by Julie Rieger
“I couldn’t have described you better if I tried. Welcome to your tribe, my friend. You’re a hawk.”
Sari replies with: “Cool. My new hashtag is #hawk.”
And that’s how it starts. Every text from Sari thereafter is signed with #hawk. (Watching Sari text is like watching a master at work. The battery life on her phone is always at 1 percent because it’s like another appendage.) From then on, I start seeing people’s spirit animals, whether I want to or not. I’ve seen giraffes, dolphins, bobcats, elephants, owls, badgers, and a whale. At work we have a lizard, an ostrich, and a carp, among others—and yes, we all sign our names with the corresponding animal emoji, except in the case where such an emoticon doesn’t exist, like in the case of the platypus.
Before I knew much about a writer friend of mine, I looked at her for a brief moment and got her spirit animal, clear as day.
“You’re a platypus,” I said.
“A what?” she asked. “I don’t even know what a platypus is.”
“Frankly, I don’t even think I’ve said the word ‘platypus’ before just now.”
A platypus is a duck-billed, beaver-tailed, web-footed, otter-bodied, egg-laying creature that exists only in Australia. National Geographic calls it “one of Nature’s most unlikely animals . . . a hodgepodge hybrid that hunts by electrolocation.”
According to spirit-animals.com, if the platypus is your spirit animal, you “enjoy your solitude and have never really fit into mainstream society. You are comfortable with this because you revel in your own uniqueness and strength of character. You work well on your own, are not afraid to use your imagination and logic to manifest what you desire in life.”
My friend looks back at me, dumbfounded. “I’m a damn platypus,” she says.
My ability to divine spirit animals becomes something of a dinner party trick. One night I’m invited to attend a dinner party in Ojai, California, that actually has a topic: “Living the Orgasmic Life.” The only dinner parties I’ve ever been to until then have had one topic: “Eat.” They also normally include booze and Cards Against Humanity. (Greatest game ever, by the way. All you have to know is whether your opponents have a sense of humor—or lack thereof—and play your cards strategically.)
I take Sari with me as my plus-one guest because Suzanne is out of town. We finally arrive at the restaurant, greet everyone, and sit down. Each table has a leader who guides a focused discussion at her table about this subject. This one is totally different. When the topic is announced at our table, I think: All righty then, how am I going to get through this? I’m not good at stuff like this. I don’t follow rules well, and I drift off on tangents just to stay awake. More important, I’m a bad follower.
A very lovely Australian woman who is not only very lovely but also very thin (Gawd, I hate naturally skinny people; they just piss me off) proceeds to explain why her topic is living an orgasmic life. I think it’s a way of asking people what excites them in life. Then she asks the first question for the table: “What gets you off?”
Our skinny leader decides to go clockwise around our table of six (including her). Not only is she skinny with an accent, she is also quite organized. I keep looking at the guy sitting across the table from me and squinting. He’s fortysomething, roundish, with a pleasant face. There’s something about him that I like a lot but can’t put my finger on.
The first woman to answer the “What gets you off?” question admits that nothing right now gets her excited. Fair enough; I dig her honesty. The next guy, who is absolutely sweet, charming, and handsome, gives the answer any straight woman would dream of: “My wife.” The next person—the one I’m squinting at—says something, but I can’t pay attention because I keep squinting at him. Next up is Sari, who is incredibly uncomfortable. This is not the type of event you find hip, millennial lesbians attending. I think she actually says, “Pass.”
Then it’s my turn. “So, Julie, what gets you off in your life?” our skinny leader asks.
“Everything,” I reply. “Everything gets me off.” And that’s when I see it: The guy across from me has an octopus swimming around over his head. Naturally since I’m a blurter, I have to blurt it out to him.
“Hey, do you like octopuses?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, there’s one on your head.”
“Cool.”
Remember, folks, this is Ojai. Nothing is too woo-woo for these people.
I pull up the characteristics on my phone from whats-your-sign.com and hand it to him. Here’s some of what it says:
Although vastly mobile and quite the traveler, the octopus is primarily a bottom dweller. In symbolic terms this is analogous to being grounded while still having the ability to exist in the watery world of the psyche. It reminds us that we may be spiritual and intuitively gifted; nonetheless, we are physical beings and must temper our psychic gifts with strong foundational grounding.
The guy continues to read for a few minutes, hands my phone back, and says, “Yeah, that sounds like me.”
About a minute later I look at the woman who proclaimed that nothing excites her in her life right now. I squint at her. “What’s mine?” she quietly asks.
I stare at her a bit longer with one eye shut. She is clearly uncomfortable. “Oh my word,” I finally say. “A pelican—it just swooped down.”
This is my first pelican sighting and I’m excited. I didn’t know one could have a pelican guide, but why not, right? If you can have a platypus guide, you can certainly have a pelican. I do a quick Google search for “pelican spirit animal” and find spirit-animals.com, then hand my phone over to the lovely woman.
Here’s what spirit-animals.com has to say about the pelican:
Pelican is letting you know that you need to take some time for yourself and go inward. Something in your life is slightly off-kilter and needs to be balanced.
