Echoes in a Hollow Space

 How do I reconcile the spiritual, high strangeness, the otherworldly stuff that happens to me and to others I know with the shitshow that is the world? I know this is an old question, the oldest maybe. The world has always been a shitshow and yet we have these little tender pockets of spirituality springing up like magic mushrooms in the shit. How do we reconcile them? I know it's more than just the human longing for something greater. There is something greater. But how do we bring it into the forefront? Or are we even meant to bring it into the forefront? How do we give it to the world without starting some new fucked up religion. Or must it remain strictly personal? I don't think belief ever comes from outside. It can't be inherited from your parents or anyone else. Belief is based on experience and those experiences are, as I said, fragile and rare. Must it, of necessity, remain tiny mushrooms of joy and wonder?

Do these others, these beings, these forces, these experienes, have as much power as I suspect they do or are they linked irrevocably to human imagination and hope and to the netherworld of our minds? Do they, in fact, feed on us as I suspect they do, on our hope and our creativity and our vitality and our humanness? It seems to me they need us as much as we need them, only our side has stopped acknowledging that for the most part. Maybe their side has, too. Are we on the brink of some great breakthrough as Jo Hickey-Hall of the Modern Fairy Sighting Podcast thinks, or is that just her wishful thinking? And mine. Can they save us from ourselves? If we're lost, I suspect, they are lost too, their world destroyed along with ours?

Is this a road, this road of perception and feeling, one that masses of people can ever walk, or is it always going to be a select few or those who are persistent and insistent on walking that road? That whole opiate of the masses crap, is it real? Can only simplistic answers and religious thought affect great numbers of people at once? I don't want to think that I am special in that way because I really do feel that anybody who wants to can walk the road of high strangeness and find some enlightenment. I also suspect that most people don't want to make the effort. Or don't have the time to make the effort because they're too busy trying to survive.

I certainly have times when I don't want to make the effort, certainly not in the way that other people of my acquaintance do. I'm lazy and a little afraid and tired. I'm very tired. The world has made me so tired and more cynical than I want to be. I don't want to be a naif, but I think I need to open up the hope in my heart more. I want to trust my knowing heart, but I also think it's important to retain our critical thinking. Our discernment, if you will. There are a lot of people out there who want to trick us and take advantage of our gullibility and our desperate need to believe in something. We need to stay within ourselves and our own knowing but also open ourselves to extreme possibility. Not locked in the prison of our prejudices but in the possibilities inherent in existence on this crazy planet. We need to trust our own perceptions, but we also need to be open to the perceptions of others.

That's where the discernment comes in. We should listen to what they have to say but we don't need gurus. We should be highly skeptical of gurus. They are, at base, tricksters as dubious as Coyote or Anansi, but lacking the scared elements of those gods. They have agendas that may not match with our own, and certainly not with our own good. They seek to lead us down their path and to worship them instead of trusting our own knowing, our own instincts.

How do we reconcile our perceptions of something more, something greater, something that walks beside us at every step, with the ugliness of the world? We can't withdraw from the world. That's as much a defeat as closing our eyes and letting other people lead us by the nose. We have to stay in the world and fight for our own personal redemption which has more to do with trusting the spirit within us then worshiping something outside of us.

And asking questions, perpetually asking questions, because the questions are the answer.

I just realized I forgot to go public with Epiode 14. See below.


This is the only spooky Christmas story I have. As it’s a bummer I will understand if you don’t read it.

Background: I've had two fathers. There was my "biodad" who contributed the DNA to make me. I loved him, but we had a troubled relationship. And there was my step dad Tom, the father of my heart. Tom was a gift from the Universe for both my mom and me. He was the love of her life, and for me the only parent who gave me unconditional love, who made me believe that maybe the world wasn't such a crapper after all. A gift, and not one that every person gets in their life. I feel incredibly lucky to have known him.

In December 1992 I gathered some of my loved ones together for our annual Christmas dinner: my two BFFs and ex-roommates, Lynn and Carl (now married to one another for 43 years), my mom, and Tom. These were nice gatherings, everyone enjoyed everyone's company, and I really got into putting on a big show by cooking a special meal.

