Jump Girl

by Salicrow

  29

  Manifesting Home

  As I traveled down the path of my own healing, we bought a house in Newark, Vermont—the same house we live in today. It came to us quite magically, like most things of importance in my life. Before it happened we were living in a trailer and had been looking for a house for months, but with no success. We were looking for a home more than a house, a place where we would raise our kids and stay throughout their lives at least. I also wanted land because I wanted to raise my kids with an awareness of nature and an understanding of the magical, spiritual things of life. I wanted them to live in a community where we could do this freely. We had become disappointed and discouraged, and we were beginning to think of buying a van and taking the kids on the road.

  I saw our home before Noel did. My friend Corey took me to see it; the house belonged to her massage therapist. It was and still is a glorified hippie house built by the woman’s husband, a finish carpenter. They were going through a divorce and had decided to sell the house. It hadn’t yet gone on the market when they gave Corey permission to show it to me.

  I recognized it immediately as my house. The front door was locked, but I quickly walked around the back and let myself in, knowing the way as if I had been there before. Later I told Noel I had found our home. All we had to do was sell our trailer and get a loan.

  The next morning, I awoke knowing who would buy our trailer. I told Noel to call our friend’s brother, Ryan, but when he did Ryan said he was already in the process of buying a house in Burke. I was shocked. Usually when I knew something as truth—didn’t think it but knew it—it happened. I knew Ryan would buy our trailer. I had seen it happen. Still, we put the trailer on the market and began preparations for purchasing our home. Before a real-estate sign was even up in our yard, the trailer was sold, because Ryan called a week after we signed for a listing and told us the house in Burke had fallen through—and he would buy our trailer for cash!

  Just as it all seemed to be going our way and we had the money in hand, the owners of the house in Newark changed their minds. They had decided to give their relationship another shot and wanted to keep the house.

  Again, I felt heartbroken and confused, so I decided to dig deeper. I had begun practicing Wicca the year before, and I knew it was wrong to try to manipulate or control the will of others, so I decided to do some vision work to see if the house was really meant to be mine. With curtains drawn, I set up my altar in the living room of the trailer. I called the directions and welcomed the energy of the Goddess and the God. Incense filled the room with smoke, converting it to a sacred atmosphere. Candlelight allowed my consciousness to wander into the shadows. I opened my mind’s eye and walked through the rooms of the Newark house on the astral plane. As my astral body walked through those rooms, I paced slowly around my living room with trance-like repetition, clapping my hands quietly, using the beat to focus my spirit form. My spirit body continued to walk through the Newark house, and it became clear to me that the current owners no longer lived there. Either that, or they had gotten rid of an amazing amount of stuff in record time. I knew they were collectors, perhaps even hoarders; but the house my astral body was walking through looked and felt open.

  I began to focus my vision, examining items in the rooms to the best of my ability. I was looking for anything that would show that the place was now mine—or that it was definitively not mine. I went to the kitchen and looked out the window into the front yard. I had a quick flash of recognition; I knew that I had experienced, and would experience, that view countless times. I knew that I was seeing the view of my yard. At that moment, in that thought, I got my sign. There in the front yard was my car. I knew it to be mine without a doubt, as purple Neons are not exactly common.

  I came out of my trance and immediately sat down to write a letter to the owners of the house. I told them that I understood their decision to keep it. I went on to tell them that I, too, would have a hard time parting with that house, and I gave the reasons why. I talked at great length about the yard, the maple trees, and the cute little hidey spaces that were custom-built into the home. I talked about the feeling of family that the house carried and the healing nature of the land it rested upon. I talked about the town, the school, and how it must have felt to raise a family there. These words did not come from my hopes alone; I spoke these feelings from my memories of the future. I was remembering my family growing up there, the bonding I would have with the land and its Fae nature beings.

  The next day when I went to the post office to send the letter, I felt guilt. I worried that I had put too much emotion into the letter or that perhaps it was manipulative. I didn’t want to use the power of my emotions to influence somebody else’s decision. I decided not to send the letter.

  A few days later I received a phone call from the owners of the house. The woman was calling to tell me that she had received my letter, and that it had moved her and her husband so deeply that they had decided to sell the house to us. They even came down $5,000 in price, making it easier for us to purchase. I was stunned. I stumbled on my words a bit and finally said “You got my letter? I didn’t mail it. I thought it might be too emotional, and I didn’t feel right sending it to you.”

  Many years later, we named our Newark property Solstice Meadow, and we blessed it in a ceremony with our friends and family. I believe that the spirit of place—the genius locus of Solstice Meadow—played a big part in our landing there. The land accepted us, and this acceptance helped guide the owners’ decision to sell. I believe there is a sacred relationship between the owners/stewards of a place and the spirit of the land itself. When I first saw that house, I already had a future relationship with Solstice Meadow. I was betrothed.

  Marrying the land is the act of pledging oneself to it as you would a partner. It is in many ways like becoming a nun or monk without the need to stay celibate. I didn’t need to divorce my husband to marry the land. I could be married to them both. But, like my marriage to my husband, my commitment to my land was a bond through thick and thin, through better and worse; a bond that is sacred with responsibilities as well as benefits.

