Communicating Through Music

I have spoken before about how my connection to spirit world is more auditory than visual. I experience temperature fluctuations and the hairs lifting off my neck like others. But I don’t hear voices or messages as much as I hear song lyrics or music.

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Blame it on my 80s upbringing, but usually spirit communicates with me through…tv show jingles. That’s right. I swear. The first one I noticed over and over was the Three’s Company theme song. Just the same two lines repeated, over and over:

            Come and knock on my door,

            We’ll be waiting for you…

This usually means a spirit is trying to get my attention.

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A newer one that started manifesting for me a few years ago happens less often and, in my experiences, is a spirit trying to warn me about something. It’s usually about, or for another person. If I get a flash or glimpse of who it might be associated with, I have been known to reach out to them. It’s two lines from the song “Outside” by Staind:

            I’m on the outside, I’m looking in…

            I can see through you, see to the real you…

I normally don’t lead with, “Spirit sent me to check on you,” but I will check in and see if they’re all right. I have never regretted reaching out when I do. So, if I hear that song, I listen to it.

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This year, a newer jingle has been playing this month. It’s the Sanford and Sons theme song. It’s pretty insistent. My wife says I have been humming it for days now. I don’t know what this music means yet.

I don’t know it’s message for me, but I’m listening.

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Always at this time of year, when the garden starts to bed and the winds whip up and the faded garbage blows about the neighborhood… Always, when the air chills and the green things decay and frost… The spirits walk more thickly. Trick is, they are always there, somewhere beyond here, but overlaying us still.

This is the time of year the in-betweens thin.

 

Spirit Talking

While I am sensitive to spirit world year-round, at this time of year, every year, it’s like the phone keeps ringing. Often, it’s so persistent I stop noticing. I have to, in order to get any work done. I am not a psychic. I cannot call in specific spirits. I’m a sensitive. I am useful in a seance. I can open doors. I just don’t know what, if anything, will come through.

I can’t call your Uncle. But he might visit in my dreams. That’s how I usually see them, when I am most open and my brain isn’t trying to do real-world things.

But at the thinning time? I don’t always get that option.

There are always people I am hoping to see or speak to, people I am hoping will show up. But recently, a friend visited me for the first time. We were friends for years. Not terribly close but good friends and confidants.

And I know why he came to me.

I have been feeling low, battling my trauma depression and PTSD as I near another burniversary. And then I was distracted by a song from the 90s I haven’t heard in a long time. It reminded me immediately of my time in college. I hadn’t heard it since Fredonia but it was playing clear as a bell.

            “…when I come around…”

It stuck with me in the way an earworm doesn’t. And then I felt the cool whoosh of a door opening and I heard:

            “Knock knock.”

And as I frowned:

            “I have a joke for you.”

He was king of jokes. In five years, I never heard the same joke twice. And I never did remember a joke long enough to share it with him.

I felt him in my kitchen as clearly as if I were sitting in his office pretending I had no clue who kept filling the candy bowl that was usually empty on his desk. (It was my friend Ann and I.) He seemed to want to cheer me up.

And then he was gone. So, I played Chapin’s song “Taxi” for him, like we used to listen to together. And when I see him again, I know exactly what I’ll say:

            After all this time, I finally have a joke for you.

When Spirit Walks Thickly

The Autumnal Equinox marks the first day of fall and opens a door into my favorite time of year. The leaves are dessicating and dropping, skittering across the sidewalk as the cooler winds blow in. In the northeast, we throw open our windows and let the new winds curl through our homes, licking at the corners and cleansing the edges of our rooms, and our minds.

We prepare ourselves to lower the storm windows and turn on our furnaces. We stock the woodpiles and harvest our fall gardens. We ready ourselves to turn inward and ride out the dark and cold days ahead. But they’re not here yet, and we relish in leaf piles and apple orchards, in pumpkins and autumn squashes.

The Equinoxes are balancing points. In the spring we tip both towards warmer days and the reality of shorter days after the solstice. After months of being closed up, we spring clean at the Vernal Equinox, sweeping out the cobwebs and dustbunnies and letting the warm air swirl through. In the fall we tip towards colder days and longer days after the promise of the solstice. At the Autumnal Equinox we also clean, consecrating and creating sacred space in the walls of the home we will depend on through the coming colder, dark days.

Cinnamon sticks simmer in a pot of water on the stove, the scent vibrating through the air, whispering to the ether in the house. Wake and walk, wake and walk. May all beings that wish us harm walk right out the front door. You are not wanted here.

Bundles of sage and rosemary are clipped from the garden and strung up in all the windows. May the ancestors protect all who dwell in this home. May the guardians watch over us. May they keep us healthy and safe.

Our cats run through the house, stimulated by the smells of the transforming world outside and the transforming home inside. And in their laps, the numbers grow. Two cats still of flesh and bone and two cats still beloved and every day missed. For the first time, all our babies are running together. It is a bittersweet sensation, both a gift and a heartache.

Have you ever been in a room with your cats, both sleeping, only to clearly hear another cat digging in the litter box? Have you ever reached out your hand to pet your animal, feeling them jump up beside you, before you remember that your pet is already behind you?

When spirit walks, we listen.

Equinox is a step closer to Samhain, towards All Hallows, towards the time of year when the veil between our world and spirit is thin. They walk all year, but this is the time of year that those who do not see may spy their shadows slipping past them. And this year, the spirits are walking more thickly earlier than I usually experience them, as my cats can attest.