So right in the middle of all this—it may have been during after dinner chat, before the obscene dessert, I can't be sure anymore—when everyone was telling stories and laughing, the world—or at least my part of it—came to a standstill. I've tried to describe this sensation before and that's as close as I can come to it. I was sitting there in that room, but I was outside of it, too. I could see everyone talking, but I couldn't hear them anymore. Though I saw all this movement, inside of me everything had gone completely still, the kind of silence and stillness I've never felt before or since. I heard a voice, not just in my head but in my soul, if that makes any sense at all. My impression is that it was deep, but I can't be sure anymore and I can't be sure whether it was male or female, but it was a voice of great conviction. It said, "This is the last Christmas you will all spend together like this." With those words came the utter conviction that one of us would die before the next Christmas. I didn't know who, but I suspected it was one of my parents. Then it was like the bubble burst and I was back in the room just as before, only trying hard to pretend nothing had happened, to deny what had happened, because I didn’t want to spoil the evening and because I knew everyone would just try to convince me I’d imagined it when I knew I hadn’t.

This experience was not created by too much wine at dinner. In fact, after that experience I was cold sober. As much as I put it down to excess imagination or bad brain chemistry or alcohol or whatever, I also had a deep conviction that it wasn't any of those things. I didn't tell anyone—I felt foolish just contemplating it. But I had this sense of the clock ticking, of waiting. That sense only grew over the months.

I felt desperate in that waiting place, helpless, unable to do anything, and still I had that reluctance to talk about it because of the fear of looking foolish. I began reading up on spiritual matters and found that the experience I'd had was not unknown. It had happened to other people. This wasn't especially comforting (except to know I wasn't alone) because these types of experiences tended to be portentous. I'd had premonitions before—sometimes trivial, sometimes not—but just enough that my friends jokingly called me "Spooky."

My parents decided to go to DC on vacation and I began to focus all my worry on that trip, sure something would happen to them back there. But they came through fine. I'd put so much energy into worrying about that trip that the knot in my stomach began to uncoil. Autumn arrived and I really began to feel silly. Here I'd been worrying myself sick for months over something that was probably the result of mixing my liquor and I finally relaxed enough to tell Lynn about the whole thing. We had a good laugh about it over dinner one night. Two days later, just after dinner, my father collapsed with an aortal aneurysm. Ironically, that isn't what killed him. They repaired the aneurysm, but Tom's heart—that wonderful, giving, loving heart—was so scarred and damaged by a lifetime of smoking that it just stopped beating. They revived him three times but in the end they couldn't save him.

We got the word in the wee hours of the next morning. It was hard to take in at the time, but the nurse attending us all night in the waiting room—a big bear of a Jamaican man and one of the most compassionate souls I've ever met—said that if Tom had lived, his life would have been greatly diminished. He'd have been an invalid, and that would have been a living death to Tom, who had always been active. "Maybe his soul decided not to go through that," said the nurse, "not to put you guys through that." Oddly, these words gave some comfort in the weeks to follow, the months and years of learning to live with it.

On the drive home from the hospital I asked the Universe politely but firmly to never, ever, EVER send me a premonition again. What the hell good are they if you can’t do anything to change the events??? I was done with them and with the horrible waiting to see if they came true. I haven't had one since. I don’t miss them.

All Weird Things Index

I know it's not hip in some circles to believe in hell, and I don't believe in the classic hell of Christian mythology, but I do believe that when we die, we are forced to go through a complete life review with no filters, no rationalizations, and face up to who we have truly been. Our sins, if you will.*

That in itself would be truly hellish, having to face up to things, to uncork all the muck of our shadow selves. We're all in store for it, I believe, to a greater or lesser degree. Perhaps children are exempt since they have so little life to review. I read a book by a mystic/psychic** who said that was how he perceived of hell, and it really resonated with me. He also said that the worse our misdeeds the more darkness we face in the afterlife, and it was only as we came to terms with what we had done and who we had been, own up to it, that we were able to move closer to the light. Someone like Hitler, he said, would be alone in complete cold and darkness until he came to terms with what he had done.

