windinthemaples

Saturday morning dawned sweetly with soft light blooming in the bedroom. Jenn and Sarah had insisted that I get their bedroom, choosing to sleep with their menagerie of pets on an air mattress in the living room while I was all snug and dreaming in their room. So I slept the best I have in years and they probably slept the worst. :D :/ Oh, noes! That's just the kind of friends they are.

Their home reflects them so well. It is decorated with sentiment. Even their backyard still holds reminders of their wedding--silk floral petals nestled and fading in the grass. Perhaps most humbling, so many gifts I've given them over the years are displayed with pride of place in every room. They've collected together the love they share for each other, the love for their families, the love for their friends and it all surrounds them in this little happy home. What a place to have my weekend retreat, to refuel and fill up and reconnect. All that good energy was better than any spa treatment could have been. :D

So Saturday, after a tour of their backyard paradise, we loaded up into the car with some Luna bars and headed off through the misty farmlands to Lily Dale, a Spiritualist town of the late 19th century that is, even today, populated by a large and vocal number of mediums and psychics. We arrived, like the Partridge Family, in matching light skirts and flip-flops to a sudden torrential downpour.

Universe Practical Joke #2 was that I'd packed, as a last minute impulse, my hooded raincoat. Leaving the house and considering the overcast skies, I'd asked if I should run back to get it. Sarah said "No", I think, but mostly I nixed the idea myself because I was both too lazy to negotiate the pet gates again and too vain to consider pairing my purple and lilac coat with my emerald and gold skirt. So, obviously, from the moment we arrived it was ominously dark and dumping buckets of chill rain. Within a few minutes, many of which were spent huddling under the uncertain shelter of a fire station overhang, we were soaked and freezing cold. We met up with Sarah's best friend Maddie and her sister, Laura, in a crystal shop called "Bargain Outlet" or something and I asked myself wryly if they'd have any bargain umbrellas. We shopped for longer than necessary, just to stay out of the rain, and just as we were leaving I discovered they did have some bargain umbrellas displayed incongruously with the tumbled gemstones. Only $4, too! What a bargain! So then the minute we abandoned the shop to dash through the rain elsewhere, I discovered just how shitty a $4 umbrella can be. I got what I asked for though! (And soaked, still.) I was, fortunately, in on the joke. It was really funny in a sopping, freezing, skirts-stuck-to-your-legs, flip-flops ruined by mud kind of way.

Slowly meandering through the quaint and colorful town had lost some of its appeal. Instead, we dashed and splashed to some vendor tents, had lunch at a conveniently veggie-burgered cafe, and then arrived in time to sit in on a Spiritual meeting.

The meeting, emphasized as a religious ceremony, was held indoors at an auditorium. The audience/participants settled into rows of folding chairs, in various stages of damp and soaked. Up front, a handful of mediums took turns "serving Spirit" by offering messages from the spirits they saw hanging around. While we were a party of five, none of us were chosen to be read. We'd arrived kinda late and were seated in the back, so maybe that accounted for it, but I desperately wanted to be read. I also could hardly hear so far back. I was on the edge of my chair, stretching to hear, yearning to be selected. It was interesting, though. At one point, I thought I should pull my Grandma Jane through to me, in hopes that it would get one of the mediums' attention. I concentrated and then she was there, sitting in the empty chair to my right, companionably listening to the medium. A latecomer, a guy in a raincoat, breezed in and sat on her, really indignant with that, she started and laughed, gave me a hug and took off. I guess I didn't need the medium to give me a message. I know she loves me. I know she was there.

After the meeting, the weather took pity on us, bedraggled and cold children. The sun came out in patches, drying our skirts and hair, allowing us to walk down to the lakefront to talk and swing our feet in the water. Laura, sacrificing comfort in the name of our entertainment, ended up wading fully clothed and chest deep through the water. It should have been obvious given her sister, but she proved to be the absolute cat's pajamas, the bee's knees.

