Fortunately Sarina kept every scrap of paper of any significance, and everything was organized into categories and sub-categories and filed alpha-numerically to be retrieved at some distant point in time for some reason not yet known.
Sarina sat down and opened her computer and within a few moments she reached for a box that she had filed away more than six years ago. She rummaged through the files and scraps of paper as her computer started with that familiar “Mac Dong.” The file was labeled “Mom.” Sarina let out a long sigh. What was she going to say to her mom if she answered the phone?
The task of finding a phone number was very challenging. Sarina and her mom’s relationship had changed over the years. After Sarina’s father had left, her mom had reacted to that terrible loss by retreating into herself and away from all family ties, anything that reminded her of Jack. And so began the long journey of blocking out Sarina and Ann from her daily life. Ann had left home only a year after her father’s disappearance and Sarina, although she loved Mona, had felt the need to go out on her own as well. Sarina was drifting away from Mona’s fundamentalist beliefs, which made living at home a challenge. At the same time, as Sarina grew into a young woman, she began to experience unusual visions and a knowing, unlike most of the other teens. Her mom was concerned, mainly for her own appearances in the community, and took Sarina to see therapists and other doctors. Her mom believed something was wrong with Sarina and wanted to fix it.
Through these times, Sarina and her mom began to become more distant from each other. When the doctors and therapists were not able to “fix” Sarina, her mom had turned to the church and the roots of her Christian faith. Mona had hoped to find a reason for Sarina’s penchant for knowing what was going to occur at an event before the event materialized. Words like Satan and the devil were used a lot during that year. But what had struck her mom as deviant, Sarina experienced as a special and humbling gift. As a way to embrace this side of herself, in all of her spare time, Sarina researched everything about clairvoyance, the paranormal, past lives, reincarnation, and anything else she found pertinent to her gift of these visions. All the while her mom ventured further into her faith to find her own answers.
Although Sarina felt a need to assert her independence, the breakdown in relationship between her and her mom weighed heavily on her. With her father and Ann gone, Sarina had started wondering how fragile her mom might have become. So Sarina put aside her research and began to close the gap between her and her mom.
One thing Sarina did was attend the Christian church where her mom was a member. After a few months of keeping an open mind, Sarina had begun to find peace within the Christian community. Her visions were still happening, but she was now a year older, and at almost eighteen she knew how to control her reaction to the visions and knew when to remain silent, a trait that could help her as an adult.
What Sarina had discovered during that year grounded in her Christian faith was that Jesus had spoken about visions in a way that helped her better understand what the purpose of these visions might mean. That knowledge didn’t mean Sarina didn’t have hurdles to overcome. One of the difficult hurdles had been when the ministers felt threatened that someone else was possibly communing with Jesus. Most ministers seem to enjoy the spotlight on the pulpit and were less inclined to share that place with just anyone, especially a teenage girl who claimed to converse with Jesus. From their perspective, her youth and her gender made her suspect; her only role was to submit to the authority of older men. But Sarina had accepted neither such self-serving authority nor being labeled a heretic. She loved her gift and her conversations with her guides in the spirit world and if one happened to be named Jesus, then so be it. She knew these conversations and visions were real and meant as tools of service to help others. So she waited for the right moment to reveal herself to someone, anyone who might offer her support for her authentic self.
High school had not been the place for her to share her deeper self with others. Her father had left and her sister was heading out the door as well. All the people she loved were simply walking out and this troubled her. She hoped that someday she might be able to share herself but not then. High school was a place where Sarina had excelled, bright girl that she was. She loved the sanctuary school offered and adored most of her teachers but she still held back her deeper self. Sarina dove deep into her education and all of her teachers supported her brilliance, which served her well. Sarina embraced her education and had wonderful academic conversations with many of her teachers.
Out of those conversations, Sarina decided that she wanted to be a teacher when she got older, to be of service to others. She knew that she was going to follow a path of service once she was an adult, but she had no idea what that career might really look like. Being a teacher made the most sense and she wanted to get away from that small town and look for her own path in life.
Sarina enrolled in college, moved to campus, and approached her education with purpose and clarity. She was drawn to this campus for its religious affiliation and for its solid art program. So she majored in studio arts and minored in sociology. She graduated with honors at the top of her class with many awards. One award was from the Sociology School for living her faith in her work in service to the world. Sarina had enjoyed the open and expanded minds of both the teachers and the students and had felt comfort within the walls of higher learning. When Sarina entered the larger world, she joined a community of service in the Midwest and had followed her path through helping less fortunate people, many who lived on the streets. Her art education had taken her down many paths of healing with others and with herself. Her visions continued but became more a backdrop of her daily life and she decided to let them go and follow her passion of service.
Sarina met, fell in love with, and married a man who shared her desires for a life of service and intentional poverty, a very powerful decision. She had found someone to whom she opened her heart and found a wonderful balance of being her authentic self and getting the job of service to others done. Her visions had become a thing of the past, but her devotion to her Christian faith remained solid. Her first two boys were born during this period of service and she transitioned into motherhood well. She knew from the very beginning that she would eventually give birth to four children.