He didn't believe in eternal damnation, just damnation that lasted as long as we clung to our old worldview. I don't believe in eternal damnation, either. I think the Universe is more nuanced than that, that the worst hell is the one we impose upon ourselves, here and hereafter. I know this won't be popular with those who want everlasting retribution against people they hate but think about how awful it would be to be stuck in the cold and dark, screaming alone in a void until you acknowledge the wrong you've done. Far worse than fire in my opinion. The agony of that fire would give you little time to think on and acknowledge the wrong you have done. It makes no sense.

Of course, there ain't no guarantee that the mystical side of the universe makes any sense, but I do take comfort from the notion.

I guess I do believe in karma, but definitely not the way the New Age defines it: if you do something heinous in one life you’ll be born into horrible circumstances in your next life. This is essentially victim-blaming, and I reject it utterly. The Eastern concept of karma is more nuanced (and if I’ve gotten what follows wrong, I’d be very happy if someone corrected me): if you do something heinous in one life, you have the opportunity to make amends and change your ways in the same life, but if you don’t you will be born over and over again into the same circumstances, living out the same patterns until you learn to break free of them. That’s somewhat more palatable, but it doesn’t have enough retribution for my liking. (So, I will probably have to mend my ways and get rid of my need for retribution along the line somewhere.)

All this is just my own eccentric take on things, borrowed here and there from various mystical and religious texts. My own personal gnosis, if you will. It may not be pagan enough for someone who calls herself a pagan, but there it is.

I've been trying to do some of that reconciliation work on this side of the divide, acknowledging my past misdeeds, stripping away as much rationalization and excuses as possible. You know, dealing with my shadow side here rather than there. It isn’t easy and it's very uncomfortable sometimes but when I do accomplish it, it's quite liberating. I feel myself inching microscopically closer to the light.




*What is sin? I don’t think it’s about having sex outside “permitted” channels, or self-identity, or sloth, or any of the other minor venalities of conventional hell and brimstone religions. To me, sin is about doing physical, mental, or emotional harm to fellow creatures and the planet.

**I want to say it was George Anderson’s Lessons from the Light but it was a long time ago and I can’t be sure. I downloaded a Kindle sample and read the start of the book and it seems like the one but, as I say, it was a long time ago.

Long ago in a lifetime far, far away…Okay, when I was in my twenties, my friend and I liked to drive up Calabasas way and visit Tapia Park—part of the larger Malibu Creek State Park. They used to film M*A*S*H and other TV shows in Malibu Creek Park (still do film up there) and some parts of Planet of the Apes and other films. In fact, much of the land was owned by 20^th Century Fox for location filming until the state acquired it for park land. Before that it was a country club. Before that it was taken over by Spanish and Yankee squatters. Before that, it belonged to the Chumash tribe for centuries.

The smaller area of Tapia Park has hiking and biking and equestrian trails but the part we visited mostly just had lots of majestic oak trees and less majestic picnic tables. The big attraction for us was Malibu Creek itself, which ran along the western edge. (I think it was the western edge. Pardon me if I’ve gotten the direction wrong.) To me, this area always had a presence, a kind of watching-waiting, sometimes benevolent if you caught it in the right mood and there weren’t a lot of people around, sometimes—well, if not hostile, then reluctant to have company, if you know what I mean. I never felt anything sinister there but sometimes it just was not in the mood.

What we liked to do was pack a lunch, take our shoes off, and go wading down the creek. In the rainy season (usually October to April here in SoCal) it was prone to flood. In the latter months of the summer, it was greatly diminished. But there was a sweet spot in late spring and early summer when the creek flowed freely and was really delightful. Chapparal grew all around and every year there was a different growing arrangement along the creek. If you’ve been in the SoCal hills on a hot day, you’ll know chaparral has a distinctive scent: wild fennel, barley, sage, manzanita, and other plants give it the baking aroma of some exotic bread. It’s a unique scent I’ve never smelled anywhere else I’ve been in the world and it always says to me: home. The creek had rock pools and small waterfall cascades over the big rocks. The flow was never so much to threaten to knock you off your feet, but some of those pools were deceptively deep and it wasn’t unusual to take a step and wind up with a soaked crotch. But it didn’t matter. I loved it so much. It lifted my heart and spirit.

