My Journey

Everything on this journal is in earnest, and it’s not an easy thing to say for someone who has been left-brained for most of her life. But, it did take a good friend to point out (around ten years ago) that my life had been fairly “charmed”–blessed with fairly liberal parents and a good share of travel, artistic and analytic abilities, and more adventures and opportunities than most people can claim. I didn’t completely believe it at the time, but I can see the truth in it now. I’d also always had a good sense of “right” and “wrong”, of knowing when I was in a “right” place and when I was not, and in more than a geographical sense. This was not something I felt comfortable sharing with a lot of people, and I still have people who question these inklings of mine. I used to too. It didn’t really make me happier, except when, if I’d shared my feelings beforehand, I got a chance to say “I told you so.” Petty victories!

I had intuition without realising it. It hasn’t always been 100%. My cousins and I were obsessed with Extra Sensory Perception when we were kids. We did our own version of the Zener card test with playing cards, constructing our “testing deck” with the first five cards from the four suits. I was wrong 100% of the time, but, I always remembered that I was always just one value up from the card being held: I’d say two when it was one, three when it was two, one when it was five, and so on. Even when I tried to “correct” for my consistent error, my answer would still be one card up from the reality! It drove me nuts. Looking back I can only laugh, as I see it now as a fabulous joke: It seemed I wasn’t “talented” enough to pursue it farther, but at the time it really wasn’t in the cards for me anyway (pardon the expression). I was just around 10 years old!

I’m not “pursuing” it now. That isn’t the word for it. It’s more discovery that feels like re-discovery, because with every new thing I learn, I can recall old, forgotten memories from my childhood that I see again in new light, and new meanings and realisations come. Everything had a reason. Everything had a cause. Time dissolves, when I realise these clues across years and decades, and how they help me make sense of now. It’s not the big things; maybe it never really is. It’s the little things. Lucid dreams for much of my life. Dreams of deities. My childhood obsession with the night sky and certain constellations, planets and stars, my secret and destroyed teenage manuscripts of fantasy beings who lived on Pleiades, and last but not least, my inexplicable life-long “thing” for drawing things that didn’t exist: dryads, mermaids and unicorns.

Through my teens, and really much of my life, this penchant for fantastic beings didn’t really sit well with my logical brain. It was all imagination, I thought, and it should be imagination that served me! It was a love-hate relationship, one that I suffered: I kept feeling inspired by things I didn’t believe in. What a strange place it was to be. Things had to get bad before I would change my mind: I had to be visited by ghosts and angels. It’s a long story and one for another day, but in short, it was 2011 when I finally just had to let myself believe the good (angels, fairies) alongside the scary (which I’d encountered for longer). (Edited August 31, 2014: I’ve now blogged part of the journey here.) The things I’ve experienced since then have done nothing but confirm the presence of protective, beneficial beings–and I am forever grateful, and appreciative of the little jokes and signs they send me almost everyday. I’m not sure where exactly I’m heading, but I’m determined to have fun and keep learning while creating it.

Bard, you’ve passed now to the other side, but you’ll never believe–scratch that, I bet you know now–that Merlin was real. How full of wonders is this world, really!