Sarina, her husband, and her two boys left the Midwest and moved to the Pacific Northwest. Then just before the birth of her third child, her visions returned and did so with greater intensity. She sought out advice from intuitive healers who offered what they saw in this child to be born. He was a boy who would grow to explore many paths in life and needed wider open spaces to grow and develop. Through these interactions, Sarina began her journey toward a greater spiritual understanding beyond the dogmatic limitations of her narrow Christian perspective. Her faith had served her well as she navigated her early life, but her spiritual experience consisted of so much more for her. She believed that her son’s impending birth was a catalyst for her greater expansion.
The next 15 years found Sarina on a path of alternative healing, or what Sarina liked to call it, traditional healing. She had rekindled her numerology and astrology beliefs and had found them compelling. She continued to research and adopted these teachings in her own life. She had learned how these beliefs integrated with her own Christian faith. She also had discovered how challenging the task was to share this enlightenment within the construct of the powerful Christian church.
But Sarina remained committed to the Christian path, albeit in an unorthodox fashion. Thus, even as she had let her visions go, her conversations with Jesus had continued and she was assured that she was traveling a just and powerful road and that one day she was to be called for the greatest service possible to the human race. Sarina’s authentic self-re-emerging delighted her. Her conversations with Jesus comforted her and reassured her that merging her beliefs as a spiritual practice was indeed very good for her.
But while Sarina was experiencing all this growth
in her spiritual life, Sarina’s family life was decaying. Also, her relationship with her mom during these times was once again becoming more and more distant. Sarina had been calling her mom often to keep the flow of communication open. Communication has always been critical to who Sarina was. Her persistence in her need for open and honest communication can certainly push others to the edge, but in Sarina’s belief system, that edge is where life is richest and where powerful and transformational events occur.
Sarina shared with her mom all of her new discoveries and triumphs. Her mom listened but rarely affirmed her path. Sarina was treading the waters of the unknown, which was fearful territory for her devoted fundamentalist Christian mother. Sarina still deeply believed in the existence of God just not the way her mother’s church ministered it. The critical difference was her expanded belief in God, which was beyond the limitations of a religion with parameters put in place by humans with less developed visionary gifts. Sarina’s hopes were that all humans would be able to unlock their own personal, visionary gifts as their birthright. But Mona was not likely to be one of those people. And so the gap between them grew.
While the deterioration of Sarina and Mona’s relationship had been a dull ache for a long time, emerging cracks in her marriage caused her more acute pain. The marriage had begun to suffer as she asked more of her husband. She wanted more connection. She wanted personal and spiritual growth from him and she felt that their relationship was lacking what she desired. Sarina was walking a path of transformation and her husband was not.
Sarina and her husband eventually moved to the Southeast on the advice of an intuitive practitioner to be closer to her husband’s aging parents. Sarina hoped that this move might help her marriage and deferred to her husband’s decision. Her marriage was still unsettled and after a few years, Sarina felt her marriage slip to a point where divorce was what she wanted and needed. Events in life and in marriage are so fluid and dynamic that change is inevitable. Sarina grew within her journey and to be true to herself, her journey outgrew her marriage.
But while Sarina was being authentic in herself, her divorce made the gap between her and Mona seemingly unbridgeable. Sarina’s mom never adjusted to her divorce, and the communication began to fade until one day Mona simply did not return any more phone calls. Because Sarina was and is such a communicator, this affected her to her core. Sarina sent her mom cards on holidays and called and left messages until one day the message on the other end of the phone was a familiar: This number has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Please check the number and dial again. She missed her mom and adjusted to the lack of communication, but it took years to accept that she may never speak to her again.
Somewhere on Sarina’s altar in her sacred room was a token, a small statue of Jesus, to remind herself to always have hope, suspend all judgment, and follow her life’s journey however it unfolded. Her true belief in who Jesus was helped her remember that, in his words from the Bible about casting judgment, people must not judge others until they look at their own situations. Each person has enough to contend with just by judging him or herself. The final judgment of one’s self comes from within the self and from no one else.
When Sarina was still in contact with Mona, suspending judgment continued to be a daily ritual for Sarina especially when her mother continued attempting to sway her back to church. And so now, the thought of suspending judgment was making it hard for Sarina to make contact because she knew how her mother judged her and how their communication ultimately became strained. For Sarina, casting judgment upon her mother who in turn judged her always made having a civil conversation hard. Putting aside how they judged one another’s lives with their individual doctrines and their beliefs was hard for both Sarina and her mother. Nevertheless, Sarina believed that Ann’s murder was important enough to put aside any inner conflict Sarina had with her mother if she was going to communicate at all.