One year we went on a particularly long wade down the creek and spotted a stone pillar standing on a slight rise in the creek bed. It was about three feet in diameter and about four feet high and it was composed of shale—lovely streaks of salmon and gold and caramel and flecks of black and white. It felt like a natural altar to me. It stood all alone, maybe fifteen to twenty feet from the cliff behind it. Shale is very flinty and flakes off easily, so it’s entirely possible this had once been part of the cliff behind it—perhaps an arch or some such geological formation that got washed away by eons of floods. It had a presence, though, a sense of self-containment, even as the water washed by it, and a sense of wonder. There were a bunch of loose shale pieces on top of it. I picked up a piece that beckoned to me, put it in my pocket, and took it home.

No, this is not one of those stories like you hear from Hawaii or California ghost towns where if you take something your luck turns terrible and you have to ship the rock or whatever back to the park it came from to save yourself. I had that piece of shale for years with no ill effect, proudly displayed with other rocks I’d collected here and there. (It’s probably still around here somewhere but I’ve no idea where. That seems to be the theme of my life these days.) But sometime after I’d collected that rock I couldn’t remember if I’d thanked the altar for it. I thanked it in absentia but somehow felt the need for an in person visit—because I felt so drawn to it. It took me a while to get back there—the next year, in fact. My friend and I waded down the stream but never found the altar even though we knew we’d waded farther than the year before (using a bridge over the creek as a marker). Where had it disappeared to? Who hid it from our view?

I don’t really think it somehow mystically, magically disappeared. Perhaps the chapparal grew thicker around it that year and hid it from view. But…perhaps the park and the altar were just not in the mood for my nonsense. I only know that I’ve always wanted to find it again, but it’s been a very long time since I visited Tapia Park, and I’m no longer physically capable of hiking down that creek. Its disappearance, however, has kept it playing through my mind and heart ever since. Probably no enchantment involved. Probably nothing magical about it. Except, perhaps, the enchantment of a heart always willing to believe in the possibility of magic.

But it could be magic, right?


All Weird Things Index

Random quote of the day: “Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Bert and Ernie, Celine Dion, or the Band of the Coldstream Guards. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before.”

—Lewis Thomas, Discovery Magazine, 1980



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Bert and Ernie, Celine Dion, or the Band of the Coldstream Guards. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“People who love the divine go around with holes in their hearts, and inside the hole is the universe.”

—Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Bert and Ernie, Celine Dion, or the Band of the Coldstream Guards. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“If there is one mental vice, indeed, which sets off the American people from all other folks who walk the earth...it is that of assuming that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that ninety-nine percent of them are wrong.”

—H. L. Mencken, "The American: His New Puritanism,” The Smart Set



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Bert and Ernie, Celine Dion, or the Band of the Coldstream Guards. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Greg and Dana Newkirk of the Haunted Objects Podcast and the Newkirk Museum of the Paranormal like to say that paranormal experiences are often initiatory experiences. They give you a peek at the Other, breakdown the dogma of consensus reality. If you run from these experiences in fear, the initiation fails. If you try to overcome your fear and accept what has happened it can completely change you and your worldview. They also point out that these initiations can lead to periods of great creativity and productivity. By that standard, I have had more than one initiatory experience, but the one I’m about to relate is perhaps the most profound.

I haven’t told this story in full here before because at the time it happened I foolishly told it to one of my materialist friends and he said, “What bullshit.” It was brutal and said in front of my other materialist friends and they all laughed. Maybe it was nervous laughter but whatever it was, I was humiliated and made damned sure I only spoke of these things with people who believed as I did. (I drifted away from that group soon after.) Now that I am a geezer, I want to own my truth. That’s part of why I’m telling these stories now. If people think they are bullshit, that’s their problem.

