by John Nelson
Maggie stepped over and sat across from them and dipped her bare feet into the water.
“Joseph tells me you right, that just healing the boy is…”
“A complicated issue,” Joseph said. “Sometimes souls, especially children, pick sickly bodies to work out their karma from past lives.”
She nodded her head. Maggie was tempted to ask him who he was, but figured he would tell her when it was appropriate. “So, how does one know?”
Anna smiled, shaking her head as if Maggie should’ve known the answer. “You ask their soul, or their spirit.”
“And if his soul says yes, and Anna miraculously heals him and the word gets out, the infirm will start lining up at our door.”
Joseph smiled. “We, her spirit guides, understand your concern. In such cases, Anna can remotely heal him or energize a bottle of water or a bite of food as the conduit.”
“So you agree that Anna’s Being needs to be…”
“Allowed its expression, but as her guardian parent your concerns must be honored.” He paused and then smiled. “We of the spirit world are not always the best judge of how humans will react to Spirit and its manifestations.”
The scene dissolved, and she found herself back in the apartment with Anna sitting in her playpen smiling at her mother.
“I asked Martin’s spirit, and he said he not ready yet, but maybe one day soon.”
“Thank Joseph for me.”
“He says the three of us have been together in other lives and that this will be grand adventure.”
Maggie smiled at her daughter, went over and picked her up, and walked back to Anna’s room and put her to sleep. In her office, she felt inspired to work on her book Heart Lines, and always wrote or drew pictures after intense spiritual contact with Anna, treating her daughter as a kind of inspirational collaborator. She now understood that Lisa’s Lifelines was not only inspired by how Anna interacted with others, even as a child, but Maggie suspected that there may have been dreamtime exchanges that she did not recall. As Joseph said, this would be a grand adventure… together.
Over the next six months Anna learned to walk ahead of schedule and began to speak a few words—Kris was one of the first she uttered, and Maggie assumed it was short for Krishna. Since Maggie had made only one more visit to the ashram, where Anna might have heard the Hindu god’s name spoken, Maggie assumed it was a spirit contact and left it at that. She had been around enough manifestation of spiritual ego at the ashram not to project too much onto such displays; she knew her daughter was a highly evolved soul but didn’t consider it further. Keeping others disinformed and deflecting their own projection was more difficult. This became a challenge when her mother, Grace, had a health crisis: she was discovered to have breast cancer, and upon hearing this news, Maggie packed up her daughter and they drove down to be with her mother while she was considering her medical options.
It appeared that as soon as Anna saw her grandmother that some part of her knew her condition immediately, as if she could almost see the cancerous cells spreading in her breasts. Maggie gave her daughter a look before she toddled over and let her grandmother hug her. That afternoon, as Maggie was putting her daughter down for a nap, they had an exchange:
“I ask and her spirit said it is allowed.”
“Okay,” Maggie thought. “But I want to be careful about her healing, not to let her figure it out.”
Then Maggie heard Joseph’s voice in her head, “Let her carry Anna on her chest.”
“Of course, we’ll use my flip carrier. Thank you, Joseph.”
And so that afternoon, Maggie and her mother went for a walk on the beach, and she fitted Grace with Anna’s flip carrier. While Anna was facing forward, Maggie figured the long physical contact was enough to transfer the needed energy and healing. After a while Grace remarked how warm she felt, and they found a bench to sit on.
“I can take Anna, if she is too much of a strain,” Maggie said.
“Oh no. I’m fine. I just feel flushed, but a good flush. Just give me a minute.”
Maggie then added. “Mother, I know you’re wedded to your doctor, but maybe you should get a second opinion.”
Grace looked at her daughter about to protest when Anna became particularly animated. “So, I take it that this is a family request,” Grace added, looking at her granddaughter suspiciously.
Maggie shrugged her shoulders and tried to deflect her mother’s inquiry. “Oh, you mean Anna’s activity.” She pointed out the seagulls flying nearby. “It’s the seagulls, Mom. Nothing more, really.”
Grace stood up. “Well, I kind of like this flush feeling, so let’s keep walking, dear.”
Three weeks later, Grace called Maggie to inform her that a second PET scan didn’t show any cancer growth. “My doctor compared the film and can’t understand how the machine could have malfunctioned, but I told him to let it go.”
“That’s wonderful news, Mom,” Maggie said, trying to sound surprised.
“Well, thank Anna for me,” her mother said. “Maybe Marie was right about babies’ energies.”
“I’m sure it was more than that, Mom,” Maggie said.
Her mother wasn’t willing to press the issue, and she was grateful. Maggie only hoped that her father, whose spirit might decline Anna’s help, would take better care of his health. But, she figured more physical contact between him and her daughter on their now more frequent visits might be a kind of preventative medicine measure for him, and made a note to question Joseph about it next time he popped up in their lives.
