turned off. My housemates and I took care of each other and worked through recovering from the strange and violent betrayal of a friend. And once the truth was known, the spirit world around us was again at peace. When I encounter spirit so strong it manifests, I don’t just look at it as a haunting, but I try to stay open to where it collects, and what else it might be trying to tell me. Our intuitive body is strongly linked to the spirit world, and when you can open to that energy, it allows you to see with extra senses. It allows us to see more fully.

Experiencing Death VII: There in the Room

When my Grandfather died in 2004, I was blessed to be there in the room with him. I had missed saying goodbye to my Grandma, a guilt I still carried with me. He had known that, those years in between, and I believe he waited for me to fold time to get there, where he lay unconscious on the bed. His eyes stirred momentarily beneath his closed lids at the sound of my voice and then slowed again. It could have been days, sitting beside him, we were told. I didn’t think it would be. He felt ready to go, and the spirits were gathering close.

Those of us in the room were midwifing death, whether we wanted to or not. Those who stand at a threshold and guard the way between are charged with a sacred task, whether it’s life coming into or out of our world. You don’t have to know what you’re doing to hold space for the dying- and I’m not talking about people who can be saved medically. I’m talking about those on their deathbed. I’m even talking about animals dying at the side of the road. I’m talking about stepping up to face the unknown one last time with someone, when there is no hope left. When the doctor says days and hours instead of weeks and months.

I wasn’t alone in that room. Each of us could tell a very different story of what happened within that final minute in the hospital room. Every single one of those stories is true. Mine just happens to be fraught with more joy and awe than loss and sorrow, which was not what I expected when I entered. My story is the one I’m sharing.

Midwives are best known for birthing babies and bringing lives into this world, bringing spirits into being. Birth is a physical science that is truly magical to me, and all magic comes with a price. With birth, when the being that has been living in the womb for nine months, comes crying out into the world, fully articulated, it’s magic. And with birth comes pain, and afterwards, much joy.

And in death, when the spirit leaves and the physical body finally shuts down, it comes with extreme sorrow and emptiness. It carves out a hollow space inside us that those loved ones left behind, as if that person literally held space within our emotional body. These are the prices we pay for the experience of being human. Because I was able to accept what was coming, and for having the courage to wish my Grandpa peace, even though I could not imagine living without him, I was given a gift.

I am sensitive to spirit world but I never see anything more than what I call emotional shadow. I saw more when I was younger. It’s true that children and animals see more than we grown-ups do, though I personally do not believe that has always been true. When we hit puberty, there is so much expectation on us to fit into our societal constructs that we sever that connection ourselves if we have it. We sever anything of ourselves that makes us different, weird or strange. Something that I hope will change.

My Grandpa’s actual death took a moment. In the span of that second, my Grandpa took a breath in and out, so imperceptible my sister had her hand over his chest and heart to gauge it. And that was it. My partner and I had been singing softly, preparing ourselves for what was to come and opening the way for him, in our hearts, to cross when he was ready. May he be free from pain.

I was sitting just to the left of the foot of his bed. Beside me, a doorway on the wall opened up. Through the doorway poured this wash of green light. It was warm and made the room smell like summer. The March evening smelled like hot tilled earth and peppery tomatoes. I smelled my Grandma, who had passed four years earlier. I heard her clear her throat, tapping her foot, waiting for him. What I would describe as his soul leapt from my Grandpa’s body in human form, with joyful abandon. And then it became a cloud of smoke which swam into the green energy and in a swirl it was gone. The door was closed beside me.

The room was cold and empty, though the number of bodies hadn’t changed. It was over. He was gone.

My partner and I had been singing softly, honoring his life, expressing what he meant to us with voice. But not only that. I was also doing it to accept the grace of understanding that his freedom from sickness meant that I would feel sorrow and pain. May that grace help me to heal.

After that experience, I can imagine the spiritual growth that might also come from being on the living side of death’s door. To be the person who helps birth the spirit into other world at the end of someone’s life. Or even to be someone who simply watches it happen. To sit at a bedside with someone who might otherwise be alone, so that they can cross unafraid. I believe that how you let go of your time in this world is important to what comes after.

Since my Grandpa’s death, I light candles at night for those who die alone and afraid, that their souls might find peace and move on. I do this because I know, even at my young age, that a time will come when I will sit at the bedsides of people I love as they die. More than anything I wish to build up the courage and strength to find the grace in the blessing of being with them at the end of this life and the beginning of whatever comes next.