  Both the house and the property of Solstice Meadow have always been places of healing. This healing began its work on me immediately. In my bedroom in Newark, I sat contemplating my need for healing. Within the walls of my home I experienced the most profound redemptive chains of my life. I have been transformed while living there, and I am eternally thankful to the land.

  As for the letter, there are many ways to send information. Perhaps I psychically sent the letter, and the couple psychically received it. I will never know nor need to know. Spirit works in its own ways.

  After I had my son, I was sick for a good three and a half years. I struggled every day and tried very hard to ignore my illness or fix it, bouncing back and forth between the two options like a game of Ping-Pong. Shortly after I moved to Newark, a chiropractor recommended that I go see someone for hands-on healing.

  I was a bit nervous, remembering my church healing-prayer circle as a child. I didn’t want anything like a repeat of that. I finally decided to go see a friend of a friend’s mother, who did Reiki and hypnosis, among other healing techniques. I wasn’t expecting much, but I was hoping and praying.

  Upon meeting Jimmy, I was surprised because he was not a font of health himself. In fact, he had a drinking problem and had been in some kind of accident that left him with a pronounced limp. My first thought was, How is this guy going to help me? He looks like he’s the one who needs help. Skepticism aside, I lay down on the massage table he had set up in his living room. Within a few moments of placing his hands on my abdomen, he said, “Tell me about your family.”

  I felt the air get sucked out of my lungs, and the tears overflowed from my eyes. I was still a warrior girl, and I thought the tears betrayed me as weak. But that was the second thought I had. The first thought was of my father standing in front of me, poking his finger into my chest and blasting his
energetic force as he called me a cunt.

  How could my mind go first to the darkest days in my family life when I now had a loving family of my own, a husband who adored me, two beautiful children? It seemed fucked up. But no matter how I tried to steer my brain back around to thinking about my current family, my thoughts rebounded to my father. I could hear the arguments and feel the pain. I could also hear Kaolin’s little voice asking me, “Why can’t I know your dad?” Jimmy had found my wounding, and it was deep.

  I drove home weeping. I was crying so hard that I needed to pull over and center myself at one point so I would be safe behind the wheel. When I got home, I purged. My body released so much built-up crap that after the snot fest my eyes were almost swollen shut. But I felt great.

  I wasn’t healed in one appointment, but it was a start. In subsequent appointments Jimmy used hypnosis to return me to the past so I could support my teenage self and my father. I began to recognize how my digestive problems were connected to my emotional issues. I was looking for an outward wound, a physical ailment to blame for my illness. In fact, it was a complicated mix of emotions and allergies.

  30

  Kinetic Force

  While we still owned the trailer and lived in a park outside Lyndonville, I started jogging. I would do a little over a mile and a half along a dirt road, always taking the same route and making sure to get a small incline out of the way at the beginning of the run, while I was still full of energy. The road ran beside a ravine, and every time I jogged past that ravine I would imagine there was a portal down at the bottom of it. Influenced by the fantasy novels I read, I would imagine what it would be like to be transported into another land.

  I believe I was actually sensing an energetic portal—a strong node on a ley line that formed an energy basin at the base of the ravine. This particular stretch of road had a profound effect on me. My mind moved from one strange scenario to another. Because I jogged alone and had been raised by a marine, I obsessed a bit about what I would do if I were confronted with a dangerous scenario. I wasn’t being paranoid; it was more like a fantasy of self-defense, a natural response that comes from years of being told to be alert, to always have a plan.

  My self-defense plan centered on kinetic force. As I ran, I imagined being attacked while running, and I clearly saw myself sending someone flying across the road with a force that came from my hands. This image arose so often that I began to actually think of my superhero power as real. I hadn’t the slightest idea how to do such a thing. I just believed I could.

  Years later, after we moved to Newark, we owned a bar and a store in Lyndonville. I read cards in the store and sold metaphysical books and clothing I made. Upstairs we sold fancy tobacco and smoking accessories, the bread and butter of the business. Because of the nature of our businesses, we knew a lot of people in bands and got invited to some pretty cool parties.

  One of guys who invited us to a party was a politically aware hippie with a love of cheap art. He played the banjo and sang in a number of bands, and he liked to throw parties that were social experiments in many ways, including a few parties that were based on color. At one of these, the Red Party, everything was supposed to be red. Guests were told to come in red in whatever way they felt drawn to do. I chose a long red dress with a hood and went as my own interpretation of Red Riding Hood. Noel borrowed an old Soviet military uniform from a friend’s dad and went as a Red Russian. Another friend wore plaid flannels: Mr. Red Green. All the light bulbs in the house had been replaced with red ones. The food was red; the beverages were red; the energy was most certainly red.

  A band out of Boston was supposed to play at the party, but they were late, and the later they were, the more “red” started to raise its vibe. People began bitching, getting pissy about the no-show. But when the band arrived, the atmosphere changed instantaneously. People were lively, vivacious, horny. As I danced with my husband, I remarked on the change of energy, how people had gone from angry to amorous in the blink of an eye. Red-red-red.