My dreams are full of lost loved ones visiting and bringing me messages. Some of them are for me. Some of them are for people I love. And some of them are spirits who find me because I am an ancestral lighthouse keeper and I shine a bright light. Some messages I can’t deliver, some I won’t deliver, but I listen to what all the spirits have to say. Most of their messages are meaningful, but a handful of them are purely selfish. Still, I hear them out so they can move on.

This is my work and what I do. I listen to the living tell stories about their dead and I listen to the dead tell stories about their living, their loved ones, their descendants. And the spirits that follow the course of their family lines, a mirror of how I trace mine backwards, have just as much love for those they could never know as I have for those who came before me.

And this year, spirit is moving earlier than usual, reaches out to us and milling about, thickening the air around us. The only thing we have to fear from them is what they reveal to us that we have been trying not to look at, the things we have been trying not to see. The only fear is within us. Because they come with love. They come because they love us.

Call out to your loved ones as you close your eyes for slumber. Open yourself up to the spirit energy in the world around you. Open yourself to see what was previously unseen. And bring yourself to meet them in dream world with love in your heart.

(A note: I separate true hauntings and poltergeist activity from normal spirit world antics. Often what we think of as hauntings are spirits simply trying to get our attention. If they’re turning your iron or your stove burners on, that’s different than knocking over boxes, playing with your pets, and turning on lights around the house.)

Ancestor-Walking Beneath the Stars

Photo of the labyrinth I walked by Amy, 2015.

The best thing about a labyrinth is that it’s a physical meditation of your body in motion as you journey internally. You can walk the same labyrinth every day and feel like each day is a new journey. Sometimes I use the labyrinth as a means to petition my ancestors, and the seven-circuit labyrinth is my favorite.

I recently attended a candle-lit labyrinth on the beach, beneath a starry sky, organized by a woman I have had the great pleasure to study with and work with, Tracy Andryc, a Veriditas Certified Labyrinth Facilitator. I emerged from the woods after leading an Evening Devotional in the Ancestor Shrine and travelled across the sand, bringing my ancestors with me. I stepped into the labyrinth with a purpose.

As I put each foot in front of the other in the first circuit, I allowed myself to sink deeper into the earth. I sank down through the layer we trod on, through the layer the burrowing animals and insects live in, through the layer where the bones and ashes of our dead are buried. At this layer, I began to call to them.

In the second track I called to my grandparents, to the four who have crossed over, two of whom I knew, beloved to me. I thought they would live forever. Specifically, I called on my father’s father. I have one solid memory of him before his death when I was seven. And I called on my father’s mother, who died when he was a young boy. I focused my thoughts on them, and the other Rustons and Eatons in their lines.

In the third track I opened to my eight great-grandparents, to the Rustons and the Wickers, the Eatons and the Smiths.

Then I reached out to my sixteen 2x great-grandparents on the fourth turn, those who saw the Civil War and the beginning of the new century, the Rustons and Irelands, Wickers and Whitchers, the Eatons and Tenneys, Smiths and Dutchers.

In the shortest track of the labyrinth I called in my thirty-two 3x great-grandparents, those who forged new wildernesses in a newer land, the Rustons and Richardsons, Irelands and Lentons, Wickers and Lusks, Whitchers and Loziers, the Eatons and Treadwells, Tenneys and Targees, Smiths and Sears, Dutchers and Birds.

In the sixth circuit, I felt my sixty-four 4x great-grandparents join me, the spirit door wide open. The Rustons, Richardsons, Irelands, Lentons and Wilsons, Wickers and Morgans, Lusks, Whitchers/Whittiers and Kittredges, DeLoziers and Raymonds, the Eatons and Goulds, Treadwells, Tenneys, Targees and Smiths, Sears and Dubois’, Dutchers and Feagles, Birds and Marshes… and those lines unknown.

On the last path, I opened to all one-hundred and twenty-five of my 5x great-grandparents. The Rustons, Richardsons, Irelands, Lentons and Wrights, Wilsons, Wickers and Parkers, Morgans, Lusks, Whittiers and Dows, Kittredges and Baileys, DeLoziers and Erkells, Raymonds and Richmonds, the Eatons and Skiffs, Goulds and Arnolds, Treadwells, Tenneys and Darbys, Targees and Tourgees, Smiths, Sears and Andrews, Dubois’, Dutchers and Palmers, Feagles, Birds and Colemans, Marshes… and those lines unknown.

I was at a threshold, crossing over with two-hundred and fifty-four ancestors beside and behind me, the collective spirits of the first seven generations of my family tree. I made two hundred and fifty-five. I walked in ancestral fire. At the center there was a door. I am the door. In the center and called my father’s parents into the center of labyrinth.

They came immediately, young together in my vision, holding a baby made of light. I had meant to petition them to be with the family, to watch over my uncle, their son. I was prepared to sweat through the work and will them in from the ether, and I laughed to find them waiting. They were already holding him, watching over him, encircling him in love and healing light.

Ruth looked at me. Ruth, the grandmother whose line I take after genetically, the grandmother I never knew. Her face was warm and full of love and gratitude. Her eyes smiled. I saw myself, and my sister, my father and my uncle dancing in her face.

But when she smiled at me, I saw her. Only her. In the center of the labyrinth I felt the love of a woman I couldn’t know. Death is not the end.

Mark and Ruth smiled at me. The baby in their arms clapped his hands in something akin to original joy. I knew he was being watched over and I felt overwhelming peace and love fill my heart. I stepped out of the center and stared up into the sky, at the stars in the mountains, dusted across the black expanse and I cried, tears of joy and tears of release.