Chapter 11
In the fall Maggie’s second book, Lisa’s Heart Lines, was published to both critical and popular success. This time she felt more comfortable leaving Anna with her parents while she went on another two-week book tour. She had a “talk” with her daughter while driving down to Santa Barbara, and even had a word with Joseph, and they both assured her that the child Anna would “behave” herself, spiritually speaking. While she called her mother nearly every day from the road, Maggie was on alert when the three of them picked her up at the airport—she had started her tour with a book signing at Chaucer’s, left her car with her parents, and flew out from Santa Barbara. It was obvious that they had a secret but were waiting to tell Maggie, and they were almost home when Anna finally blurted out, “Dog.”
Maggie looked at her mother in the front passenger’s seat, but she only smiled back. At the house she found a golden retriever tied up in the front yard. “Whose dog is that?”
Her father shook his head and her mother only smiled again. When Maggie opened the door, Anna squirmed out of her arms and ran over to the two-year-old dog who lay down on the grass and allowed Anna to crawl all over him.
“Okay. What’s up, Mom?”
“Well, it seemed like every dog in the neighborhood was finding its way over here to play with Anna, and Mark knew a breeder of purebred retrievers, and…”
“Don’t tell me you bought a dog for her?”
“Well, we got him on loan to see how you’d like him.”
Maggie shook her head. “Mom, my place is too small for a big dog and besides…” But she only had to look at Anna, her hands wrapped around his neck, the dog licking her face, to know this was a hopeless battle.
Maggie stepped over and sat down on the lawn next to him. “What’s his name?”
“Well, you’re not going to believe this, but one of the reasons we picked him or got one at all was because of his name,” Grace said in self-defense. Maggie looked back at her expectantly. “Bodhi… short for Bodhisattva.”
“You’re kidding?”
Mark volunteered, “Yeah, Barry’s a screenwriter of sorts and was a friend of Patrick Swayze, and named him after his character in the surfing movie Point Break.”
Maggie petted the dog who turned and put his head in her lap, and she just melted. She turned to her daughter. “Well, my apartment allows dogs, so I guess we’ll give it a try.”
Anna jumped up and
gave her a big hug, wrapping her arms around her mother’s legs. Grace had watched this exchange while Mark unloaded Maggie’s luggage. “How did she understand that?”
“Body language, Mom. Body language.”
After spending two weeks with her granddaughter, who had the most extraordinary effect on people and animals and after her own miraculous recovery from cancer, Grace was officially suspicious of Anna’s apparent premature cognition and her healing effect on those around her.
When they arrived home and took a stroll through the park that first night, it became obvious to Maggie that Anna was in telepathic contact with Bodhi. At one point he squatted on the lawn to “do his business,” when Anna stared at him, and he stood up on all fours and ran into the bushes.
“Did you tell Bodhi do that, Anna?”
“Yes, Mama,” Anna replied. “Is not better?”
“Well, for now. I’ll put baggies in the stroller for next time.”
Maggie wondered if she could talk with Bodhi herself, but decided not to test that idea quite yet. It was one thing to “talk” with her evolved daughter, but communicating with a dog was quite another. However, she picked up the book, The Dog Whisperer, and began to read it. At some point she realized that Bodhi was on a kind of protection detail: He would never leave Anna’s side, slept in her room, and watched her like a secret service agent wherever they went. One of the mothers at the park noted how attentive Bodhi was, and asked Maggie if he had been trained as a guard dog.
“Well, not formally. But he kind of acts that way.”
“Have you noticed the eye contact between them?” the woman asked. “It’s as if they’re communicating with each other.”
“Evelyn, you’re getting carried away. Anna’s just particularly attached to him.” The woman shook her head and walked off. Maggie made a note to “talk” with Anna about this overt behavior with her dog, but for now at least she felt more relaxed and less on guard while Anna was out in public. She knew Bodhi was there helping her watch over her daughter.
As Anna approached her second birthday, Maggie was concerned that she didn’t speak as many words as other children her age. She read that by age two she should be saying as many as forty or fifty words, when Anna only spoke twenty or so. Maggie knew it wasn’t a developmental problem, and she asked the child’s being.
“You’re not speaking as well as you should.”
“Why speak when we can mind talk?”
“Because you won’t be able to speak with others later.”
Anna thought about this for a moment, and then said out loud, “Yes, Mama.”
From that point Anna made more of an effort to pick up language, but it was clear to Maggie that as time went on she would never have as developed a social life as she apparently enjoyed with a host of inner beings. This was a concern of Maggie’s. At this point Anna formally meditated and even crossed her little legs in the lotus position for hours at a time. While she could appreciate her child’s inner life, she wanted her to balance that with an outer focus. So, she started taking Anna out of the house on more walks to the park and to the beach, trips to the store, and especially to yoga class.
The latter turned into another demonstration of Anna’s accelerated development. One day, while Maggie and her class were doing simple asanas on their mats, Anna found a small mat and joined her mother. Her yoga teacher, Riva, indulged the child, expecting her to collapse into a ball of arms and legs. But, when Anna did most of the asanas fairly well, the teacher was taken aback.
“Maggie, have you been teaching her at home?”
“No. Like with meditation, it must be a past-life thing.”
“Well, let’s start to include Anna as a student and we’ll see how much she can do.”
“Fine. As long as you don’t bring TV crews in to film your prodigy.”
Riva laughed. “And why would that be a problem? Promoting child yoga seems advantageous.”