I have experienced high strangeness all my life, starting when I was about three or four. Except for one notable period in my early thirties. I had just successfully fought off thyroid cancer. So much weirdness led up to the diagnosis and treatment, so many wild swings of emotion that seemed beyond my control. Afterwards, after treatment and getting a proper dose of thyroid hormone, it was like someone flipped a switch and I had my equilibrium back. No weirdness for a long time after that.

It made me wonder if all of the strange things in my life had been induced by bad brain chemistry and/or pure illusion. Coupled with this, I had been working and hanging out with a bunch of diehard materialists and absorbed a lot of their worldview. It had me reassessing everything. I went from believer to agnostic to almost-declared materialist in a very short span of time. I said to myself one day, “I don’t think there’s anything beyond this reality except bad brain chemistry and illusion.” Well, the Universe decided to call my bet and raise me.

I had a cat I adored. Her name was Mocha, a brown and orange swirled tortoise shell. When we first met, I was living in a bungalow on the back end of a property in Venice, California. My landlords lived in the house on the front of the property and on either side of us were open fields where houses had been torn down. Idiots were constantly dumping cats in these fields which meant we often had to adopt them or otherwise find homes for them. One sunny afternoon I was sitting in my bungalow with the sliding glass doors open to catch a breeze and Mocha walked in bold as brass and said, “Hello. I live here now and you need to feed me.” So, of course, I did. (No, I didn’t really hear her say this but I got the message clearly.) I had two other cats and one of them, pure white angel Ollie, got so insulted that he moved in permanently with the landlords. (They were great fans of Ollie and were okay with this.)

I have adored all my cats over the years but my bond with Mocha was different. I can’t quite explain it except to say she was a soul cat for me. I knew it the minute she first walked in the door. Some years later I had moved to another part of L.A. on a busy street and about the time of my materialist reassessment of things Mocha was killed. From that point on, all my cats became indoor only cats but I was filled with guilt and shame that I’d been so careless with someone so precious.

Immediately after her death strange things started happening. The dog, who liked to play with Mocha around a swiveling chair in the living room, began to play this same game with something only she could see. She would also sit in front of the hall window, one of Mocha’s favorite perches, and whine in an excited but puzzled way. When I went over and put my hand in the spot the dog was staring at, the air would be noticeably colder than the rest of the room, even when the sun was shining through the window. These were events experienced by other people living in the house. But one night when I was alone in my bed and crying over Mocha I heard purring coming from the empty pillow next to me. It so startled me I jumped out of bed. I couldn’t hear the purring anymore until I leaned over close to the pillow and there it was again! I straightened up, no purring. I leaned over, purring. It was actually very comforting, so I calmed down and eventually got back in bed and listened to the purring beside me. Gradually, it faded away and then I was able to go to sleep.

But I am very talented at making myself feel guilty and sad and one night—again, lying in bed—I was indulging in this and really working myself up. Then something happened that words are inadequate to describe. A wave of pure, unadulterated, one-with-the-Universe bliss swept over me, starting at the top of my head and spreading through my entire body. I knew it was a taste of the numinous and I also knew it was sent to me by or through Mocha. These words on this page/screen cannot possibly do justice to that feeling. It was a privilege, a gift, and I was so profoundly grateful for it. For days my heart was lifted by it. But I got greedy because, wow, that feeling. One night maybe a few days later I wondered if I could cultivate it again and I started the ol’ chain of guilt-making but this time it was like I got a slap across the face—not physically, but mentally, psychically. Along with it came a clear message: “Knock it off. Get on with your life.” I kind of felt that message was from Mocha, too.

