Jump Girl

by Salicrow

  He spoke to my sister for about half an hour, offering tales of their time together, talking about the child they shared, regretting his lack of parenting. He saw that his son was a better version of himself. Paul’s son had his intelligence, his natural aptitude for music, his charm, but he was responsible. Paul thanked my sister for their son’s maturity, acknowledging her skill as a parent and the size of her heart.

  When we were near the end of our conversation, we heard a noise from the opposite corner of the yard. A voice was calling from the hawthorn tree. The voice spoke loud and clear, so that we heard it with our ears: “Sali!”

  Sandy and I froze in place. We looked at each other. I said, “Did you hear that?” She nodded, tilting her head in the way she does when sensing something otherworldly. She gets a gleam in her eye and raises one of her eyebrows.

  I said, “It sounded like my voice. It sounded like me calling my name. It was my voice.” She nodded again and started walking down toward the tree. I followed her, eager as she was to see what or who had called my name. It reminded me of sitting in front of the mirror as a child.

  When we were halfway to the thorn tree, we saw the image of an old woman standing beside the tree. It was apparent that she was in spirit form, though she was visually crisp. We both saw her clearly, and we both agreed that she looked like Sandy, only older, with white hair and skin marked by age. In fact, she was very old. The spirit of what appeared to be my sister looked at us, nodded in that way that Sandy does, and dissipated.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon discussing how what we had seen was like a mirror. We wanted to be perceived by ourselves. The Sali who called my name wanted us to hear her. The Sandy who stood under the tree wanted us to see her.

  I put this experience in the same category as me being connected to myself as Chazut. If I could do that between lifetimes, it only made sense that I could do it between selves within the same lifetime. I imagined the Sali from the future, the one who called my name, reaching out to me over time and space, sending her voice to that moment, planning to arrive in a place in between, in a time when it would be heard. We were both time travelers, but time traveling always means “both”—both times simultaneously present and real.

  A few years ago I received a teaching from a Native American elder, a spirit guide of a Druid friend of mine. I don’t remember which tribe she was from, but she delivered an important message I use now in my work when I’m actively healing old wounds, both with my clients and in the land. This message was not even intended for me; it was a gift for the use of her living ward, one she watched over and guided.

  She said we must learn to focus on the spaces in between. She showed me a still pond and then a rock being thrown into it. I saw the rings spreading out from where the stone had landed, disturbing the water. She said, “People always focus on the rings. The rings represent the big moments, the moments when things are becoming, the moment of papers being signed, blades being crossed, decisions being made. A healer, an agent of change, must focus on the places in between the ripples.”

  As my trajectory was drawn to the space between the ripples, I understood. The place of between, of becoming, is where decisions are yet to be made and anything is still possible. To make real change, we must focus on these moments, on the dark passage in the middle of the night, when a decision is struggled with. This is the place of healing and influence.

  That thought had not yet been placed neatly in my hands when I heard my voice from beneath the tree and saw my sister’s elder self. But even then, I knew the timing had been chosen purposefully. We planned the event so as to have the highest likelihood of reminding ourselves that we could still communicate with ourselves when needed.

  Now that I’ve learned more about geomancy and the earth’s energy conduits, I know that a strong ley line runs from where we sat on Sandy’s hill to the where the hawthorn tree stands.

  Connecting with my future self made me feel stronger. I knew I would make it through this transformation, and I would do so with strength and power. The voice that summoned me by my name was not wounded or weak. “Sali” had been called out with strength and intention.

  This knowledge was like being handed a canteen of water halfway up a mountain, when your mouth is so parched that your lips stick to your teeth. It was refreshing, it was exhilarating, and it held the faith of perseverance.

  46

  Christmas with the Spirits

  By the time the holidays came around, I was deep into my transformation. I was still struggling, but the struggle had become rhythmic. It came in waves, and I was learning to ride them. The opening of my kundalini came with more ease because most of my blocks had been broken through. I could feel that my body and soul had already healed tremendously, and I was now focusing on balance.

  My life was still off-kilter; I had just learned to flow with it better. I was not, however, in a mood to handle the traditional rituals of the holiday season. I still struggled with the idea of being around crowds. I hadn’t seen most of my friends since the beginning of November.

  This was my mindset as I got dressed for the annual winter solstice party. I felt vulnerable and unprepared, which was out of character for me. I’m typically a gregarious person who loves parties, costumes, and entertainment. The solstice party was the highlight of the winter season. It was when we gathered with our closest friends, ate too much, drank too much, did a “Yankee swap” gift exchange, and danced to the lights of the Yule tree.

  I got dressed like I was getting ready for a stage performance. I picked out something flashy, a long white dress that glittered in the light. It was nearly backless and showed off the tattoo I wore on the back of my neck: three crows connected by their talons in a circle. To me, they represented the three Fates, and I wore them as spiritual emblems or runes. The crows were intended not only to connect me to the Fates but also to open my throat chakra so my communication would be clear.

  Choosing a dress that exposed my tattoo was purposeful. I wanted to go out and have a good time with my friends, dance, joke, and play. I wanted to talk about the simple things of life with the living, not conduct reality-altering dialogues with the dead.