I walked out of the labyrinth lighter, crossing paths with other journeyers. With each step I took I thanked my ancestors for walking with me. And I know they are with me in all the moments of my life.

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“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”  ~Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

For more on Tracy Andryc's work, visit One Path Labyrinth here!

Leave the Recent Dead to Rest

This is the time of year when neighbors decorate their yards with fake cemetery stones, when cobweb-covered skeletons hang from trees and porches. Leaves around us dry, fall and die, leaving the bare branches visible, and our minds wander to thoughts of loss. It is this time of year when those we have recently lost are close to our hearts and in our thoughts.

In my Ancestor practice, I talk a lot about actually working with your dead. For my purposes, there are three levels of dead. There is your Ancestral Dead, comprising those of your family line you never knew in life. Your Beloved Dead are those you knew and loved in this life that are passed, whether of your bloodline or not. And then there is your Recent Dead, those who have died within this last year, or since last Samhain, if you regularly wish your recent dead rest. Just remember that time is not consistent, for us or them.

I spend a lot of time honoring the Recent Dead in Samhain rituals, lighting candles for them and wishing them safe passage. I shepherd lost souls across to whatever comes next. I know some spirits wander because they do not know where to go. It’s like standing at a subway station and the train comes and the door opens and all that exists beyond it is space without firmament. The spirits who are still attached to their physical bodies don’t know how to move through that space, thinking in terms that no longer apply, so they don’t.

Mostly what I want to tell you about is why I don’t do work or call upon my recent dead. And why you shouldn’t either. It’s not about them. It’s about you.

Not all Recent Dead cross over, but mostly they do. Still, sometimes a part of them stays behind because they’re not ready, or they have unfinished business. And even if they do, that business can wait. Because you need to take care of you.

When we grieve, we are walking in two worlds. The world of the mundane, where life revolves and continues despite our sorrow, and the world where every moment is a reminder of how our loved ones are no longer with us. That’s the world where every time you reach out for them or you turn to talk to them, where every one of those moments is sharp and it cuts. And no one is in that world but you, existing slightly outside of the one everyone else is in.

Sometimes we forget that others around us don’t feel the pain we’re feeling. Sometimes they forget we’re still feeling the pain we’re feeling. So we are not in a stable place, even if we’re functional. That is extremely important. We use our intuitive bodies to do magic. Our intuitive bodies and our emotional bodies are not the same, though they overlap. And our emotional bodies are grieving.

I do not call on my Recent Dead for help or aid. I do not ask them to visit me in my work, in my meditations, or in my dreams. Because it would be too hard if they came. It would be too hard to open my eyes in the morning, after experiencing them, and re-remembering that they are gone.

A decade ago, friends of ours let us stay in their empty house while in town for holiday with my family. They were out of town for Christmas, as earlier that year my friend had taken his life in that house. His wife and son were recovering, choosing to spend their first holiday elsewhere. I woke in the middle of the night and he was standing at the end of the bed. He wanted to know where they were. It was Christmas. He came to be with them. Where was the tree? Where was his son? I took a deep breath. His eyes were so clear and bright, so much like the man I knew before his illness.

I told him he had to leave them alone. I told him it was too hard for them, because of what he did. I told him his being around made it hard for them to move forward. I told him he made his choice and he had to own it.

He was sad. But he disappeared. And I fell back to sleep. The human part of me wanted to ask my friend questions. But even spirits rewrite their own stories. It’s what holds them here. In hauntings, it is always the truth that sets the ghost free. And as a healer, as an Edgewalker, that was all I had to offer him.

Afterwards, my friends’ lives improved. The queer sensations that had been haunting them in the house stopped. Magic is real.

Magic isn’t safe.

So we don’t work with the Recent Dead. At Samhain, we ground that grief with flame and fire and we hold that light in our hearts. We know that peace of sorts will find us. And that we will accept the inevitable nature of death, even as it applies to us. Eventually. And that hope sustains us.

On All Hallow’s Eve I will offer the names of my Recent Dead and I will wish them peace. But I will not open myself to contact. I will not ask them questions. I will offer them tears and reach back to my Beloved and Ancestral Dead for comfort. Until next year, I will leave my most recently deceased to their rest. 

Before Dreaming

Connecting to those who have crossed over can seem difficult because of the longing in our hearts to be close to those who are gone again. That weighted emotion will be the biggest hurdle in your path. When that quality is softened, opening to spirit world can be like prayer. I always suggest those who are interested start by attempting visitation in dreaming, when our brains are open while our eyes are closed.

We are used to perceiving the shadows of night as other objects and entities. We soothe our minds with the self-told tales that these perceptions are simple imaginings. It’s because of this survival tactic that we accept the appearance of shifting forms more easily in the dark.

If you are longing to speak to someone who has crossed over, try this gentle ritual. Think of who you want to speak with and put a photo of them next to your bed, if you have one. If you have any items that belonged to them, or items they gave to you, put those beside your bed as well, as if you are creating an altar. Because you are creating an altar. Make the space sacred.

The best way to create meaningful rituals for yourself is to use exercises that are habitual for you and require little forethought. My most powerful dreaming ritual is the simplest. When you are ready to lie down, go to your front door, open it, and call out the name of your spirit. Invite them to come in. Invite them to visit with you. Take a deep, slow breath and then close the door.