Relevant Posts:

The Beginning I Saw in the End (published March 23, 2011)

Eulogy I Wish I’d Given (published March 14, 2012)

Experiencing Death: The Unborn Baby (published May 16, 2012)

Experiencing Death II: My Father’s Father (published June 13, 2012)

Experiencing Death III: Squirrel in the Road (published July 11, 2012)

Experiencing Death IV: The Body at Daggett Lake (published August 15, 2012)

Experiencing Death V: Suicide (published September 9, 2012)

Experiencing Death VI: Alone with the Dead (published October 17, 2012)

The Dumb Supper

“And in one house they could see an old grandfather mummy being taken out of a closet and put in the place of honor at the head of the table, with food set before him. And the members of the family sat down to their evening meal and lifted their glasses and drank to the dead one seated there, all dust and dry silence…”

~ Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree, 1972

Tonight is Halloween, All Hallows Evening, a holiday also known as Samhain. Like my ancient forebears, my family and I began to practice the ritual of the Dumb Supper seven years ago, which is a dinner set for both the living and the dead. It can be as simple or elaborate as your circumstances require, but it is a rewarding way to honor the dead and keep their memories alive. This formal supper can be done on any night between October thirty-first and November third.

For the simplest form you can add an extra place setting at dinner and feed that plate first, welcoming in the weary travelers from the other world and offering them the hospitality with a place to sit at your table. Allow them an evening of humanity on the night when the overlapping worlds bleed through. It’s called a Dumb Supper, which means Silent Supper. It is not a place to chit chat about the workday or chores that need to be done as such mundane life can keep the timid dead who no longer recognize the world-as-is away.

Hold supper sacred and keep all conversation minimal, and to the experience at hand. It does not have to be solemn or somber event. There was much giggling on our end last year when we felt an overwhelming cry of “Taters!” erupt from our invited ethereal guests as the food was placed out. Some readings will tell you the night must be silent, and that may have been true in a time when silence was possible but for the scraping of forks and howling of the wind. But in this day, when our homes are filled with the not-so-quiet hum and thrum of electronics, appliances, traffic and plumbing, I tend to worry that those noises will keep the dead at bay.

We switch things up every year, with some kind of music that might appeal to our invited guests. Last year we listened to the radio drama of Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree, which we will continue this year. It was a special treat that brought in much more spirit energy than ever before. It seemed a familiar thing that pulled them in and the emotional sensation that filled our home was one of a joyous family reunion.

For our ritual, we set a chair at the head of the table called the Spirit Chair and we shroud it in black fabric and clothing. No human will sit in that chair tonight. The Spirit Chair is the setting for all spirits who wander the night and wish no harm, but wish a moment of hospitality.

Beyond that, there is a chair for each of us, and for the spirit we are personally inviting to the table. We write the name of the spirit who is our invited guest on a piece of paper and place it beneath their plate. If you do not have a particular name you wish to invoke, you may simply write the ancestors of your name, your bloodline, your spiritual heart, etc.

For my purposes, I place my guest’s chair across from me, so that I may gaze into the space there, like divination, during the meal. Ultimately, where you place them is not important. What is important is that you serve the Spirit Chair first, your invited guests next, and then yourself. It’s the intention of hospitality that matters most.

At this time of year, we use the dumb supper to open a space for the living and dead to dine together. I think of the table and meal like a reflection, a photo-negative image of your mundane life. To that end, the place setting is prepared the opposite of however you would normally set the table. Do you usually put forks on the left and water glass on the right? Reverse them.

Place a candle on the plate for the Spirit Chair and a tea light on the center of the plate for each invited guest. At the beginning of the meal, stand behind the Spirit Chair and invite your ancestors to come and dine with you. I even go so far as to open the front door and invite them into my home, literally. Light the candle on the Spirit plate. Pour a libation into the cup at the head of the table and call in the Ancestors:

To those who have gone before,

To those whose names live in our hearts and dance upon our lips,

To those whose names have been lost in the sea of time,

To those whose bones lie above and below the earth,

To those whose ashes have travelled on the winds,

We, the living, bid you welcome and entrance.

This is how you open the door for your personal guests to step in. Next, light the candles on your invited guests’ plates and call them in by name.

