by Salicrow
We had to drive all the way from St. Johnsbury to East Haven to take one of the guys home—forty-five minutes one way. This gave us a lot of time to talk. I found Noel to be a deep thinker as we talked about everything, including my weird relationship with John.
He said, “Why would you stay if you know the relationship isn’t going anywhere?” It was a good question and opened my eyes. It made me begin asking myself what I wanted. I was by no means at a point where I could admit I actually wanted to be in love, but his questioning touched a sliver embedded in my skin.
We started talking on the phone every night. At first this was more of an easygoing thing—two friends who both worked nights, me running the service desk at Ames Department Store, and him working second shift at a factory—which left us both wide awake when others were already dreaming.
Our relationship began to hold a deep knowing for me that both scared and attracted me. I knew that if I allowed myself to date this man, I would be with him for a long time. I remember telling my friends, “I don’t know if I want to go out with him, because I know we’ll be together a long time, and I don’t know if I’m ready for that.” I thought eleven years was a long time. Eleven was specific; it was the number that came to mind whenever I thought of a relationship with Noel.
At the time I didn’t know anything about the study of numbers as energetic vibrations or about eleven as a master number. In numerology, all multidigit factors are first reduced to single digits. Hence, 12 is 1 + 2 = 3. The master numbers—11, 22, 33, 44, etc.—are an exception. 11 remains 11, 22 remains 22. They carry higher vibrations and deeper meanings than the others. The repetition of numerals somehow represents a force in the universe as deep as string theory and beyond our ken. In numerology, eleven is connected to intuition and prophecy.
The violent illness I experienced upon meeting Noel for the first time was a heightened response to my psychic knowing. The otherwise inexplicable belief that I would be with him for eleven years was my higher self telling me that this was a big deal. I was walking into something beyond my comprehension.
I talk about meeting Noel a lot. When I do, I start by telling people that the first time I met him, he made me sick. I laugh and then explain how meeting him triggered me on a psychic level more profoundly than any other meeting in my life. I also talk about how scared I was and how happy I am that I did not let fear overshadow my intuition.
I did start dating Noel. We entered a relationship within three months of meeting. That relationship is still going strong, not eleven but twenty-eight years later—or the eternal eleven, which is more than just a number. This was a powerful passage in my life story, not just because I began dating the love of my life but also because I followed my intuition in a personal matter even when I was scared shitless, to the point of having nightmares. Never stepping through that door would have been understandable; after all, I was just eighteen. I truly was scared of being in love. But I couldn’t ignore the voice in my head, the inner knowing that kept telling me that I would regret it if I let him walk away.
Stepping forward, following my intuition when fear was flashing its propaganda at me, was powerful. It changed my psychic input on many levels, making me more sensitive to the subtle fluctuations of my intuition.
I’m not going to sit here and say we’ve never had a fight, because that would be absurd. As in all relationships, we’ve had to learn how to communicate with one another, how to compromise. But Noel gave me the gift of trust, and that changed my life.
Connecting with my soul partner was healing in many ways. I began to trust another person on a profound level. I knew he would always have my back, a feeling that allowed me to step further onto my path. I have always known that no matter what kind of predicament I may get myself into, he’ll be there with me. Beyond that, I knew he would give his life for mine.
We were living with each other within four months of dating, almost like we were married, sharing bills and bank accounts. We became a team, never separating our belongings into what was mine and what was his.
An astrologer once said to me in a reading, “I don’t think you could have planned this any better for the work that you now do.” I believe that. I believe that in between lives I agreed to be a guide in this incarnation, to help other people find answers and a sense of peace in a time of psychic evolution. I also believe that I had a certain request of my own. I needed a solid partner at a young age. This was crucial to my being able to focus on my gifts.
My newfound trust helped develop my intuition and open my heart. I had not felt so strong and connected in life since the death of my grandmother. I was ready to begin my studies.
25
It’s in the Cards
During the first twenty years of my life with Noel—no small amount of time—I was able to work part time, usually from home. This gave me ample time to develop my abilities and pursue metaphysical subjects. At the beginning of my studies, I began collecting books on dream interpretation, tarot, and candle magic. I’m not even sure how I came by them, but within a short amount of time a deck of tarot cards showed up in my house and opened my psychic gateway like a skilled locksmith.
Noel brought home a Rider-Waite tarot deck with a tiny booklet describing the basic meanings of each card. He knew I was interested in the tarot, but he had actually bought the first deck for himself to study. As I said earlier, we have never drawn a line between what was his and what was mine. The tarot became mine.
I read the entire booklet and did practice readings for myself, always looking up what the card meant to find my answer. I experimented with this for a few months, until one day a friend of Sandy’s asked me to read her cards.
As she shuffled the deck, I got out my booklet and prepared to “read” the cards. Sandy’s friend looked up at me and said, “Don’t use the book. Just tell me what you see.”
