Pets and Intuitive Connections

We might not have a favorite child, but most of us have had a favorite pet. Mine was an orange cat named Savvy. She would walk with me on a leash, or stay close by without one, and come when I made a certain sound, like a dog would. I’ve had a lot of cats, but she was the smartest, the sweetest, the easiest, and oh so pretty. I still see an orange cat and think it might be her.

For a brief time, I thought I might do work as a pet psychic. Well, I sort of do, in that I can see people’s pets, and know their physical weaknesses. I can’t hear them talking to me or communicating, so I decided to let that idea pass me by.

I like pets. I don’t have one because I’m old and I don’t want to die and have it go to the Humane Society and be put down. They are also a lot of work and I’m getting tired, and they cost a lot of money, and I’m getting tired.

When I decided to start the foster training, I thought I might save an animal instead. But frankly, I like people better than cats or dogs. I sure do understand the love though. I will always miss Savvy. 

My Magical Mystery Tour

In February, I travelled to Italy, Switzerland, and France. My travels to Europe are coming to a close, due to my advancing age and the cost, so this visit I thought a lot about why foreign travel makes my heart soar. I love change, so that’s a factor, but the magical, mystical explorations are my favorite.

The last time I had visited the Coliseum in Rome was fifty-two years ago. Memory is uneven. This time it seemed larger and scarier. Possibly because our guide said that ½ million people and 1 million animals died there in 26 years. My spidey sense heard their screams, and it chilled me to the bone.

The fountain statues in Rome speak to me. Walk a few blocks and I see another one. The human form in stone or marble thrills me. The Vatican came next. More Michaelangelo. I could have spent all day looking at his paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He painted from memory rather than forms or sketches. I free floated my brain to think about which one of the men he painted was his uncle, which one was his neighbor.

The statue of David, and other sculptures by Michaelangelo and others in the art museum, Gallery of the Academy of Florence. I swooned then I time travelled to the subject’s lives, to see what type of person they were, and how they sat still for so long to pose.

Gondoliers sang in the canals of Venice as they paddled me down stinky pathways of water. When I got off the boat, my body vibrated with happiness for twenty minutes. How strange that some people long ago decided to build a city on water. It’s fun to think about how people’s obsessions lead them.

In Switzerland, near Lucerne, I went in a tiny cable car, where I feel such fear that I thought my heart would pump out of my chest, to the top of Mt. Pilatus. At 7000 feet, I had a view of the top of the clouds, and on top of that, a line of snow-covered mountains in the Swiss Alps. I thought about explorers and mountain climbers, and, how I would both love and hate that job.

My hotel room in Paris overlooked the Eiffel Towel. I walked to its base many times in two days, and the romance of that city swept me away from myself and into the mysteries of the past.

The gardens of Versailles made me feel like I was a court princess, despite my abundance of warm clothes. I glided instead of walked. I heard the court’s laughter and felt their discontent.

Home now feels flat. Adventures will be small instead of huge. My focus will be on things that touch my life in small ways, but small can be exciting too.

Into the Ether

I read a super interesting book, Psychic Warrior, by David Morehouse. An ex-Army officer, Morehouse revealed his experiences working for the CIA as a psychic, and his book discusses his spiritual transformation that led him to expose the CIA's Stargate program. 

Before the program, he signed a Human Use Agreement, and then he was taught to transcend time and space. They said it would change his life and it seems to have done so.

What I found most interesting was that I was asked long ago by someone in law enforcement, if I would be interested in working on one of these programs. For many reasons, I said no. I prefer working alone, or with one other person, the military seems too confining for my personality, and I preferred to keep my abilities and way of working to myself.

I was told I would be working in a room, and would be led by coordinates, as David Morehouse and his colleagues were, to a place I needed to examine. It seemed a bit nebulous, and I preferred murder cases, especially local ones.

The best part of the book was when Morehouse gave a name to where he goes. He called it “the ether”. I don’t call it anything other than a bit of a trance.

One thing Morehouse and I have in common is nightmares. They are what motivated me to do this work. With Morehouse, his upsetting dreams began after he was wounded by a stray machine gun bullet and had glimpses into another world. After he told military authorities, they recruited him into Stargate, a group of top-secret psychic spies backed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Another thing Morehouse and I had in common, is that it was hard to explain to his kids. I never knew how much or how little info to give my children. I didn’t want them to worry, and I didn’t want them to go into strange worlds or reasoning.