When you serve the meal, begin with the dessert course. The meal itself is also a reflected image of the meal the dead would remember. Start with the dessert course and sit down to enjoy it. Next, serve the main course, then the sides. Then serve the soup and salad, followed by any appetizers and pre-dinner cocktails. You should structure your meal in a way that seems appropriate to you, your heritage and your family traditions- just backwards from whatever that might be. What foods will you serve? I like to make items that were meaningful to my family as well as items I find that hearken to the cultural heritage I am slowly discovering in my genealogical research.

During each pause in courses, while we are eating, I focus on the space across from me and the multiple sensory impressions I receive. I always invite my Great-Grandma to dine with me and have been chastised for not salting her meatballs or being stingy on the chocolate cake. I have also heard the gentle trebling of her voice and felt the cool paper of her skin as our hands brushed while I was serving her. I have found myself responding to an unspoken request from her spirit for another napkin. On this night, they can allow themselves the human moments they had in life and we can be reminded of them; Elsie did often need an extra napkin.

When the meal is finished, we take a few moments and express our gratitude to those who came and supped with us. When the evening feels over, I thank my guest for coming and I open the front door, wishing them a safe journey for the rest of their evening. I tell them to leave as they will (in case they’re not done yet). I will let the ancestral tea lights burn out on their plates.

I thank the ancestors for dining with us and I snuff out the candle on the Spirit Chair. I carry the water from the Spirit cup and pour it on the ground outside:

To those who have gone before,

To those whose names live in our hearts and dance upon our lips,

To those whose names have been lost in the sea of time,

To those whose bones lie above and below the earth,

To those whose ashes have travelled on the winds,

We, the living, thank you for dining with us.

                        We, the living, wish you safe travels.

Ideally, the food would also be disposed of sacredly, either burned, buried or, traditionally, placed in running water. For me, it means leaving it out in the woods for critters, an offering of the bones of spirit-eaten food to other life in need. When I dispose of it, I do so with sacred intention.

            Many blessings to you and your family, both living and dead on this day. I have much gratitude to the Ancestors who lived, who opened the Way that we might walk this earth together. May we walk this earth softly, that those who come after us will speak our names in joy. May the peace and stillness of the season be with you. May the Ancestors walk with us, always.

Making Amends with the Dead

Death doesn’t always give us time to get affairs in order before it comes and more often, when it does, it leaves behind things unfinished for both the dead and the living. There are conversations we needed to have that are no longer possible in the physical world. In my own life, I needed forgiveness from one of my ghosts. I had a friend who ended his life, and my last words to him were said in anger, out of a place of being wounded. In a place of pain, I blamed him for an assault that happened to me and refused to speak to him. And then he was gone.

I never saw his pain. I never knew how deep his wounds were until it was too late and I tortured myself with the guilt I carried. When I eventually came to a place of believing I was worthy of happiness, and needed to take action, I did it for me. Because I was killing myself inside by hanging onto that old wound.

It’s not that I expected him to manifest from ether before me. It’s not like I expected to hear him say he forgave me. But whether we are seeking forgiveness or we are being asked to forgive, I do believe it is the humbleness of being in that moment that is more important than the outcome. If we are forgiven or not, whether we choose to forgive or find we are not ready to, at least the seeker can say they tried everything they could. At the very least, they can forgive themselves and move on. And that is what I needed to do.

I picked a dark moon, when there was no light in the sky but the stars, when the black around me was inky thick. I sat in a place of fear and allowed myself to face it and found that the guilt I carried was heavier than the dark around me. It was long past time to seek peace.

I burned some sage and copal to clear the space around me and call in protective energies to my heart. I called to my friend, using words that would pull his spirit, memories that only his ghost would answer to. I did this until the air around me felt thick with his presence. Whether he appeared on his own like a true spectre or it was my memories that wove him out of the air, the desired outcome was the same. I felt like I was standing in the grove with him.

I cried first, before my voice could find its footing. It felt familiar, the two of us stealing moments to analyze the chaos around us. The familiarity was painful in how pleasant it was. I told him how much I missed him. I asked him to forgive me for not seeing beyond my own pain. And I told him my secret, the one I had kept from him all those years ago.

I finally put words to the event that happened to me. I explained why I blamed him for not being there to protect me. I apologized for my anger. And in the weaving of words previously unspoken I was forced to see my life with clear eyes.

I had made a poppet out of red fabric. I held it in my hands, pouring pain into it as I spoke. When I had no more words to say I told him that I loved him and that I wished him peace. I threw it into the fire and watched it burn. And it burned through me for a moment. I was time travelling backwards to the moment of my past when I chose to lash out at him rather than tell him what had happened to me. Only this time, at that edge, I made a new choice.