I can’t say I was nervous, for I have never been nervous when asked on the spot if I can do something I intuitively know I can do. I was puzzled, though, because it had never occurred to me not to use the book. The accuracy of the reading I gave Sandy’s friend encouraged me to offer readings to any of my girlfriends who wanted them. Within a few months I was doing readings for friends, and friends of friends, and then friends of friends of friends. I began to make a bit of money here and there but did not yet think much of it as a career option.
I also began to play with the cards obsessively, always shuffling them and asking random questions—questions about what was going to happen, what people thought of me, what I should do with my life.
The longer I used the cards, the deeper my questions became. I began to explore my past lives and the deep future. I used the imagery of the cards to trigger my brain and expand my psychic vision. There is no simple explanation for how the pictures do this, but there doesn’t have to be: spirit is always more complex and engaged than we suspect, and it uses all the things of our world—numbers, mirrors, cards, birth charts, synchronicities, intuitions—to reach and guide us.
Part 4
Foundations of Home
26
Motherhood and Awakening My Gifts
When I turned twenty, I had been in a relationship with Noel for almost three years. He had been up front about the fact that he wanted to have all of his kids by the time he was twenty-six or not at all. Either way would work; he just didn’t want to be old when his kids graduated from high school. By then, my best friend had a child, Sandy was pregnant, and her roommate had a one-year-old. I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career, but I knew I wanted a family. I was pregnant within a month.
My first connection with my daughter came through a dream. In the dream, Sandy pulled up beside me driving a convertible with a baby girl in her arms. She handed me the child and said, “She’s yours now. Take care of her.” Then she drove off. I awoke knowing I was pregnant and was having a girl.
When I was four months pregnant, I went to see a psychic, an old lady who lived in Littlet
on. Everyone who had been to see her said she was very skilled but not overly friendly, preferring to read for people on her porch instead of bringing them into her home. Apparently she treasured her privacy. I expected her to be professional but curt.
The moment I stepped onto Mrs. Drapeau’s porch she welcomed me by clasping my hand and bringing me into her home. She offered me little gifts, clippings from her house plants and glass knickknacks. She showed me around her kitchen and sitting room. When we finally made it back out to the porch, she pulled out a deck of regular playing cards. While shuffling them, she told me how her gifts had developed. Her brother had died in World War II, and her capacity had improved after he crossed into spirit.
I was a bit taken aback because her behavior was the opposite of what I been led to expect. I felt shaky in her presence, as if my entire body was vibrating. I was even shivering, even though it was a warm summer day. Both her behavior and my physical reaction to her puzzled me.
When I became skilled in my abilities, I realized that I could see psychic gifts in other people and determine the level of ability they possessed. This explains why Mrs. Drapeau treated me the way she did. She saw. The stories she told and the way she told them to me confirmed that she saw my truth, my latent psychic ability, and she recognized me as being like her—kindred, an equal.
My meeting with Mrs. Drapeau confirmed my belief that I was having a girl. She knew I was pregnant, even though I wasn’t showing yet, and she saw that I was carrying a girl. She told me many things about my current life, stressing the steadfastness of my relationship with Noel and how good he was for me. She told me I would have a prosperous, meaningful life, and that I would be the maker of that life. She also told me a man about whom I cared deeply would soon die. I knew in my heart that she spoke of John, for I could feel his death calling near in the shadows of my mind. She repeated often that I had a deep connection to death.
My experience with Mrs. Drapeau was a confidence booster for my ego. I felt as though I had been welcomed into a super-cool psychic club by someone other than Grammy Brown. This woman spoke to me with respect and did not seem to be taken back by my age. Sitting with her had opened me up somehow. I felt as if I had just completed a major task in a video game and had leveled up.
I now recognize my experience with Mrs. Drapeau as an energetic attunement created by our shared resonance. A note played in perfect tune can cause anything in the room that is set to the same pitch to vibrate. People who share similar energetic pitches can also create resonance, especially when one is carrying a perfect note. In this way, my sitting with Mrs. Drapeau as she shared psychic knowledge opened or attuned my energetic body, bringing my abilities closer to the surface.
While my pregnancy with Levi was powerful on a psychic level, it was difficult on a physical level. Nausea and carpal tunnel syndrome ended in a complicated cesarean birth two and a half weeks past her due date. As I lay in the hospital bed overcome with exhaustion and pain, I suddenly found myself high up in the corner of the hospital room, as if I was floating. The pain was gone, and my mind was clear. I could see my body lying in the bed below and Noel standing next to me, changing Levi’s diaper. I knew I was having an out-of-body-experience. It lasted for about five minutes. When I came back into my body, the pain was greatly reduced.
The experience of being completely out of my body added another layer to my belief that our souls and bodies are separate entities. I had always known that people’s souls left their bodies upon death, but my OBE showed me that people’s souls could leave their bodies while still alive. This concept opened up many avenues of thought. I began to understand why some people appeared to have a spirit-self sitting next to their body. They were detached somehow. Something had caused them to step away from their life.