I did what he calls, open search, and he claims that means to invite the signal line to take you wherever there’s something to be learned. Remote viewing is more of what they explained I would be doing when they offered it to me. Remote viewers are told where to go and what to look for, and have a handler at their side or nearby. That explains why, when working on a case, I liked doing so in the spot where the detectives worked. That cop shop, as I called it, helped me feel safer.

Morehouse said that many others worked on Stargate, and sometimes two people were told to go to the same spot, on the same mission, and then the higher ups would analyze the data and compare. I guess that’s like listening to information from other psychics besides me. His specific mission was called Sun Streak, and included classified documents that he couldn’t take home. I never took any evidence home.

When the US started their program, the Soviets had been doing it for years. Law enforcement had made me aware of that many years ago.

When Morehouse began to talk about his work he was blacklisted. My work as a psychic has brought hassles for me. I don’t want to complain, but it used to be frequent that I had arguments when people who told me I was doing the Devil’s work.

I do believe my work as a psychic has been somewhat detrimental to my work as a teacher. Several schools have wanted me to stop working there, even though I tried to keep it a secret and didn’t talk about my abilities with students or parents. It’s a fine line between doing good work, the right thing, and other people’s beliefs that I might be on the wrong side. 

Fear

People ask me, about my psychic ability, aren’t you afraid? I wonder, do they think they would be afraid to know what is going to happen? Or do they think that knowledge in advance is to be feared? I see it more as a preparation, a way to not be afraid, since I expected a result.

My first bike was an open ride into the world. Before that, I was afraid of my closet, the space under my bed, and basically the whole wide world. As I rode four blocks to my elementary school to peer in the windows on the weekends, I realized I loved adventures. To love an adventure meant I had destroyed fear. I soon saw that cars and people inside who ignored me were the biggest menace to what might happen to me. Yet I continued to have as many adventures as I could fit into my small life.

My huge college, Penn State, wasn’t scary. Just big and beautiful, with choices beyond measure. Sports, music, friends, food, all the choices were mine alone. No longer did my mom try to pick my friends for their social status. I could use my intuition to pick the good ones, the stimulating ones, regardless of their parent’s status. 

In college, I rode my fat-wheeled bike out into the country to escape the chaos of all those people at Penn State. Crowds meant I could “see” too much, people’s past mistakes, and negative thoughts. I still hate crowds, with my ability to see crimes committed and blunders covered up. 

If a person presses me more than once with the question, aren’t you afraid? I answer, I think you should be the one who is afraid. I have an ability that makes me safer. 

When we remember the past, it’s a fuzzy, grey sort of thought. That’s how I see other people’s past mistakes. That isn’t who they are now, although that is another layer I can wade through if I need to think about whether they can be trusted.

We all worry about the future, about what could happen. I see it in advance sometimes, but I’m not afraid. Long, long ago I conquered my fears, as I stepped onto a United Air Lines plane as a stewardess in 1973. Full gusto, I said to myself. Don’t let fear get in the way. Do it and think positively. Try it all, say yes. Fear is a roadblock, move beyond it.

 

Recipient of a Grudge

An old high school writer pal said I was her nemesis and wrote a book where I had a starring role. When I talked about her lies to another friend she said, I only wish someone would write a book about me. But I felt stunned and bewildered. 

I actually had to look up the word nemesis in my 2076 page Webster dictionary. It’s an opponent or rival whom a person cannot best. Oh my sorrow almost overwhelmed me. To think that I play a role so predominantly in her world could be thought of as good, but it seemed quite pitiful. 

I don’t know how to make her value her own self more. Intuitively, I know she is coming from a place of inferiority, but when we were close, I tried to build her up. When she wanted to play compare games, I’d tell her that her legs or hair were the most beautiful. I still try to send Facebook positivity her way when she posts, and on the few occasions that I see her, I ask important questions about her life and interests. 

I know that all of you have been recipients of grudges, and most were undeserved. We have to pat ourselves on the back and say, you’re doing a great job. Don’t let someone else’s negativity stand in your way. Be creative and interesting, achieve all that you can. The race is you against your own self, not a race against another. Change the Be Our Guest lyrics from Beauty and the Beast to your own lyrics- Be Your Best, be your best, put your service to the test. And the finale: Come on and lift your glass, you’ve won your own free pass (life is so unnerving). 