A direct phone call was no help. Her mom’s phone number had been disconnected and no new number was listed. A few cards had been returned recently with the stamp: “No longer at this address.” Sarina was beginning to feel guilty about not driving out to see her mom sooner. It was only a 640 mile drive, easily done in one or two days. “Dammit, Sarina, why did you wait so long?” she shouted at herself, as Sarina was inclined to do from time to time. Mona had no living relatives and only a few older friends scattered around the country. Her only chance was to contact the church her mom had attended for decades in the hope of finding some clues to her mom’s living situation.
Sarina was a research editor and so finding a number for the minister of the church was fairly simple. He was the same minister Sarina remembered from those many years ago and with a simple phone call, Sarina hoped to learn about what had happened to her mom.
But she had dug up the number pretty late in the evening, and because she and the minister were in different time zones, it was already after midnight in Idaho. On top of that, Sarina felt more exhausted today than she had in years. Sleep seemed very attractive and Sarina decided to wait until morning to make the call. It was time for bed.
Sarina needed structure through ritual in all aspects of her life and her bedtime ritual was the most important. When Sarina decided she was going to bed, it was generally understood that no less than thirty minutes were required before she touched the sheets.
Usually the ritual consisted of the rites of contact lens removal and other physical necessities, time to check emails once or twice more, and drawing an angel card or shadow card for the nightly dream intention. Sarina then always wrote a brief recounting of the day’s activities in her bedside notebook culminating with a visit to her altar with an offering to her family members and loved ones.
Tonight, however, was different and she was in bed in five minutes and asleep in ten despite her nervousness about potentially having the same dream again that night. Sarina tended to dream in sequence and she always came away with something after each night’s segment. But this dream with the names and the scream and flashing light was unnerving and so Sarina was afraid to fall asleep. But even as apprehensive as she was, she was also exhausted and was not able to resist sleep.
As she drifted off her final thoughts were about her sister and their history. She was remembering their childhood together and how they played together. Sarina was always the serious playmate while Ann was always so fanciful in her play. She always knew that Ann had always kept things light and fun, and Sarina was grateful for that. These memories made it harder for Sarina when she realized that she was never going to speak to her sister again. Sarina gently cried herself to sleep.
The dreams came again and Sarina’s mind quickly moved through the various dream states. They were vivid to a level of lucidness where Sarina believed she was conscious and able to make choices within her dreams.
The names flashed in front of her as if on an electric marquee, moving from one to the next. Over and over they flashed in front of her with a burst of bright light as their transition. She also saw a Thunderbird and Isis. The Thunderbird is a mythical creature of Native American people and was familiar to Sarina. In her research travels, she had visited elders of various tribes in America and had learned that the Thunderbird was thought to create storms as it flies, bringing hard and strong winds along with thunder as its wings beat together. Isis was more familiar to Sarina. She adored this winged Egyptian Goddess and kept images and sculptures in her apartment. The origins of Isis are not fully known, but many believe she dates back to the Egyptian Fifth Dynasty more than 4,500 years ago.
Sarina was taken on a journey in her dream to see the origins of these great winged gods and saw how connected they were to each other. They seemed to represent a celestial event. The image appeared to be a comet or other cosmic body moving through space but the image was fuzzy and unclear. The thunder in her ears, however, was very clear and was deafening. As she navigated through space, she saw her father and sister sitting at a table talking and s
huffling paperwork around a table or desk. She walked past them with no acknowledgement from them. She looked at the papers and saw the names again. This time they were written down and cross referenced to names of people she knew: Jack, Ann, Sarina, Riley, Dana, and others, without any familiarity. She was just about to make the connection of the ancient names to the more common names when someone touched her shoulder. She spun around to see Riley who was present and saying hello as if in her conscious state.
Sarina returned the greeting, somewhat startled. Riley said, looking around, “I don’t understand this. I think I am asleep but here you are and where are we?”
“I know I am asleep. We must be experiencing shared lucid dreaming. I have read about this and tried to accomplish it without success. This is the first time it has ever happened to me. Wow, this is amazing, don’t you think?”
“Uh, this scares the hell out of me. Where are we and is this really happening?” Riley’s voice was beginning to quiver.
“Come on, detective, this is a real experience and you get to see what I see in my dreams.”
“I don’t like this feeling. In fact, I want to leave and get out of this dream, or whatever it is.” Detective Holden closed his eyes and when he re-opened them, he was in his office, sitting at his desk. He was not sure if he was awake or asleep. He looked up from his desk and saw Sarina standing in the doorway looking a bit confused.
“Where are we?” Sarina asked.
“In my office at the precinct, or so it seems …” Detective Holden was not sure of anything at that moment.
“Well this is a twist. I was about to connect some names in my dream space and now I find myself here, apparently in your dream space. Very neat and tidy, I must say.” Katrina was obviously more comfortable with this process.
“Uh, yeah … but I have an unsolved case load that may take the rest of my life to sort through.” He pointed to a pile of paperwork and folders on the corner of his desk.
The Song_A mysterious tale of the Mayan spirit world and the Mayan calendar Page 9