It didn’t change the past. It didn’t rewrite history. Somewhere in my heart, I felt the change in me. I felt the pain of then and knew with certainty that today, even facing that same pain, I would never make that same choice. With that knowledge, the past wound was salved and began to heal. So in a sense, I was able to step back in time and make a different choice. That healing work, once finished, rippled outwards through my core, altering other places that had been affected by that pain.

I sought forgiveness for me. Even if he were alive, my guilt and shame might not have been enough to revive our friendship after all this time. But it still would have allowed me the experience of knowing I had changed enough to mean my words. That they were not born from guilt, but of repentance. I would have known that I was a new person who deserved to free myself of such incredible guilt. Even if he were alive and still hurting, I could have allowed myself the freedom to move on, and hope that eventually he would be able to as well.

My friend is still dead. My last words to him were still in anger, but it was a learning experience and a choice I have proven I would not make again. Since that dark moon ritual, I have not been plagued by the nightmares of guilt that I had been. I remember him fondly, without that pang of culpability I would feel over his death before. It was his choice that he made, for no one but himself.

What I can and have done, is to be careful of my words. I choose not to speak words that I may not mean after they burn through me. I have decided that the cycle of anger and hurt will end with me. I will not perpetuate it further.

This is how I made amends with a loved one who is no longer living. Had the rolls been reversed, I might have called on him to forgive him for his words to me as well, again so that I might move on. Life lessons mean nothing if we learn nothing from them. All our magic is for our own healing and growth and if we open ourselves to the larger world around us, we can find peace from those unspoken things that haunt us.

Experiencing Death III: Squirrel in the Road

This is the third installment in a monthly thread, where I will be looking back at the early experiences I had with death and reflecting on how those moments shaped my views and fears of it. In order to change my relationship with the concept of death, I have to understand what shaped it to begin with. Our ideas and philosophies are meant to evolve and change, to grow as our own experiences do.

It was a quiet afternoon. I was young enough that we still played to the edges of our block and looked multiple times, both ways, before running across the street to the other side. Halfway down the block, in front of the only house of apartments, there was a squirrel in the road. I thought it was dead, another casualty of an automobile on our mostly quiet street. But I thought I saw it breathing.

I looked back and forth many times and darted out into the road. I think the fact that in my memory the road seemed bigger than I know it to be, is telling of my age. I was glad I did because the squirrel wasn’t dead. He was gasping for air, looking at the sky. And then he turned his eyes to me.

He started trembling, every instinct telling him to run. His tiny hand opened and closed with his labored breath. He was still alive but I knew he was dying. I wanted to scoop him up and run him home but I worried that the grown-ups would be more mad that I had touched a wild animal than that a squirrel was dying.

I’d seen dead animals in the street before, flat shapes in the road. We all have. All I knew was that I couldn’t leave him in the road, half-alive, to be crushed as he died because he couldn’t run away. I talked very softly to him, told him I wasn’t going to hurt him although it might hurt a little. I remember promising him I wouldn’t touch him, having been told that some animals would reject other wild ones that smelled of human.

He was laying atop a large cluster of leaves and I very slowly and very gently pulled the leaves closer to the side of the road, obsessively watching for traffic. He made no sound and didn’t move. He just opened and closed his little fist as he struggled for air.

I calmed a bit when he was no longer in the open and I sat on the curb, my knees pulled in, sitting with him. Even then I had a sense that he shouldn’t be alone. Who knew how old he was, if he had family? What if animals could feel the way we felt? What if he was scared? It must have been autumn. In my memories leaves fell softly while we sat there.

I talked quietly with him and sang softly to him. I wished I could save him. I’m pretty sure I prayed for him to be okay, that he might get up and walk away. After that, my memory splits.

I remember my mother coming to find me. I remember her sitting beside me for a moment. She asked me if I touched it and I told her I knew I shouldn’t. She wanted me to come home but I didn’t want to leave it alone. She said that I was right that it was dying. Its breathing was already slower and less urgent. She told me I did a wonderful thing for the squirrel and it was time to come home.