Jay Shetty in his book, Think Like a Monk, suggests transformative forgiveness. He says negativity arises from fear, and the longer we hold onto fear, the more it ferments until it eventually becomes toxic.

Reincarnation

I am not even close to being an expert on reincarnation. When people tell me their stories and remember a past life, I nod and wish I were more fluent in this. I have always remembered only one thing, I drowned in a past life. The image is of me swimming in very deep water, and I had a bathing suit on and I had very long black hair.

Since my hair has never grown long and takes forever to grow an inch, I figured from the dark hair and my adroit figure that it must have happened in my 30s. The vision seemed vivid for so long, that I avoided deep water from age eighteen to my forties. I still don’t think I’d swim out deep into the ocean.

The whole thought of this phenomenon makes me feel creepy. Clients on my ghost tours ask me if I’m frightened by the ghosts I see. No, I tell them, I’ve always seen them, so they don’t seem unusual to me. Beside, they aren’t here to disturb me.

Why are they here? I think disgruntled ghosts are people who have unfinished business. Why are the good ghosts here? I imagine they are having fun, or got stuck in this dimension somehow.

I wish I could remember more past lives. I wonder if my déjà vu is related to a past life. Maybe then I was in the same spot as I am in this lifetime.

Hinduism and Buddhism believe in reincarnation. That will be my next research project, to find out what’s going on through the eyes of a religion. One quarter of adults and 18% of Americans believe in reincarnation. I definitely need to know more. Here’s a book suggestion: In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger. 

How Long Have You Been Doing This?

At holistic fairs, the question I get most often is, How long have you been doing this?

When I was thirty, I started to research tarot and anything paranormal. Libraries were my source, and the librarians stared at me oddly when I asked for help. I lived in Bloomsburg, PA at the time, and the locals told me there was a witch girl who walked through town often and hung out at the roller rink. 

I found her walking by my apartment most days, and tried to lure her in, to ask what she knew. She had a great sense of reserve, and told me the people in the town made fun of her. That wasn’t my intention, but she also said she didn’t have any real powers. She discussed her “crazy mother” and her own bouts of mental illness. The two of us had fun roller skating, but people in the town thought I should stay away from her. To me, she seemed harmless. 

A few years later, I moved back to my hometown, Lebanon, where it was easier to find work than it was in Bloomsburg, where I knew few people. I had missed my mom’s presence and support, and this area had more libraries for my research and more radio stations for me to find work. 

I visited a few local psychics who were scam women, and not at all helpful in my quest to be a good psychic. I read books, took notes, and used libraries in Cumberland and Dauphin counties. 

At age forty, in 1991, I began my pro bono work with police. Detectives used to ask, don’t you need anything? What do you use? By then I had spent many years learning the tarot, but it wasn’t helpful or needed in my murder work. Information came to me as I sat at my computer, and I would type info from home. It was unpleasant work, and I truly hated seeing murder scene pictures. 

At age fifty-five, I grew weary of what others called the dark side of life. I only worked on cases where good people were hurt, and that made me almost too sad for words. I decided then, that I was finally well-versed enough to start to do readings for pay. I got booths at holistic fairs far enough out of town that I wouldn’t be labelled as crazy. I did all I could not to be a charlatan. Honesty came first. It’s still hard to tell people difficult news. I don’t think my music education nor my multi media specialization for my masters helped me succeed in this field.

I met Andy Pushnik, who was a great reader but didn’t share much with me. He gave me his worn deck of cards and clothes from his dead mom, but I truly wanted a mentor. He worked through his substance abuse problems, and in time, I decided if he could work in the field, so could I. So here I am, with a business that flourishes and a name that garners respect. It’s what we all wish for, to keep our path straight and keep a clear conscience. 

It's easier to be an old lady psychic than a young one. I get more automatic respect. Just like it’s easier to be an old music teacher. None of the mothers care anymore when their husbands bring the kids. Jealousy is not pleasant, so it’s a relief to be past that stage. When old guys flirt with me in front of their wives, the wives usually say, you can have him if you want him!

Nowadays, I continue to research anything paranormal and try to find my own path. My latest is palms, an ancient form that many have moved away from. As teenagers, my friends and I would stare at our palms and try to see the future. Now I can actually make sense of it through this almost lost art.