Alternatively, this bird also teaches us to take it easy even in the most hectic times of our lives. Make sure to make an effort to float through life and your emotions. Savor each special moment.
Once the woman finishes reading, she hands my phone back. “Wow,” she says. “That is me. How do you do that? Who trained you?”
Uh-oh—somebody finally asked.
I hem and haw for a minute and finally come clean. “Honestly, I have no earthly idea how this happens. I can’t control it. I’ve never even heard of it as a ‘gift.’ It feels very Native American to me, but I don’t have a drop of Native American blood in my body. And no one taught me this or how to perform on command like a show pony. I’m kinda kidding, because I think some people really need this information—something to identify with they can study and connect with.”
My new friend chuckles. “I really needed it,” she says. “It may just have shown up to help me out of my funk.”
Now I don’t know what’s going on in Miss Pelican’s life, but seems this message is exactly what she needs to move ahead and find joy. And frankly, it’s not a bad message for all of us. The same is true for Sari’s friend Sabrina, whom I meet at Sari’s birthday party weeks later and whose spirit animal is also an octopus. Basically, I just looked over at Sabrina and saw an octopus plopped on top of her head, its tentacles writhing around in slow motion.
Sabrina knew of my newly found gift through Sari, so the first thing she says when she sees me staring at her head is: “Is it a panda?”
“Actually, I think you have an octopus on your head.” (As I’m talking, all I can think is: Who am I?)
“Oh my gawd. I have an octopus? Really? I love octopuses. Or is it octopi? Oh my gosh, what does it mean?”
I share what I learned from whats-your-sign.com: “The octopus reminds us to loosen up—relax.” (This gets a chuckle from Sabrina’s husband.) “Because the octopus can detach a limb at will to distract predators, it has the symbolic ability to cut loose excess baggage in our lives in order to achieve our desires.”
This actually goes deep for Sabrina: After she was introduced to her spirit a
nimal, she slowly started to embrace her animal nature by giving up a few addictions she’d been struggling with, what she now calls her “appendages.” Isn’t it always good to think about what kind of baggage we can give up?
My ability to see animal spirits is the gift that keeps on giving. Sometimes I’ll be in a meeting and it literally looks like a zoo or a scene from Out of Africa. I refer to those as my lions, tigers, and bears, oh my! moments.
During one of my sessions with Ima, I saw a snake twirling around over her head. At first she wasn’t terribly thrilled with the idea of a snake on her head; she even looked a little panicked and asked if it was a black snake. Then she wanted to know if it was attached to her. I think she was worried that it represented something slightly demonic, which was not the case, of course. In fact, it made perfect sense that I saw a snake on Ima’s head because the snake signifies a healer energy—hence, the symbol of medicine (called the caduceus) that features two snakes and wings.
“So what the hell do you think is going on with me seeing all these animals?” I ask her when we finally get the snake business out of the way.
“I don’t know,” she replies. “I’ve never heard of the ability to see spirit animals, but it’s really cool.”
Okay, psychic lady, I think, you’ve got to have more than that. Then Ima does her usual thing: She yawns (to move energy), looks up (I don’t know why), and last, starts talking (and not to me). Finally she says: “Remember when you met Jacob, your spirit guide?”
“Yes.”
“At that session you also met two of your other guides, your wolves,” she adds.
“I did,” I respond, waiting for the big reveal.
“I’m being told”—I love when she says that—“that your wolf guides tuned you into that clair. It’s part of seeing spirits and part of your mediumship journey.”
So there you have it. The Julie of ten years ago—okay, the Julie of today—still can’t believe this crazy shit. And guess what? Just when I think it can’t get much weirder, well, it does.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Shades of Extraterrestrial Gray
It is possible that these millions of suns, along with thousands of millions more we cannot see, make up altogether but a globule of blood or lymph in the veins of an animal, of a minute insect, hatched in a world of whose vastness we can frame no conception, but which nevertheless would itself, in proportion to some other world, be no more than a speck of dust.
—ANATOLE FRANCE
There may be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost certain that there is life somewhere in space.
—BUZZ ALDRIN
Perhaps we’ve never been visited by aliens because they have looked upon Earth and decided there’s no sign of intelligent life.
—NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
Okay, people, I intentionally put this chapter toward the end of the book because I didn’t want to freak you out right off the bat. Yes, it’s even weirder than ghosts. And no, I’m not kidding you when I say that I took a picture of an alien from who knows what galaxy.
There. I just wrote it. Interested in reading more?
So here’s how this went down. One day I’m engaging in my usual ghost photography hobby/obsession: I’ve got the sage pots going, Homer the shaman dog is lumbering by my side as I snap pics with my cell phone camera. Later, I zoom in and out of my shots, checking each one carefully to see if there’s anything in negative mode. I sometimes add color or change color to better discern certain outlines. And that particular day, lo and behold, I find a hairless creature with giant eyes and a bulbous head. I think: This is an alien. This is definitely an alien.
Because my friend Becca is obsessed with my psychic magic and my ghosts—and I love that she’s obsessed—I send her the pic. She immediately writes back: “That freaked me out; I deleted it.”
“It’s just a little alien,” I write back. “Don’t get all bent out of shape.”