Carry that air and the energy of that invocation and let it sweep you into bed. Focus on the items or photos next to you as your eyes grow heavy. Repeat their name in your head as you fall asleep and open yourself up to what is to come.

You may not remember your dreams at first. In the morning, pay attention to the quality of your heart. Pay attention to your waking thoughts and emotions. Don’t be afraid to speak to them out loud. Don’t be afraid to speak to the air. Wherever your loved one’s spirit resides, words are carried on the winds and will reach them.

Sweetest dreams, fellow travelers.

When You Visit

My Grandpa watching me draw with his great-grandkids on my last birthday before he died.

It’s Saturday. I watch the hands on the mirrored clock, eyes straying to the forest scene held within it, always pulled into those rays of light and their stillness, even as the ticking hands keep their movement. It’s almost noon, every week, my metronome, arriving between 11:59 or 12:01, no earlier or later- unless something was wrong.

The door knob turns and I am in the front room with my lunch, waiting. Your head pokes in first, always with a wink and a twinkling eye. Then your voice rings out a greeting, the magician entering as if his arrival is unexpected and the audience plays along.

“What kind of sandwich are you having today?” you ask with laughing eyes. The stars could be navigated by my predictability.

“Bologna, cheese, mustard, and potato chip,” I reply.

“What kind of potato chip?” you ask, and I was waiting for you to ask. You know salt and vinegar are my favorite but sometimes I like the ketchup-flavored ones that come in the big metal tubs the man delivers to our house. You pretend to be surprised that I am having a bologna sandwich and I giggle. It’s our thing.

It’s Saturday. I remember the mirrored clock that belonged to my parent’s house. My heart still lives in that forest. The digital blue of my clock flickers, 11:59 to noon- at times like this I miss the ticking reminder of time passing.

The scent of your cologne drifts in as the bells on the back of the front door jingle. The doorknob turns and I pour you a cup of coffee. I make a sandwich I barely have anymore, drawing a smiley face on one piece of bread with the mustard, because that’s how the mustard goes on. I hear my younger voice explaining it to you and I smile.  

I pour a cup of coffee I won’t drink and I leave it for you on the table. As I crunch down into my sandwich, I miss you and I love you and I’m glad you came to visit. It’s our thing. I know you’d never miss it.

Spirit Dreaming

I often get spirit visitations in dream world, which is fairly common. It’s easier for our Western minds to be open to seeing someone we know has passed in a world that we expect to be irrational. The spirits always appear different than their surroundings, as if they are watchers of my subconscious theatre, swept up in the story but not of it. They appear to me as if made of a separate quality of film overlaid onto that of the dreaming.

When I see a spirit, I take notice of the things that seem to pull my focus. They are likely to be relevant, whether I understand them or not. Sometimes it’s a word they say or the way they say it. Sometimes it is an item they hold. Other times it’s a reflection of myself in their eye. I bring these images and thoughts out of dream world and mull them over in my meditations.

Last Year’s Dream

I am walking a path in the wood. The forest is old and the trees are thick and tall. There is hardly any underbrush. Our village is in this wood. At the heart of the village is a large stone table. I approach it, alone. There are two people laying on the stone table, head to feet, a man and a woman. They are both naked. They are both old with white hair. They are flickering to fill the shape of themselves and I know they are ancestors of mine.

They take turns speaking, but I only hear their words in my head. On the stone table, their lips do not move. When I look at her I hear seagulls and I smell the cloying scent of sod and sea spray. Could this be a mother of my mothers from Ireland? I look at him and I feel the heft of an axe in my hand, in a younger wood than this one.

They are speaking in my head, overlapping now. I was chosen because I can hear them. The old man is crying; he never thought he would see this done. His relief is palpable. I hold his hand and I tell him that it is okay. I assure him that I’ll see it through. He sighs and passes on, his flesh and bones turning to stardust. Other stardusted spirits and people from my village in the woods gather around the stone table for the funeral.

I am standing at the back of the crowd and the old woman shows me a picture in my head. She is digging up an ancient drumming shield in a place I am familiar with. I think I am watching it backwards. I think she is burying it. There is a secret around this object. It is important to unbury it, even though I don’t know what the darkness around it is.

When I leave my village it is dusk and the shield is slung over my shoulder. In the dream I think of it as “her weapon.” The drumming shield is octagon shaped, with slightly curved edges that makes it’s shape like a bowl. When I strike it, it sounds like a drum. There is a small circle in the northwest quadrant and a crescent around it in the southeast quadrant of the shield…

…then I am standing on a ship. It is modern in appearance, but feels ageless and ancient at once. I see a friend of mine on deck. In the real world when I had this dream, my friend was on walkabout in the Celtic Isles. He does not recognize the face I wear in the dream but when I speak to him he sees me and gives me the biggest hug. I tell him that I am about to fix an 800 year-old wrong. He tells me to journey well.

Bits of the dream cling to me in the waking world, like puzzle pieces that would fit together if only I could see the larger pattern. They are wheels within wheels... the immediate pull to think on my maternal line... the secret with 8 sides... an 800 year-old wrong… the feel of being handed a quest. An 800 year-old wrong would put the ancestral generation somewhere in the 1100s. I meditate on the past, seeking shadows and blocks in the energy flow as I drift backwards through the bloodstream.

I trust in the dream, that there is something there, some secret unknown, lingering in the recesses of my ancestral memory. I understand that it may always remain unknown to me. Just because I don’t know what caused a shadow on the energy flow, doesn’t mean I am incapable of clearing it out so that the energy may move freely again… and perhaps remove the larger hamster-wheel patterns my family has been repeating.