I also remember a woman sitting beside me, more ether than flesh, with chestnut hair and a weathered housedress. She wrapped an arm around me and we watched the squirrel as I cried. I think I apologized for not being able to be more help. Maybe they both happened. Maybe the ghost arm became my mother’s when she came to see where I was. I remember there was a woman. Maybe my mother was never there and my brain imposed her face onto another, because she is known to me. All I know for sure is that it wasn’t just me and the squirrel at the curb.

There’s no clear lesson in this experience for me except that I have always remembered the look on that squirrel’s face. It was the first time I recognized the shadow of death without having seen it before. I have never forgotten the feeling of knowing that death was imminent, as if I saw it every day. Often our intuition knows better than we do.

Once we see that shadow, however it manifests for us, we are altered. It is our fear that changes us in harmful ways, closing our minds to the reality of it. Sometimes the alteration is as simple as awareness and we open ourselves to a larger cycle of life. Life and death are intertwined, interconnected and those who can embrace the inevitability of death are the ones who can embrace the wonder of the living world more fully.

Relevant Posts:

Introduction to Death: The Unborn Baby (published May 16, 2012)

Introduction to Death II: My Father’s Father (published June 13, 2012)

Spirit World: If You Saw a Ghost...

For a moment, forget whether or not you believe ghosts are real. At the end of the day, none of this work is about whether or not you believe in ghosts. But our interactions with other, whether it’s spirit world or an unknown culture, are moments that define the aspects of us that are not otherwise tested regularly. They are our very own teachable moments.

Why does the supernatural scare us? Because it is one of the last unexplained reaches we haven’t been able to quantify yet. At the turn of the 20^th century, we still had not mapped exploration to the poles, and there were so many places unknown to our world still. Now, there is little of our known world left to challenge us. But challenges, when framed correctly, test us and shape us. These moments hardly ever feel safe.

Many of us have had experiences that tested us and darkened our lives for a while. Moments that we pushed through and moved past. In these moments we struggle to learn to be a survivor rather than a victim. None of us are alone in that journey. Life is not fair and not always kind.

How do you respond to those moments? Do you freeze and wait for the danger to pass over you? Or do you bolt at the first sound to stay hidden? Freezing leaves you open to capture, to attack, to hurt. Bolting keeps you on the run, often missing important moments that held no danger at all. How does fear own your body?

I was disheartened to discover that I had become a rabbit. Not the run-as-fast-as-you-can rabbit, but the kind that freezes when it’s seen, when it’s in danger, waiting for the scare to move on. It left me open to more hurt and that was not the person I wanted to be. My emotional body and my physical body were not in sync.

You cannot reach out to the spirit world successfully if you cannot stand fully in yourself. What I needed to learn, without judging myself for what I would discover, was how I responded to stimulus. I couldn’t move forward in my practice until I knew. Touching the spirit world is about learning where your body has resistance to it, and if you care, learning where the walls you have put up are, so you can work at expanding your world and your truth.

It’s not about pushing yourself past your threshold in an unsafe way. It’s definitely not about breaking yourself. It’s about learning where your boundaries are and how to gently push at them, like seedlings pushing out of the earth.

Imagine…

Allow yourself to imagine that you are alone in an empty house. It is the middle of the night. You hear a strange noise and look up, thinking for the moment that you see a figure in the next room that just as suddenly disappears. The house feels different, as if there is a presence in it that you can’t see, as if you are being watched.

Does the adrenaline-surge in your body taste like movement or fear? Does it push you forward or does it freeze you where you are? Do you believe that your eyes saw form or do you dismiss it as a figment because now nothing is there? Do you run from the house and refuse to enter it again unless accompanied by friends after the sun comes up? Do you spend the next few days living with the lights on?

Do you freeze where you are and wait to see if there is more activity? Do you go towards the spot where you think you saw something, with a heavy object in hand, and investigate whether or not something was really there? Do you simply return to what you were doing and ignore it?

Do you try to engage the entity? Do you ask it what it wants? Do you ask it to move on? Do you let it know it’s scaring you? Do you let the moment go but stay open to experiencing one again?

What emotions move in your body?

How we meet our fear highlights our nature. Most people will spend their time explaining to themselves why they couldn’t possibly have seen a ghost, because ghosts are not real so they cannot exist. I say that it doesn’t matter whether the existence of spectres is true or false to the moment. The facts surrounding ghosts is in itself ether and knowledge does not speak to who you are as a person.

We cannot control what happens to us. The only control we have is how we respond to it. We can only control what interactions we have with the natural world if we remove ourselves from it. But to remove ourselves from it would be to deny our own role in this world we share. We should immerse ourselves in it. The natural world is constantly trying to reach out to us and help us find the way back to stasis, center and home.