I honestly don’t think much about it because, frankly, after seeing dancing ghost chickens, nothing surprises me. But one day I mention it to Ima.
“Do you have it with you?” she asks.
“Uhh—does a bear shit in the woods? Of course I do.”
I hand her my iPad and Ima looks at the pictures. Then she looks at me, then back at the screen again. “Oh my God,” she finally exclaims. “That’s a gray.”
“A gray what?”
“A gray alien.”
I seek clarity: “Okay, what the fuck is a gray alien?”
“They’re like scouts,” she says. “They come here to observe. This alien race has a static vibration, which is probably why you were able to take a picture of it.” She pauses, then almost gushes: “I’ve never seen one, in a photograph, that is. This is amazing. It must be fascinated with you.”
Well, I’ve got to say the feeling is mutual.
Let me step back and say the obvious: Extraterrestrials might be the only thing that have a stronger vise grip on our collective imagination than ghosts. But there’s more of a stigma associated with seeing a UFO or an alien than there is with seeing ghosts, because aliens are not part of our invisible ecosystem. Though they may be able to slip in and out of our dimension (and I’m convinced that’s what happened in my case), they are decidedly not human. If they have a spirit or a soul, we can’t fathom it. Even people who don’t believe in ghosts, for example, have a place in their belief system for their own soul or spirit. Most people don’t believe that we are just machines, or meat, or pure biology. Something else animates our emotions, hearts, intuition, and consciousness; some deep pure essence is “us.” What that essence truly is has been the source of esoteric and philosophical debate forever.
But the idea that our soul or spirit might exist after death—that it indeed has an afterlife and that our bodies are just a vessel—is familiar to us; it’s deeply woven into the human spiritual psyche and narrative. But an extraterrestrial? What exactly is an extraterrestrial?
We can’t even begin to imagine any familiarity with this type of creature, though the majority of us believe that they exist, because how could they not when you consider the seemingly infinite number of other galaxies and universes potentially just like ours—never mind those that are infinitely more advanced?
This no doubt explains our absolute obsession with outer space and UFOs, and the countless books, movies, and TV shows that we’ve created nearly ever year about extraterrestrial life. (Do I even have to mention them? Star Trek, ET, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are truly just the tip of the iceberg.) In Look Both Ways, artist/educator Debbie Millman wrote: “Philosophers and scientists alike believe that if humans can imagine something, there is a distinct possibility that it can be manifested.” Yeah, and I’d add that if artists can imagine something beyond our wildest imagination (like gray aliens and time/space warps), chances are pretty high they actually exist.
The international scientific community has been probing the universe for decades for signs of extraterrestrial life, because even though an extraterrestrial is so deeply not a part of the human species, if they exist on some level, then we’re all intergalactic neighbors. It’s quite possible that we’re even made from the same particles. That’s no doubt what scientist Carl Sagan was getting at when he wrote: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star-stuff.”
But okay now, we have telescopes the size of football fields scanning the universe for signs of extraterrestrial life and one simply showed up in my backyard?
Really?
Yeah. Really. I’m pretty fucking convinced of it. So back to Mr. Gray.
A gray alien is a prototype of the alien we’ve re-created in all our books and movies: He’s ET. He and his brethren are the creatures we’ve seen in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The first extensively documented case of gray aliens involv
es a couple named Betty and Barney Hill, who were abducted by them in 1965. The Hills went through a battery of exhaustive tests and recounted fascinating details about how the gray aliens studied them—all of this is readily available online—so perhaps it’s true that they’re as fascinated with us as we are with them.
Any way you slice it, these short, bald, gray-skinned, long-limbed, slanty-eyed creatures are mentioned time and again in abduction experiences and continue to be attributed to extraterrestrials. It’s been suggested that the Egyptian pyramids were designed with the help of aliens (because how else can you explain those massive perfectly aligned triangles?), and that the Nazca lines in Peru were made by extraterrestrials to land their aircraft (because how else can you explain those perfectly straight lines carved deeply into a cliff where you can only—only—see them in their entirety from the altitude of an airplane—or an alien spacecraft?), and that extraterrestrials have landed everywhere from Roswell (helloooo, government conspiracy) to your backyard?
Despite all this, I honestly never spent much time thinking about the existence of aliens, much less worried about being abducted by one. It’s not that I didn’t believe, I’m just not an active member of an “alien club.”
But since I’ve become comfortable talking about my ghost pictures, I start to drop “Yeah, I have a few alien pictures, too,” just to see what happens. One night Suzanne and I are at the dinner party of a prominent Hollywood producer and executive. She lives in a beautiful home in a fancy schmancy Los Angeles neighborhood. There are eleven of us altogether, some business colleagues and others lifelong friends of the hostess. After appetizers, chitchat, and watching a television pilot, we all sit down at the dinner table.
The hostess introduces the chef, who talks about the menu and wine pairings. And to be clear, this is not my life. This evening is an exception. The only chef at my house is Suz, and she specializes in Frito chili pie. I’m afraid if those lovely ladies attended a dinner at our home, they would have to all squeeze onto our pet-hair-covered sofa and share a bucket of chicken.