I make offerings to the ancestors to let go of the things they held onto in death. I make offerings to appease the wrongs the ancestors of mine had done. I open my heart to forgiveness and embrace my ancestors for whatever lives they might have led. Good or bad, I would not be here without them. That is the comfort I inhale and the acceptance I exhale.

What is remembered lives. What is remembered never truly dies. What is dead lives on within me.

My Grackle Friends

photo shared by Factumquintus

Five years ago, a group of birds woke me on an early spring morning, their piercing croak filling the space outside my bedroom window. I had never seen them at our feeder before, the brown-black birds with iridescent green and purple heads. They were substantially bigger than the house sparrows and cardinals we were used to feeding and they did not seem to be able to manage the cedar feeder without almost knocking it over. They were so flashy in the sunlight that I later had to look them up on the Cornell bird identification website. They were my first grackles.

Of the nine grackles that frequented our yard, only one figured the bird feeder out. He was a little larger than the other ones and he found a way to hook one foot on the side of the feeder and a second foot just underneath it. He bent his body slightly sideways to balance his weight, with his tail wrapped around the side corner. From there, he would use his beak to scrap the seed off the side, down onto the ground for his friends, feeding below.

I watched them every morning when they rolled through for breakfast. I would sit quietly and after a while, they didn’t even startle when I slid the window curtain to the side. My friend, the grackle acrobat, slowly learned some more skills with balancing on the feeder. When he spied me through the window, he would run through all of his tricks and land on the clothesline, staring at me. After a while, he even started calling to me in the morning from the feeder if it was empty, which was one thing the other grackles picked up. Still, above the din, I was able to discern his fuller rusty hinge croak from the others.

When they moved on in the summertime, I was sad to see them go, but grateful for the time I was able to spend with them. The next spring, they returned, my friend front and center, and I was overjoyed. We picked up where we had left off and shared our morning times together. Two years ago, when the grackles returned, my friend was no longer among them. Even though none of the others could manage the feeder, they kept returning, and I spread seed out on the ground to encourage them.

A week and a half ago, I knew spring was finally here when I woke to a sharp grackle cry outside. It is a small group this year, but strong. There is one among them who figured out the feeder first, a smaller female. I found her hunched over the landing strip of the feeder, tucking her tail underneath it for counterbalance, skipping seed down onto the ground for her grateful friends. She unabashedly jumped up onto the clothesline and looked through the window at me.

Over the days, others have mastered the feeder, each in their own way. There is a large pair of males who discovered that if they each land on a side of the feeder at the same time they can keep it from swinging wildly beneath them. I don’t claim to know anything about bird genetic memory, but even still, I allow myself some musings. I know that in the wild, grackles can live eight to twelve years. Maybe there will come a spring that they don’t return. And maybe the grackles will keep coming long after the ones who came with my old friend are dead. Maybe they’ll keep coming long after we move away from where we live now. Maybe the fact that our lives intersected at all have linked our journeys somehow.

I wonder if the young grackles in the group knew my old friend, or if he passed before they were born. I wonder if they remember, and if they do, if they remember him. And then I realized that it doesn’t matter whether or not they do, because I do. These grackles are here and I remember the first grackle that brought them here and found them food. These grackles are living their lives in the moment, eating sitting and throwing up leaves in the dirt. I am bearing witness to the larger journey of their small group. Their lives come and go and I remain.

It is like that with our world, we come and go and the trees in their lengthened years bear witness to our passing. Watching the grackles outside my window, I am reminded that the whole pattern I am watching unfold is what my ancestor work is about. I hold my hand to a thread of ancestral energy that is the pattern of birth, life, and death we humans keep marching through. I hold my hand to that thread, keeping it present and connected to the action of living my life now. That energy is there for all of us to connect into, waiting just on the other side of the curtain, hiding beneath the rusty creak-song of an early spring grackle.

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.

Working with the Dead

My ancestor work doesn’t just involve honoring those who paved the way for me to be here. In times of hardship and trouble, I make petitions to my ancestors for guidance and aid, but most often simply to watch over us and shield us from harm. I work to keep my connection to them strong so that when I find myself in need, they are right beside me and sharp in my mind. I have always been sensitive to the spirit world. I have always known when spirits were about but not in a psychic way. I get emotional impressions, not factual information.

Fresh out of college, I attended my first Psychic Fair, full of doubt and skepticism, but knowing that I wanted it to be true. After several trips to the spiritualist community of Lilydale during my time in college, I desperately wanted to be a believer. After all, if I thought I could sense spirit activity, I couldn’t be the only one who could do it.

We’re always skeptical about anything we haven’t or can’t experience for ourselves. How do we know something is real if we can’t touch it or see it or hear it or taste it? Even though I was sensitive to spirits, if I couldn’t see them well enough to describe them or hear them say what they wanted, how could I be sure anyone else could? And that’s were faith always comes into play. If I believed I could, I had to trust that others could. If I believed I had a gift that others didn’t, I had to believe that other people could have a gift I didn’t.

I wandered the room, eavesdropping on readings and using my gut responses to feel out people whose readings sounded exactly like I expected them to sound. I know now that my own interpretations are so vague that I perhaps did some of the mediums a disservice by writing them off. But what was missing for me in their readings was the emotional context, the emotional connection to spirit world that I feel. And the people paying for readings were too eager, too open about revealing information that cold readers can use. And I was young.