  At the party, I thought about how Alice grew large enough to fill a room after drinking a potion in Wonderland. I found conversation challenging, so I changed rooms a lot so I wouldn’t have to engage for too long with any one person. My reality resembled the feeling of taking a small quantity of a hallucinogen. The world was distorted; I was distorted.

  At one point I went into the bathroom and washed my face with cold water. I looked at myself in the mirror and soon got lost as the mirror took me out of my current scene into other condensed lifetimes.

  I don’t know how long I stood looking in the mirror, but finally Adam caught my attention and said, “How long do you intend to stay in here? Don’t you think it’s odd that you’re at a party at one of your best friend’s houses, and you’re hiding out in the bathroom talking to a dead guy?”

  He had a point. I pulled myself together and rejoined the party. I was still weird, but by that point in the evening, so were a lot of people.

  The next holiday challenge to tackle was Noel’s parents. Noel and I had been raised in totally different universes. My family was a bunch of Irish and Blackfoot gypsies, whereas Noel’s family were the sort of people who went to sugaring parties when the sap was running, played golf, and camped in an RV. We decided to hold a small Christmas Eve gathering at our house that Noel’s parents and grandmother would attend. I loved Noel’s grandmother Doris. She was a superstitious woman who loved that I read cards and swore she saw a flying saucer land in the 1940s. The idea of her being there evened the odds and made me feel that everything would be okay.

  A few days before Christmas Eve, Noel’s grandfather Harland, Doris’s deceased husband, started visiting me. He had passed away a few years before from Parkinson’s disease. He told me he wanted to talk to Doris when she came up for Christmas; he had
unfinished business, and she needed to hear from him. Harland, like Doris, had been open-minded in life. He’d seen the same saucer she did, and he had a bunch of other stories about odd things.

  I tried to refuse, saying I was not yet ready to let Noel’s parents know I was doing this. They knew I read cards, and I had even read Noel’s mom’s cards a few times, but this was different, and I didn’t feel ready. I did it anyway.

  As I’ve said, I have always known when something must be done, and I have also known when I was capable of doing it. I knew I could do this, and I knew I had to. Also, Harland was persistent, and after a short while, he enlisted the help of both Adam and Peter. They believed it would be a good experience for me to have. They wanted to see if I could communicate when I was nervous or when I sensed that someone in the room might not believe.

  Shortly after Noel’s family arrived, I said I needed to talk to Doris alone. We went out into the sunroom, and I shut the door. I was nervous; my senses were on high alert. I focused on the light coming through the slanted glass roof sprinkled with snow. I took a deep breath and began.

  At first the things Harland communicated through me didn’t surprise me. They were things that made sense in light of what I knew about the family—stories of the farm, and the horse, and the time Doris got shot in the arm by a stray bullet. Then he started talking about things I had never heard before, things that surprised me. He talked about drinking and ladies and how he had done her wrong. He said how sorry he was and how much he loved her and repeated over and over again that she was a good woman.

  I couldn’t believe I was saying things that breached such personal topics, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready to handle the emotions that came with it. Doris took my hand and cried softly. She told me I had a gift, and she was so thankful that I had shared it with her. She completed the story that Harland had started, telling me details of their life together and how he had been a different man when he was young and drinking. We spoke of forgiveness and of how she felt him around her. Grammy Bickford’s approval meant a lot to me. I loved that tough old lady like my own grandmother. She, too, had endured hardship and survived the Great Depression.

  Harland was not satisfied with talking to Doris alone. He soon insisted that I let him talk to his daughter Emily, my mother in-law. I agreed, after Doris agreed too. After Emily, he asked to speak to my father-in-law, Arnie. He said he had loved Arnie like his own son and he would have loved him even if they had not been related.

  I no longer held back. I let my wyrd hang out. It felt fantastic, as if I had been wearing too-tight pants all day and was finally able to slip into my favorite pajamas. I no longer cared if I seemed odd. I owned it.

  47

  Scaring My Daughter

  Just after Christmas, I was visited by a familiar spirit from my past. It was Mikhail, my friend Stacy’s spirit guide, whom I’d first made contact with as a teenager. He was a good communicator and provided one more spirit to interact with.

  At first, conversations with him were easy, fluid, and enjoyable, but soon he began talking to me about the perils of communicating with the dead. He talked about how mediums draw the attention of far more spirits than the average person, and that could be a lot to handle. I was dropping fluorescent bread crumbs amid flocks of pigeons.

  The analogy I like to use is that the average person is like a candle in the darkness. Their beloved dead—the spirits of their family, friends, ancestors, and guides—can find them by their light, but it is elusive and evanescent. A medium is more like a lighthouse, shining brightly into the mist and the darkness, attracting spirits of all varieties over a great span. Of course, this distance is not judged in miles; it’s a nonmaterial thing, but it is a thing.

  There was something spooky about the way Mikhail spoke to me about protection and being careful about who I summoned and how I engaged with them. His message felt menacing, yet I recognized his energy and truly believed him to be a benevolent spirit. I began to feel jumpy and to look for dark spirits that might be lurking around, wondering if there was one I was overlooking.

