The world seems to be full of things that are difficult to understand and I am thinking that it has always been that way. People are confronted with the unexplainable -- like a pandemic of some sort, border issues or... politics putting its big nose into everything. Seriously.... It is exhausting (as I have said before... maybe too many times). Right now, though, I want to switch gears and take a look at what is my world and those things that are unexplainable but interesting to me. Writing helps me sort things out or at least to explore them....
The saga begins...
When I look back on it, I don’t remember ever feeling
really “to the core frightened” – not even when as a child I found myself
wondering, in the silence and darkness of the night, if something were in my
room with me… although… getting up enough courage to look under the bed was
sometimes a challenge. Later on, when upon returning home, I became aware of
sensing that someone had been/was still there – moving around within my
personal safe haven, I guess I always thought that I was not alone in this…
that everyone sensed a presence or had a certain tinge of awareness that only
peeks its head above the surface once in a while. Should I have paid more
attention…honed my focus? Even now, I let a lot of weird things slide. I am comfortable with a certain amount of the
unexplained. It’s interesting. Living
where I do now – I have a lot of experience with the unexplained. I am thinking that not everyone lives on "haunted" land (more on that later) … yet… perhaps it is that not everyone is aware of it. Maybe we all need to pay closer attention. Maybe we all need to develop a certain kind of mindfulness.
Perhaps this lack of fear is, because from a young age, I was familiar with various levels of the hard to explain. For example, one of my aunts could see things that were going to happen. It was sort of unnerving to get a call from her. You never quite knew if you wanted to know why she was getting in touch. I sometimes found myself holding my breath when I heard her voice. One time she called me because she wanted help getting in contact with my Mom. At the end of the conversation, she simply said… “Be thinking pink’”. My daughter was born a few months later. (That was back in the day when no one knew the gender of the baby they were carrying.) My family explained her special abilities by agreeing and totally accepting that she was "clairvoyant". Anyway -- the family story, as it was told to me, was that it all began when she was four years old. She described, in great detail, a horrific train wreck. This was dismissed as the vivid imagination of a young child … until the next day … when the exact scene she had described appeared as a photo accompanying the report of a train accident. This photo appeared above the fold on the front page of the local newspaper. And so, it began….
This “gift” was a blessing and a curse. She struggled with it her entire life. It was a difficult journey for her. I hope it helped that we always believed her. A case in point – is something that happened one time when I was visiting in their home in Eastern Pennsylvania. As I remember it, my aunt came into the kitchen and told her four sons to rush to the bottom of the alley way to help their father because he had fallen on the ice and was hurt. Second sight. Without questioning, they immediately dropped their morning toast, grabbed jackets and headed out the back door. They found him crawling back up the alley way… with a broken ankle. That is just one experience. Her stories abound – including her particular ability to locate lost objects even if they were hundreds of miles away from her. She once called my Mom and told her that the ring she was looking for had fallen down through a radiator and my aunt was able to tell her how far from the left side of the radiator to look down at the floor underneath. There was the missing ring. She also knew how to locate important maps of secret campaigns during WWII, but that is a whole other story. All kinds of these stories were a part of my growing up. They were definitely an integral part of other hard to explain experiences as well. As I got older, I must mention that I found it rather ironic that my aunt worked for a newspaper. Honest -- you can't make up this kind of "stuff". It happens....
More next week ….
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