  I began to notice a young woman wearing a short red dress and dancing next to me. Pretty as she was, I have never been sexually attracted to women, so the attention I gave her was psychically motivated, not sexually. She was setting my radar off. I thought I must know her, or perhaps someday I would know her. This feeling did not go away.

  She began dancing with a blond-haired guy about her age. She was flirting a bit, and he was returning the attention tenfold. When they began dancing right next to me, I was suddenly overcome with the feeling that their evening was going to end very badly. I did not like the energy coming off of him. Psychically, I could tell that their evening was going to end in date rape. I did not think this; I knew it from the center of my being. As the thought took on form, I started to think, I need to do something. I can’t just let this happen.

  As I dropped into a deep state of consciousness, my higher self came to the fore. I reached my hand out and gently placed it on the guy’s shoulder. That mere touch threw him back across the room. It was as if I had hurled him with all my strength. He was thrown back at least ten feet. The effect on him was immediate. He looked at me in shock and yelled, “What the fuck was that? What the fuck did you just do to me?” The blood drained from his face, leaving him pale as a ghost.

  The band stopped playing. Everyone stood staring at me. I turned to Noel and said, “I need to go outside for a minute.” He followed me out.

  As I was explaining to Noel what had just happened, the young woman in the red dress came outside and approached me. She introduced herself as Sally; I had just used kinetic force to shove a man across the room in defense of “Sally.” This coincidence brought back the days I’d spent jogging alone on that dirt road, imagining just such an experience, although I’d imagined I would be the Sali I was defending.

  Instead of asking me what I had done, Sally asked me why I had done it. I told her I was psychic, I felt she was endangered, and I needed to do something to break the chain of events I saw playing out. She said she wanted to meet up later in the week to talk about the situation. She did not return to dancing with the blond-haired man; nor did he seem at all interested in being anywhere near her or me.

  When I met with her a few days later, she said she’d been feeling weird about his attentions but hadn’t thought much about it. When I’d placed my hand on his shoulder, she had felt the force too. It truly was an energetic shift, because the pressure I’d used on his shoulder was only of the kind meant to politely get someone’s attention, like something you would do when passing tightly between people. It was meant to feel like “excuse me,” not “excuse the fuck out of me.”

  I don’t know how to do such a thing at will; nor have I ever tried again. I know it’s something that can be learned. T’ai chi masters are able send opponents spinning across the room with the touch of a single finger. I have never felt the desire to do so. Instead I have chosen to cultivate my use of kinetic energy for aura manipulation and healing. However, I feel that in the event I ever need to push someone away from myself or others, the ability to convert healing energy into martial energy will be there. In moments such as those, my true self, with its lifetimes of study, comes forward and runs the show. All I have to do is get out of my own way and trust. It was no accident that the intuition of a ley channel at the base of a ravine, fantasy realms, self-protection strategies, and an imaginal cultivation of kinetic energy all came together as I jogged. That’s my lot in this world, my karmic legacy.

  The moment I shoved the man across the room, I confirmed that the ability to do so existed within me—just like when I stopped time and avoided being raped. Such abilities are not for everyday use; nor should they be treated as parlor tricks. In fact, they can’t be. They arise from the vortex of necessity and from the intercession of someone with the capacity to convert psychic and physical energies, images and actions, into each other. Superhero comics and movies are subconscious recognitions that these are possible within the range of huma
n potential. In times of need, I become Wonder Woman and have the ability to access my true self.

  I am not unique in this. Many regular humans do extraordinary things at critical moments. Mothers lift cars off their children. We are all capable of so much more than our minds believe. We just need to remember. I believe in this lifetime I am here to do just that for myself and to help others do the same.

  31

  I’m Normal

  As remarkable and slightly fictional as my life sounds, I really have strived to be normal. As much as I enjoy speaking to dead people and knowing things before they happen, I love hanging out with my friends, shooting the shit, and being part of a community.

  While my psychic gifts were developing and I was pulling kinetic force out of my bag of tricks at parties, I was also running three businesses and a Brownie troop while serving in parent-teacher groups and on local and district school boards. I wanted people to know me as a community member, a kind neighbor, and someone who cared about the world before I put on my psychic Wonder Woman uniform. The first time I served on the school board, I was appointed to the board when a member needed to step down for personal reasons. After that, I was elected; after a couple of years, I ended up as president and then served on the district board as well.

  My daughter calls me a racehorse because I often seem to run a hundred miles an hour. Instead of a horse, I relate more to the energy of Squirrel. I often joke that my dark totem—the power animal that I need to keep a close eye on and rein in from time to time—is Squirrel on Crack.

  Living in rural Vermont has its perks; being fully accepted by one’s community as a liberal witch is one of them. My gifts could very easily push me to the outskirts of society, so I felt it was important to bridge that gap and show people that psychics are regular people like everyone else. When we begin to separate ourselves as different, we open the door for witch fear to spread. I never have hidden the fact that I’m a pagan, a witch, and a practicing psychic. I have worn my truth with pride and have freely faced my community with my eccentricities on my sleeve.