“There are other issues, and I don’t feel like I need to defend my decision.”
Riva nodded her head. “Okay. For now it’s a private thing, but a two-year-old yogi is certainly going to draw some attention.”
Maggie smiled and laid back on her mat in the Shavasana or resting pose, and Anna followed her mother’s lead. After class they returned her borrowed mat, and Maggie bought Anna her own mat. Afterward they walked down the block to the Bliss Café. As they walked inside, Anna said, “Yogi tea.”
“Very good, Anna,” Maggie said encouragingly.
She ordered two and treated Anna to the “Little Yogi Bowl” of rice, beans, and chutney. It was intended for older children, but the name seemed appropriate to the occasion, and she could always finish what Anna couldn’t eat. She ate a power salad herself and allowed Anna to pick items from it.
After finishing half of the rice bowl, Anna sat back and watched her mother.
“You’re upset, me doing yoga?”
Maggie looked around to make sure they weren’t being monitored. “No. Just concerned about the reaction of others.”
Anna nodded her head. She closed her eyes as if hearing an inner voice. “Bodhi, pee-pee walk.”
Maggie took money out of her purse and laid it on the table. “Let’s hurry. We don’t want to keep him waiting.” As they walked to her car, Maggie realized that Anna’s telepathy did have some practical applications, and recalling a recent walk in the woods, wondered if she were prescient as well. They had come to a forked path and Anna steered them to the right. After walking twenty yards or so, Maggie heard and then saw through the sparse foliage a jogger and his two big dogs tromping down the left-side path. She looked down at her daughter but she just continued walking with a smile and petting Bodhi to calm him down. Of course Maggie had seen overblown movies about child psychics, which only reinforced her natural inclination to marshal Anna’s contacts with the outside world, or until which time she could discipline the display of her siddhis, or powers, as they were called in the Eastern world.
Chapter 12
After the success of her first two books, in which her illustrations won several awards, Maggie branched out into illustrating children’s books for her publisher and others. Combined with the royalties from her own books, this allowed Maggie to support her and Anna without having to work a day job or go back to teaching. Thus the two of them led a fairly cloistered life, which suited her daughter’s temperament just fine. In fact, Anna now spent hours each day in ecstatic trance states, and when she wasn’t meditating, she drew pictures. Apparently she had inherited her mother’s artistic talent and would draw pictures of her spirit friends, at first in crayons and then with colored pencils, that were quite elaborate. Upon seeing them, friends encouraged Maggie to put them on display at art festivals, but she didn’t want to draw any further attention to her daughter’s talents.
Anna’s only real contact with other children was at the park, since she no longer stayed in the yoga studio’s daycare center and practiced with the adults. While the apartment complex had a playground, Anna preferred to stay at home and didn’t interact much with the children there. Maggie couldn’t imagine that this would cause a problem, but apparently one of the mothers there began to worry about Anna’s cloistered existence and wondered if she was being unnaturally constrained by her reclusive mother. This led her to report the situation to the county’s Child Services.
Maggie answered the door one afternoon to be greeted by a black middle-aged woman in a business suit. “How can I help you?”
“Are you Margret Langford?”
“Yes, I am.”
She looked down at a sheet of paper. “The mother of Anna Langford, age four?”
“Yes. What is this about?”
The woman stuck out her hand, which Maggie shook. “I’m Beverly Foster from Child Services. May I come in and talk with you?”
Maggie was taken aback but opened the door and allowed the woman to step inside. She followed Maggie into the living room and took a seat across fro
m her as Maggie sat on the sofa.
“Is Anna home?” Beverly asked.
“Ms. Foster, please tell me why you’re here,” Maggie insisted.
“Well, don’t be alarmed, but one of the mothers here at the apartment complex has reported that you child is unusually reclusive. We just wanted to check to see if there was a health or emotional issue that we could help with.”
Maggie took a deep breath and tried to calm herself and not overreact. “Anna has an… artistic temperament.” Maggie pointed out several of her daughter’s drawings that were framed and hung on the living room walls. “As you can see, she’s quite a budding artist and as such has a very active interior life.”
Ms. Foster stood up and took a closer look at the pictures. “They are all of angels or spirits, and no drawings of people, pets, or something in nature. Is that healthy?”
“Read any of a number of books on the spiritual life of children and you’ll find this is quite normal, if precocious.”
The woman nodded her head. “Could I see Anna, maybe look into her bedroom?”
“Please have a seat, and I’ll check on her.”
“I’d prefer to go in unannounced,” the woman insisted.
Maggie again calmed herself. “It’ll just be a minute. Stand here.” She walked down the hall and knocked on Anna’s door. “Dear, may I come in?” She opened the door and had a look-see. Anna was sitting on the floor drawing—she wasn’t meditating or in a trance state as Maggie had feared—and Bodhi was lying on the floor beside her. She and Anna exchanged looks. The child put down her pencil.
Maggie waved Ms. Foster over, and the two of them stepped into Anna’s room. Bodhi immediately stood up and placed himself between the stranger and Anna.
“Anna, tell Bodhi to sit down.” After a moment, Bodhi sauntered over to the corner of the room and lay down.