To be fair, in retrospect, I have worked through the fear of revealing something that might be too personal or raw to people who are practically strangers to me. I understand why people trying to make money with their gifts might hold back from attempting to offer information that would upset a potential client. You have to be good with people, both living and dead to engender trust. When the dead have something to say and they find a doorway into this world they are not going to sugar-coat or tiptoe around why they’re here. And no stranger enjoys mediating family drama between the dead and the living.

Eventually I found a woman who was sitting patiently, not trying to get people to buy her time. She offered to do a reading for me, as she sensed someone coming through. If I felt she had made contact, I could pay her. It was the right way to woo a skeptic and I sat down. She was dressed simply in jeans and a sweater. Her hair was loose. She had a deck of tarot cards with a Native American theme on them in front of her, which she had me shuffle and then laid out.

Something about a mother figure, she said. But no, I said, my mother was still alive. She said it could be grandmother, but I shook my head no. All three of my grandmothers were still alive. Except for my father’s mother. I said so but she said no, it was my maternal side, connected to my mother. I sat expressionless, knowing a thing or two about cold reading. I watched her go into what I now know as a trance state and she began to talk about how this woman visits me and watches over me and sometimes I can feel her touching the top right side of my head and when it happens I wonder for a moment at the sensation and yes, she wants me to know that is her trying to contact me, letting me know I’m not alone.

I was sitting at the table. I remembered that feeling and with it, attached to a thin thread came the memory of sitting at my Great-Grandma Elsie’s knee when she stayed with us for the summer. Her hand was on the top of my head, and it was cool like silk paper. And with that memory the spot on my head began to buzz in the room at the Psychic Fair and the air around me smelled like baby powder, musty blankets, and lilacs. Elsie spent the summers with us and watched us when my mother went out. She was like a mother to me, to everyone who knew her and all of the senses I had learned to trust were trying to tell me she was present.

Me, Elsie, and my brother, 1976.

The woman across the table was staring at me, her eyes open, and she said “She loves you, and she watches over you.” I put my money on the table, thanked her, and walked quietly outside, where I promptly burst into tears. We all want to hear that the people we loved in the world are still with us when they leave it. I do believe part of them is still here, like an echo, like energy of love that was so strong it stays behind, ebbing through the time we have left. Our spirit is only form within our physical bodies and when we die, some of it moves on, some of it becomes something else, some of it becomes part of the energy of the world around us and some of it stays behind like an echo.

I knew I would do anything to reach my Great-Grandmother again. And I started on the path to where I am now. When I received confirmation that Elsie was with me, she had been dead for six years and I had healed my grief over losing her. So I was ready to call on her, to call her to me, to ask for help and guidance from her. She became a doorway to the rest of my ancestors. I consider them like an “intuition upgrade,” adding another sense to my repertoire.

I do not know the exact length of time before you should call on a dead relative for aid, and I think that the time is different for everyone. In the same way that we all handle transitions and transformations differently, some need more time than others. I believe and worry that some spirits need more time to cross over, to adjust to not being part of the material world. I worry that those who are called to stay here before they’re ready get pulled by what is familiar and become ghosts, stuck in between living and whatever happens next. At the same time, if a recently deceased spirit is the one trying to contact you, it would seem prudent to answer, for perhaps they will not pass over until their business is finished.

We need not fear the spirits around us. In my work it would be akin to be afraid of the ring of a telephone. When we open ourselves to accepting the call of our ancestors, we are opening a larger universe of sensation that can only serve to sharpen our experiences of the world we walk upon in our breathing lives.

Spirit World: Afraid of What Lies in the Dark

Ghosts.

It’s a double-edged word. It literally means “spirit of the dead” and that is its true definition. Culturally, the word carries a negative connotation. Ghost has a history behind it of propagating fear and keeping people away. One of the reasons I use it in the context of my work is because I want people to understand a simple truth. Every feared apparition is someone’s ancestor. Every ghost was once a living, breathing person, like you and me.

When people are afraid of ghosts and ghost stories, it often leads to their being afraid of spirits, the spirit world and ancestor work. Only once in all of my workings have I encountered what I would call a malevolent spirit, one that scared me. It does happen, but it was more echo-of-emotional-anger and less disembodied spirit. That’s once in over thirty years of encountering something I perceived as dangerous and with the help of my Women of Spirit group from my Unitarian-Universalist church, we performed a house cleansing and blessing and consecrated our home, sending it away.

I know adults who are afraid of the dark, afraid of the idea of ghosts and afraid of ghost stories (especially real ones). I also know adults who sit in fear of anything past the boundary of what is known and familiar to them, natural or supernatural. It has become the human condition to be afraid of what we can’t explain or see. But we limit ourselves by depending on one sensory interpretation. There is more than the world we know.

I think it’s important to challenge ourselves in the ways that we are able, to face our fears, work through them and emerge stronger people in new skins. The spirit world exists, and often the vapors and echoes of human life are all around us- even if we take no notice of them.

There is a moment in the film The Empire Strikes Back when Luke is faced with entering a dark cave alone. He asks his mentor, Yoda, what is in there. Yoda’s answer is simple and powerful and beyond Luke’s comprehension. “Only what you take with you.” So what truly lies in the unknown, waiting for us? The answer is the same. What lies in the dark is we take into the dark with us. The fear that lives inside us is the fear we will find outside ourselves.