We piled into the car and drove just a bit outside of Lily Dale to a psychic fair that was being held at the Fellowships of the Spirit. They had $10 ten minute readings with a roomful of random psychics and mediums, so we each sat down for one. I was unnerved by my psychic. She was in the back of the room, without a client, watching the door intently and practically staring me down. It was intimidating to choose her and walk back there, though she was certainly nice enough when I arrived and spent a lot more than the 10 minutes talking with me. I'm a skeptic, really, when it comes to paid psychics. I believe everyone can develop their psychic abilities but I also believe that anyone can cleverly, vaguely make stuff up in order to seem more psychic than they are. I think she showed some sense of who I am, said some things I agree with, and in other places seemed a bit off of truth. I don't know. Some of it is embarrassment. I don't take compliments well. So what she said, with that grain of salt, was:

Watching you walk up, I saw you had two spirit guides protecting you, one man and one woman, very tall like the Masai. I wanted you to know they were there.

You and your friends (Jenn and Sarah), when you walked in the room had such energy together. The whole place came alive. I can tell you that the three of you create a whole. You have different interests and you are each your own person, but together you are very good for each other. I get the sense you didn't grow up together which is good, you would have fought but together now as adults they are very good for you.

I see you as a very earthy type. You have your feet on the ground and a clear vision of where you're headed. Obviously, life takes you on detours to learn, but you'll always keep coming back to that path. In the next few months, you'll veer off a bit to observe something in the pagan community near you, to collect information, but you'll ultimately have your initial feelings about it confirmed and you'll move back onto your original course. You are the outsider observing the group.

Your husband loves you, you know. You have this big Valentine heart I can see around you. He loves you so much and he's very supportive of you. In the next few months, someone with long dark hair, a mustache, medium-height, someone you already know or may come to know will try to pull the two of you apart. He'll befriend you or your husband with the goal of luring you away, so be aware. You've got the intuition to avoid the problem, but trust it.

Your son is so cute! And so smart. So smart! Understand sometimes you'll need to sit back and say, "Just go ahead" when he wants to clear out the cabinets. He's exploring and it is because he's so smart.

Soon you'll have a choice about whether to have or adopt another child. I don't think you're pregnant now, though I suppose you could be. Either way, the decision will come soon. The pregnancy, whoever has the child, would have a rough patch but will ultimately turn out okay if you relax into it and let go. The child is a daughter, another brilliant child who'd keep up with her brother. What one doesn't know, the other does. They're so smart, with so much energy, you'll have her and you'll say, "Enough!" and have just the two children, your boy and a girl.

Your husband complements you. What you're good at, he isn't. What he's good at, you aren't. It is not a soulmates thing, I don't believe in all that, but he's very good for you"

I sorta closed down a bit on her earthy/set path talk, but now that it has sat a few days I understand it. Just as I shied away from the knowledge that I was on the Straight, not the Bent or Crooked energetic path, the Red Ray, so I also don't always claim what I am. But I am on the straight path and always have been. I've always had a keen sense of self, an unshakeable conviction in my own thoughts, and an overpowering sense of right and wrong for me. I cannot be turned from what I think is right, where I want to go, which does seem to be that straight set path that I do, though only briefly, flutter away and back to now and again. It is possible I'm pregnant, though unlikely, and I will be going back to the OB/GYN next month for my first checkup since G's birth. Will I get some news there that leads to a choice? I guess we'll see.

After Lily Dale, we drove home in time for Sarah and I to take a sunset walk around the adjoining meadow with Poesy. The grass was shorn into a close, dry stubble and as the light slipped away, I found myself getting poked by harsh stalks around my flipflops.

Universe Practical Joke #3 was when a particularly uncomfortable wheat stalk jabbed my instep. I stopped for a second to pull my foot out of my sandal and to examine the bottom of my foot when I discovered, OMG I'M BLEEDING EVERYWHERE!. My foot was covered in blood. I couldn't believe it! Such dark blood, too. I rubbed the arch of my foot, searching for the wound and wondering why it didn't hurt, when my hand came away with some tissue that looked suspiciously like a berry skin. Waitaminute. OMG! AM I BLEEDING?? Or did I get a berry sandwiched between my foot and my shoe? Yeah. That'd be option B. ;) Hi-fucking-larious. What is with all these jokes? It was funny, granted, but I'm feeling foolish and laughed at a lot this trip. :D Some trickster God is having a ROTFLMAO moment. I could hear it. Sarah and I laughed, too.

Oh, wait. I totally forgot stuff. Between Lily Dale and me impaling myself on a blood-filled berry, we went out for dinner at Amy's Place, a vegetarian diner of excellence. I had vegan mac and cheese and a vegan BLT, both of which were perfectly crave satisfying. YUM! :D We also went to drool over Breyers and dollhouse miniatures at the Niagara hobby shop.