I was inundated for days afterward by a ton of small but meaningful incidents of high strangeness until I finally said to the Universe one day, “All right! I get it! I am not a materialist. I believe. You can send any weird thing to me and I will accept it but I only ask one thing. I don’t want to see anything because I think that would drive me crazy.” The deluge of weird stopped, but it has continued to be an occasional presence in my life ever since. For the most part, with one notable exception (a story for another day) I haven’t seen anything, but I have experienced intense synchronicities, odd things happening in the house, ghostly but unseen visitations from other deceased ones I’ve adored, etc., etc. Curiously, I never experienced anything with Mocha again except one dream, months later. She was sitting on the edge of the roof of the old bungalow where we first met, not really paying attention to me. I called out to her, “Mocha! I’ve missed you! Come here.” She looked at me and I got the clear message, “Can’t stay. I’ve got other things to do.” And she trotted over the peaked roof of the bungalow and disappeared over the other side.

The other thing that happened after I accepted my non-materialist pact with the Universe is that I entered into one of the most profoundly creative periods of my life. Art was pouring out of me for many years after. At the time, I didn’t think of these experiences as initiatory, but I do now. I have had other initiations in my life, but that was the most profound. And all due to the ghost of my soul cat.



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I’m not sure if this is a ghost story, not sure what it is, but it’s eerie and has “haunted” me for over 10 years. I’ve blogged about the different parts of this before, here and here, but have included both experiences in this one blog because I’ve always felt they were linked.

Anyway, in the last few years of my mother’s life, a marked coldness started dominating her bedroom—much more than the rest of the house. I had to buy her an electric mattress cover so she didn’t freeze at night and not have to turn the heating up until I myself was suffocating and sleeping without covers even in the coldest weather. The chill in Mom’s room was so intense and pervasive it stretched for about five feet outside of her bedroom door into a small adjoining den. Walking through the den towards her door I would hit a well-demarcated wall of icy air. Just wham! Normal temperature, then icy temperature.

Being a weird but mostly rational human being, I searched for possible sources of the chill, tried taping over even the most minor air leaks, had the heating company check the vents, but none of us could find anything to explain it. And to test the existence of this wall of cold, I had my friends walk through the den (without telling them what to expect) to see if I was imagining it, but they felt it, too. Even the skeptical one.

The day my mother died I brought her home for hospice to that bedroom. She arrived at noon and was gone by about eight that night. She was very ready to go. Two remarkable things happened after she died. First, five to ten minutes after she passed, our cat (who had not gone into her room once the cold stuff started happening at least a couple of years previously) came to the foot of her hospital bed and started rolling around, showing her belly and acting coy as she did when my mother talked baby talk to her. The second thing, which I didn’t notice until the next day: the cold had completely disappeared. No wall of ice emanating from her door, the bedroom the same temperature as the rest of the house. And it has never returned since, over ten years on (her ten year death anniversary was January 22), even in the coldest parts of winter (which in L.A. is a relative thing, but you catch my drift).

What haunts me is wondering what caused this.

Mom had two incidents of possible near-death experience in her later years and I’ve often wondered if they were related. There was the time in her late eighties when she got a severe blood infection and almost died. She told me that one night she woke up in the hospital and three shadowy figures stood in the corner. They didn’t speak aloud, she said, but in her mind. They told her that if she wanted to leave this life she could go, but it was up to her. She told them she wasn’t ready, and they said she could stay but things would get much harder from that point on. She survived, and things did get much harder. Maybe a year after this incident, her shaky kidneys finally failed and she had to start dialysis. Less than a year after that, she had a stroke. We were lucky in that it didn’t affect her mind, nor was she paralyzed in any way, but it severely affected her vision (kind of like macular degeneration but not exactly) and her sense of balance. She had to go into rehab for three months and came out of it with her fighting spirit intact.

She confessed to me, though, that those three shadowy figures visited her in the rehab center and offered her the same deal. Again, she refused, and again they said things would get much harder. And they did.

I keep wondering if the shadowy figures showed up that last time? She was in a coma and not talking so I’ll never know. Were they present those years when it was so cold in that room? Sightings of the Grim Reaper, et al., are often accompanied by an intense feeling of cold. But the cat being so coy after she passed makes me think there was nothing evil or malicious hanging around. I still live in the same house and although weird things do happen here I’ve rarely had any activity I would call malicious. Again, I doubt I’ll get answers to any of this, just more questions and speculation.

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