When I was a little girl I wanted to believe that my house was haunted. It was over 100 years old and I was sure, in my innocence that it must be. All old things were haunted, right? But it wasn’t. So I would willingly go to places that people said were haunted or where supernatural events had frightened them.

As an early teen I went a few places I shouldn’t have, chasing ghosts. I wanted to believe, to believe there was more. I wanted to see what I was made of- could I face my darkness? After all, I was getting older and the world was growing scarier. Scary things were happening to me in my real life. I allowed myself to feel the fear my friends felt when I had real encounters. I allowed myself to be afraid. It was easier to retreat to a realm of safety by putting walls up and closing my world up.

I can look back at those moments with my adult eyes and understand that it was the opening of myself into the larger world that scared me. Not the ghost or spectre or spirit. I mean, if my neighbor walked by me while gardening and said hello I wouldn’t be afraid of them. The spirit world is simply neighborhood adjacent.

In my experience, when supernatural activity scares us, and we respond in fear, we are closing a door. Most of the frightening activity is not meant to cause terror. Imagine if you found you suddenly couldn’t speak. You would have to learn another way to communicate, right? So spirits who lack corporeal form are trying to find a way to interact. In most cases, that’s all that’s happening. Try acknowledging the experience and most likely, it will stop.

It’s important to know the history of the way we think. The journey is just as important as the destination. One of the terms for a spirit of the dead is shade. Shade. Shadow. Our worlds are made up of a chiaroscuro of light and dark, white and black, and good and bad.

What we must endeavor to find are the shades of grey where they blend and merge. That’s where the truth lives, between what is known and unknown, where stories overlap. The next time you have a moment of feeling something you can’t see, don’t be so quick to dismiss it as impossible. Simply believe in the possibility of the improbable; keep a door to your world open.

Relevant Posts:

Spirit World: Ghost Visitations (published on July 11, 2011)

Emma's Letters

Emma Angeline Whitcher was born in 1845. She was my great-great-grandmother, mother of Minnie, mother of Ruth, mother of my father. Among the family possessions are letters that 16 year old Emma wrote to Captain Charles Thompson, stationed in the same camp as her brother George Harrison Whitcher, during the Civil War. Charles and George were both in the 7^th Michigan Infantry.

Emma’s letters were written on stationary embossed with a Union flag and seal, in the year 1862. Her handwriting was exquisite and easy to read except where the ink was faded. My father and I sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by old photos and program books, picture frames and antique shelves. I read aloud words 150 years dead and forgotten. The story of a young girl and a man she was smitten with.

I don’t know if she knew Charles before her brother joined the war or not, and we don’t know when young George left Western New York to make a life for himself in Michigan. We know he was living there at the outbreak of the war. I wonder if Charles was a childhood friend from his hometown or a new friend he made in Michigan?

In the first letter, Emma chastised Charles, in what seemed like a very forward manner, for reading the letters she had sent to her brother, where she inquired about Charles and wanted to know more about him. Emma implied that her brother George was supposed to mask her desire for a “likeness” of Charles by suggesting the friends pose together for a sitting, so he might send it back home to his family.

Emma’s tone was both familiar and flippant, a brash young girl talking to an unknown man as if no social boundaries lay between them. At the same time she apologized for breaking social etiquettes in her reply. Emma asked Charles to forgive the fact that she did not wait the appropriate length of time before responding to his letter, but she wanted to address the wrong she felt was done. And then, as if to reinforce her interest, she sent him back a likeness of herself and hoped that he hadn’t built her up in his mind so elaborately that he was disappointed in the reality of her. I found her honesty and forthrightness fascinating.

She talked of her time spent sleigh riding and ice skating with family friends. She told Charles about the first soldier sent home to Lockport in a casket, and how all the fire wagons were draped in mourning cloths. The body was escorted home by seven soldiers and there was a procession through the entire length of town. She had never heard the “death march” before but she said she thought it was beautiful.

She mentioned that George said “a letter from home was better than dinner at noon” and then quipped that she doubted very much that her brother would pass up a meal for a letter from home in a playful voice. But her lightness belies her worry and fear for the war after the first soldier from town came home dead. She even goes so far at the end of the letter, keeping a light tone, to ask Charles if he would make sure George did not get shot in the back before he managed to write another letter home.

My Great-Great Grandmother apologizes to Charles for all of the “rail fences” in her letter. It took me a while to realize she meant all the misspelled words that she had crossed out lengthwise and then slashed top to bottom multiple times. Emma begs Charles to overlook them, as if she would normally have rewritten the letter before it was appropriate to be sent out. To me it speaks to a hastily written letter, important for her to post, a glimpse of how wartime changed some of the established social frameworks.

Isn't her script lovely? (Photo by Phillip R. Eaton)

George Harrison Whitcher enlisted in company A, Seventh Infantry, Port Huron, MI at the age of 19 in 1861. Emma and Charles Thompson exchanged letters during 1862, each one from her a bit more familiar and forward. George was killed in action at Gettysburg, PA on July 3, 1863 at the age of 21. As far as the family knows, his body was never recovered. A year later, on November 16, 1864, Emma married Hiram King Wicker.

The question we were left with, sitting at the kitchen table, was how these letters come to be back in Emma’s possession? Did Charles return them to her? Did he also die and they were returned to her? We double-checked that the letters were in fact postmarked and had been sent to Charles. I wondered if it was the death of her brother and the following bereavement on both their parts that saw them parting ways, for it seemed understood that Charles and George were close friends.