Relevant Posts

Spirit World: Ghost Visitations (published September 13, 2011)

Spirit World: Afraid of What Lies in the Dark (published April 4, 2012)

Spirit World: Haunting at White Street (published April 11, 2012)

Spirit World: What is Ghost? (published April 18, 2012)

Spirit World: What is Ghost?

Not everyone who dies becomes a ghost.

Anyone who is ready to meet the moment of their end passes quickly. But not as the solid being we knew, loved and touched with our hands. We are more than our bodies. The matter dries and decays. But what is spirit leaves the vessel when the heart stops. I have witnessed it. I have felt the essence of my grandfather leave the room suddenly barren and cold. Empty. In that moment, the body was just… body. Not Grandpa. It is what I know to be true.

The rest is what I feel, what I believe, what I have pieced together through my practice and experiences. It is easy to accept death when you witness the exit of the spirit. Even then, I believe the spirit that leaves often splits, just as we can split ourselves into different functions; student, lover, spouse, parent, employee. I believe the spirit moves on, reincarnates and remains behind, becoming another part of the earth we live on. I believe in multiple truths.

Working with the spirit world relies a lot on trusting your gut, being quiet enough to listen to your intuition. It means you accept and work with the information you are receiving/sensing/seeing until it is proven otherwise. Then you reevaluate and adjust how you perceive and process. Nothing is either one thing or another.

I’ve had experiences with the supernatural world. I can’t explain them. They are what they are. These experiences used to create fear in me, and I allowed myself to be frightened and panicked by events that, years later when I was more open, I understood to be nothing more than worlds overlapping and attempted communications. There’s a difference between ghosts, or earthbound spirits, and haunted objects or haunted places. When I say ghost I don’t mean poltergeists or other unknown things that go bump in the night. I mean the echoes of people who were human once and alive in the living world with names and families.

I don’t see ghosts the way I see reality unfolding before me. It’s more like the flickering of form in the corner of my eye, in the corner of my brain. It’s the moment I lift my head because someone walked into the room- an instinctual sense of another presence- only to open my physical eyes and see the room is empty. It’s seeing movement in an empty space with clear and rested eyes. It’s the sense of sudden temperature change outside of the body at a fixed point. Once I moved through my fear of those moments, and learned to stand at the threshold, I began to get clearer impressions: male, female, approximate age, clothing silhouette, smells, time, etc.

A friend asked me recently how you know you’re interacting with spirits and not just going insane. If you’re not asking yourself that question, you shouldn’t be doing this work. For myself, I know where that line is and I know the difference. But this line, this unknowing is the place that is dangerous for others to follow. If you do not believe, you can fall into the rift between the two. If you do not believe that what you are experiencing is happening, you will give into the fear of it. You have to be willing to accepting, questioning and, at the same time, allow the story to remain unfinished and unended. Because the truth of it will change as your perception alters.

I have only seen Elsie, my Great-Grandmother, once since the moment I woke to find her sitting on the end of my bed the morning she died. I have only opened my eyes to see her once more, eating across from me at a Dumb Supper I hosted. She poured salt on her plate and I remembered that she put salt on her chicken wings when she visited us. It was one of her rituals that fascinated me as a child. I have heard her speaking but mostly I smell her. There was a scent of her skin like cool cucumber and baby powder. I smell it and I feel a hand touch my head. Then, I am awash with the emotion I attached to her. And she is with me.

The thing about ghost visits is that eventually, time doesn’t mean the same thing to me as it does to the mundane world. I can close my eyes and pull flesh-memory out of ether into breath. I can hear the sound of my Grandmother’s laughter at will. I can smell the scent of a dead friend’s skin. I can hold the hand of my Great-Grandmother and recall exactly the cool, paper-silk sensation of her flesh in mine. They become more than a remembering. It is a new experience. I become the meeting place of the living and spirit.

The ghosts that used to haunt me are comfort to me now. Because the ability I have learned with them transcends the spirit world. I can think of a friend from high school and I can recall how it felt to talk to them, how important they were, how small our world seemed then and how strong our bond was. I may not have that anymore, but it is a brick and foundation of who I am, that still swims in my own spirit body. For if flesh and bone can become ghost, surely so can time. Everyone who has ever touched me walks with me. Because of my work, I am never alone.