While I was getting used to these mind-opening experiences, thankful that the powers that be had listened when I’d said I wanted my gifts to unfold gently and naturally, fate punched me in the gut. When Levi was three months old and Noel and I had been officially married for a week, John died. His death didn’t come as a surprise; I had been waiting for it most of my life. But I don’t know that I would have ever been ready for it.
I received the knowledge that he was ill in the most peculiar way. I had gone to the hospital where I saw my OB/GYN to take care of an insurance problem, and the woman in the office recognized me. She had lived in Whitefield for a time, and I had attended second grade with her daughter. I thought it was remarkable that she could recognize me thirteen years later, when I didn’t remember her or her daughter. After we chatted briefly, she said, “Did you hear that John Silver’s cancer is back?”
I felt as if the air had been sucked out of my lungs, and the room was spinning slightly. I gathered my wits, said a quick goodbye, and left as quickly as I could. I moved quickly through the halls and into the elevator. As the doors shut behind me, giving me a moment of solitude, I sank to the floor and wept.
Months later he passed, but I reconnected with him first. The universe didn’t allow me to turn my back on his dying. I went to his funeral with my shiny new wedding band on my finger, my baby daughter in my arms. I spoke to his spirit but could not hear him speaking back, although I sensed him and knew he was close. I spoke softly to him in my mind, pleading with him to help me live my life with the vitality he had infused into his. I wanted to live with passion, as if the next day could be my last. I wanted to be brave and alive. I wanted to care less about success and failure and more about trying for the sake of the experience. I asked him to be the voice in my head that encouraged me, the kick in my ass when I let fear hold me back. I asked, and he accepted.
Levi herself played no small role in my desire to become more. I recognized her; I could see her soul. Even from a very young age, she was wise beyond her years and quizzically observant. Her deep watching pushed me to let go of my remaining fears. I knew that if I was fearful, she too would be fearful, for she watched me like a hawk, looking for guidelines about what it meant to be alive.
27
Kaolin, My Trigger for Growth
The very moment I got pregnant with my second child, I knew it, because by then I recognized the feeling of conception. Kaolin named himself. I had names picked out for either a boy or a girl, but by the time I was three months pregnant, none of them mattered. Whenever I connected to the child I carried, I heard the name Kaolin. I have always firmly believed that he named himself and that I have known him for many, many lifetimes.
I was able to pick out the date I would deliver, as doctors were sure my labor would end in a cesarean again. I had conceived on the ninth day of the month, so I chose that he would be born on the ninth day of the eighth month. I went into labor on my own on his birthday, but he was delivered by cesarean.
I began to study Wicca a year after Kaolin was born. I had been suffering from postpartum healing crisis and a bit of depression, and I felt as if I had no female friends. What began as a weekly ladies night turned into the Sisters of the Moon, an all-female coven of strong women finding their way in life and in magic.
My sister Sandy joined me in the coven, and we devised our own rituals and spells, drawing on information we remembered from Grammy Brown and from things we read in books and in articles on the internet. A lot of what we did revolved around divination, honoring the seasons, and healing. We were trying to make our lives and the lives of our families and communities better.
Psychic evolution is not a straight line of ascension. One goes through phases. Lessons from earlier phases are often forgotten or have to be learned anew in different ways. My education with Grammy Brown was complete in itself, and even before that, I was born under guidance; but I had to relearn material as a rebellious, unhappy teenager and again as a young, married adult. In the process I grew in my scope and capacity and began to connect earlier intuitions to actual systems of psychospiritual practice, many of them ancient and with global shamanic applications. That’s the way things work on this plane, the
way that learning and power deepen. You have to go through real experiences in order to gain a deeper and more functional understanding of things you already know.
In a sense, each lifetime is a chance to apply and expiate the karma of previous ones. I believe in the adage that says if you want to know who you were in a past life, look at who you are now. If you want to know who you will become in a future life, realize that you are determining that by your choices and actions now. It’s not a question of bad choices and actions; I certainly put in my share of fucked-up, spoiled, wild-girl behavior in my time. There are only shorter and longer routes to true knowledge, and even the longer routes are part of the universe and spirit offering their unceasing guidance.
To a person raised in a family with a natural understanding of other worlds, many of the branches of Wicca felt dogmatic. But I was an avid reader and devoured every book I could get my hands on. In fact, it was through a book—Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner by Scott Cunningham—that I realized I was a witch, for I naturally did many of the things he talked about. Stephen King’s The Dead Zone showed me I was a psychic; Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner gave me permission to call myself what I had always been. I am a witch. That is, I am a keeper of arcane knowledge, a practitioner of the magical arts. I am a diviner; I see into the future and the unknown. I am a medium because I communicate with the dead. I am a healer, and I am capable of speaking to the land itself and its creatures. The title of witch belongs to me.