My father unearthed an old newspaper article a few days later and sent it to me, about how the Whitcher family had spent years and money searching for George’s remains. The article was about how Daniel Whitcher, a brother, received “a letter enclosed in which was a small metallic plate battered and covered with hard earth, in which was stenciled the dead soldier’s name.” It was news worthy enough to make the paper, a part of a dead soldier returned home, 1889.

A man went back to Gettysburg 26 years after the battle and found a piece of rifle that had been dug up from the battle field 3 years earlier, with George Whitcher’s name and infantry unit engraved on it. He sent it back to the family. It took me only a moment to recognize the name of the man who signed the letter, the man who returned to the spot where George Harrison Whitcher had died and not been found. A name that would have meant nothing to me without the letters that Emma had written.

It was from George’s friend Charles, who seemed to have his own pull towards finding closure. For himself? For the family? For his fallen brother-at-arms?

Port Huron, Mich., June 19, ‘89.

Daniel Whitcher,

            Dear Sir:--While at Gettysburg last week I came across the enclosed which was dug up about three years ago at the place where we stood on that memorable third of July, 1863, after being buried nearly 24 years. “Was the body of G. H. Whitcher recovered and taken home for burial?” I could not find his name among the dead in the National Cemetery.

Yours,

C. Thompson,

Late Lt. Co. A, 7^th, Mich., Vol.

Spirit World: Ghost Visitations

Why can you see ghosts and I can’t?

It’s a question I get asked, mostly by people who ache to see a deceased loved one. Technically, I don’t see ghosts, at least not like movies, such as The Sixth Sense, would have you believe. Sometimes I see them, sometimes I hear them, sometimes it’s the hairs on my body standing on end that alert me to the presence of something Other. It’s not something I can control at will. I can’t call my Grandpa up and ask him to come visit. I think the more we ache and want a thing, the more we are blind to it.

Opening to other worlds is an intuitive knowledge. It demands a relaxing of self and a separation from want or need. The more open you are to the impossible and the more in touch you are with your intuitive body, the closer your connection to the spirit world can be. Seeing spirits doesn’t come hand in hand with the ancestor work that I do, but if a person dedicates themselves to connecting with the spirit world, interaction with other beings is inevitable.

The worlds overlap, the physical world and the ones of ether. Sometimes there is a cross over, where humans can hear whispers from another world. Sometimes the space we are in will shift slightly sideways as the echo of a past world blinks in for a moment.

Reality is fluid, like time, and currents shift and change at random intervals. Overlapping worlds do the same. Sometimes the streams merge. I have sensations of rooms being crowded when they’re not. I now trust that to mean there are spirits about. That doesn’t mean the spirit acknowledges or takes notice of my presence. We’re just sharing the same space for a moment.

When the spiritual presence is strong enough, I can see apparitions like a flickering image from an old movie. But mostly I see them out of the corner of my eye, a human form, and when I turn around there is a blur of vapor- like when you look at the wavering air over the top of a bonfire. Only, at the same time in my head, I get moments of flesh tone and hair shape and color. Clothing silhouette and notion details. It will fill out like flashes of photographs… but at the same time, it’s all at once and immediate and whole.

It’s okay if that doesn’t make sense. Sometimes I barely comprehend it myself. I just trust that what I’m experiencing is happening. Truthfully, I saw more ghosts when I was little than I do now. Kids often lose their wonder around age 8, because there are societal rules to follow and ways of fitting into this world that we are taught. Everything else falls away in the learning of this adult framework. And the grown-up world tells little children that magic is not real. And we close ourselves off to it.

I’m learning to reopen those doors. If you want to learn about the spirit world I experience from movies, try watching The Others instead of the processed haunted house fare. In my experience, it’s an accurate example of what the overlapping worlds are like.

Dawn and dusk are powerful times to do Otherworld magic. In the same vein of thought, we are susceptible to openness in the first moments drifting into and coming out of sleep. One morning, senior year of high school, I woke up in my pale pink bedroom and opened my eyes to see my Great-Grandmother Elsie sitting at the end of my bed. She was wearing a pale blue housedress with a sweater on over it.

“Good morning. You know I love you.”

Love you, too, Grandma, I said in my sleep, mumbling it nonchalantly before the notion of speaking to her woke me.

When I sat up, I assumed I’d been dreaming. She wasn’t really there, she was in Florida. She had just had surgery on a broken hip she’d gotten from falling in her nursing home. I had forgotten about the exchange until a few hours later when my Grandpa’s car pulled up in front of the house. And then I remembered the morning visitation. And I knew. With every fiber of muscle and bone of my being, I knew what had happened. I slipped up to my bedroom before he got out of his car.

My Grandpa came over every Saturday at noon on the dot to visit. I’d tease him if he was a minute late (once I learned how to tell time). And he’d tease me back, wondering what I was having for lunch that day with an impish twinkle (I ate the same thing for years- a bologna, cheese, mustard and potato chip sandwich). But the day his car pulled up in front of the house was Sunday, not Saturday.

When my mom came upstairs to tell me, all I could do was say that I knew. Elsie had died from complications of her surgery. She was 89 and had been suffering from Alzheimers in her last years. I had been torturing myself for months over the prospect of not being able to see her again.

History and legend are littered with stories of people seeing deceased loved ones moments before discovering they died. I imagine it’s like a last exhalation of intention. If I take no other consolation from the apparition at the end of my bed, in that moment of visitation, when she looked at me, she knew me. It doesn’t have to mean more than goodbye.