  As time went on, he began to talk about my daughter Levi and dark spirits being drawn to my house. Though called in by my energy, they could choose to target my daughter. None of my other spirits would comment on what Mikhail was saying. They said, You will have to decide for yourself what is right.

  One night I became convinced that Mikhail was right and that I may have been drawing negative spirits in without knowing it. I feared that Levi was endangered. First I paced downstairs, walking back and forth from the living room to the kitchen, wearing an energetic groove in the floor. I wanted to forget about it, but first I needed to be sure I hadn’t already welcomed unwanted things into the house.

  I tiptoed into my daughter’s bedroom and sat down with my back against her bed in the dark, listening to her breathe. The idea of something happening to her because of my actions was terrifying.

  Suddenly I found a silence, a moment when the world around me and within me was still. I existed in that moment alone. There was no thought of before, nor any thought of after. I was in the now. While there I thought about what Mikhail had been saying. Mediums did attract more spirits of all sorts to themselves, but that didn’t mean I would draw evil or dark beings. My intention and the protections I worked with were powerful. Other spirits, particularly Adam, helped keep me safe.

  Bullshit! I exclaimed loudly, in my mind. You are so full of shit! I am not calling in dark spirits, and Levi is not in danger.

  I heard a clapping sound in my head, and Mikhail said, Congratulations, you pass. He had been testing me, working my mind with a story of half-truths, making me question my intuitions. He was reminding me that not all spirits I would encounter would be honest. Some would be so skilled at deception that I must rely on my psychic perception to discern the truth.

  As I crept out of Levi’s room, she said, “What’s going on? Why are you in my room, Mom?” I knew that, as an empath, she could feel the energy I had spread throughout the room, the manic fear of a mama bear defending her cub. I kissed her on the forehead and said, “Go back to sleep. Everything’s okay.”

  One day in midwinter when the sun was just starting to return, I was standing in the kitchen, getting ready to make something for dinner. Levi was standing next to me, talking about her day, what was for dinner, Harry Potter. Then Adam interrupted Levi and started talking to me telepathically. His voice filled up my mind, pulling my attention to him.

  I was so deeply engrossed in what Adam was saying that I was totally unaware of the fact that my middle-school daughter had stopped talking and stood staring at me.

  “Mom! Mom! Mom!” she cried out, while I stood staring at the refrigerator. “Mom, you’re scaring me!” That shook me out of my stupor.

  I turned around and wrapped my arms around her, hugging her tight. “I’m so sorry, Levi,” I said. “It’s just that Adam was talking to me at the same time, and his voice was louder than yours.” She looked at me with that probing mind of hers, searching for signs everything would be all right. That’s what it’s like to have a medium for a mother.

  My kids had had their tarot cards read and had learned the basics themselves by that point. They were both attuned to Reiki, and they knew about sacred space, altars, crystals, and the use of herbs. They knew I was psychic and understood what that meant. They had seen spirits before themselves, and they had experienced lucid dreams, astral projection, and journey work. I guess that’s why I didn’t think they would be affected or startled by the processes I was going through. I thought that in their world it would seem normal. Levi’s concern about me made me realize that I had to sit down and have a lengthy conversation with both kids. So I did, and explaining my odd behavior was a good move. It helped them feel more at ease.

  The words spoken in my dreams by my Reiki Master came back to me: You have a long way to go and will need to learn how to rest while you can. You will need to find solace and quiet in a very loud
world.

  I talked about this with Adam and Peter, and we decided that the best thing would be for them to stop speaking in their own voices unless we were sitting down with a focus on spirit communication. Any other time they spoke to me, they would use my voice.

  At first this was confusing, and I questioned whether it was me talking to myself or one of them talking to me. Over time, telling the difference became easier, and I started to notice an energetic signature or vibration in the voice that allowed me to know who was speaking with. It was the same technique I was already using to recognize a spirit, no matter how they looked—the same skill that let me know Peter and Rosemary were the same soul.

  I was starting to believe that I would someday be able to have a normal, functioning life again, one in which I did not look like a crazy woman. This must have been a sign for my spirits to turn it up a notch.

  48

  Gifts from the Earth

  My kundalini had stopped making me feel like I was having seizures, and it had taken on a more comfortable “plugged into an electrical socket” feel. When it opened, my hands would get super hot and I would feel an electrical current run from my toes to my crown. It was somewhat uncomfortable, but compared to shaking so hard my teeth chattered, it was awesome.

  I also got better at directing my energy when kundalini was running through my system. Since my entire chakra system was lit up, I directed the energy into other things. Sometimes I would use it to work on Noel via Reiki and sound healing; other times I would conduct the energy into my root chakra by placing my hands on the top of my thighs. That worked okay, but not as well as working on Noel. But he did have a job and wasn’t always around when I needed to ground the energy flowing through me. I needed a storage device, something to pour energy into like a battery. I had worked with crystals before, but at the time, my selection was small, and I knew only the basics of working with them.