Fear and Confidence

I walk daily with an old friend who feels like a new friend because I wasn’t close to her sixty years ago. She is fearful of some things, and that seems so odd to me. When I got the job as a flight attendant fifty years ago, I decided that in order to have the most possible fun with new experiences, I would conquer my fears.

I think our mothers plant our fears. I guess it could be our fathers, but I know more fearful women than I do fearful men. My mom wasn’t afraid of many things, and she used to tell me I could be the president if I wanted that job. But as a child, I was afraid of goblins, ghosts, and strange men who seemed to have a bad streak.

I do believe that my foresight helps me avoid many problems. I can sense whether people are bad or good. I like to play that game when I’m bored while waiting for a bus or plane. Which one of these people are the bad people? The only problem with that is, they stay on my mind as they board the plane, while I hope they won’t be seated next to me. 

On my last bus trip to New York City, I saw a man board with his wife. She seems nice, he seems sort of skeezy. An hour after we left Bethlehem, he moved to sit next to me. I looked at him oddly, and he said, my wife is too big. This seat gives me more room. Ok then, a penalty for my not having ice cream every time I want it. I thought about walking back to ask her what she thought about his comment, but decided not to stir the pot.

Next thing, he started to rub his phone on his crotch while stealing looks at me. Oh why had a worn a pretty dress on that bus instead of my usual travel clothes? Although that’s a bad idea, to think that anything I wore made a difference. He got up to go check on her, or to use the bathroom. I told the woman across the aisle that he was being inappropriate and that if he returned, I would move to sit with her. She warned me not to tell the bus driver, since he was driving, so I just sat. He returned, and I moved. He acted horrified and asked why. When I told him he had acted inappropriately, he yelled, you’re crazy. Yeah, crazy for not telling the bus driver.

None of this generated fear, just caution. Port Authority has more security officers than anywhere I’ve seen, so when I got off the bus, I told a circle of them what had happened, and that I would stand with them to be sure he wasn’t following me. I forgot about his wife tagging along. They made me feel safe again, and off I went into the crowds of New York City.

Fear cripples us. To me, it’s poison. I try to avoid it. That man had been sitting in the back of the bus before he moved next to me. No way I could have avoided him entirely. Bad things and bad people are everywhere. Keep your wits about you, follow your instincts, and report to the bus drivers and officers of the law.

Memories and Time Travel

So you want to time travel? It will be easy if you start with a memory. I like to do it in the dentist chair, when I wish to be far away from what is happening inside my mouth. I seem to be able to care more about sticking with the memory, and the distraction helps the time pass quickly.

When I was small, I had a lot of bad dreams. I would yell for my mother, and she would come and sit on the side of my bed. We had four bedrooms in the house, and my sister and brother had rooms across the hall. My room shared a wall with my parents. Mostly I hated that. I could hear them making grown-up love noises and felt grossed out, or I worried they would hear the small blue transistor radio that I played under my covers after lights out.

After my bad dream, my mother would tell me to think happy thoughts. She’d usually suggest that I think of a vacation that we took that I liked, which was all of them. Some nights I would fall back asleep with my mind on my fun Alabama cousins, who didn’t wear shoes, acted a little naughty, and laughed a lot. Sometimes I fell asleep as I rode my bicycle along the ocean boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey.

The hardest part for you to time travel is that you have to take all your brain cells, and put them in another location. You have to recognize how the fun spot smells, listen to the sounds, move your body in your mind's eye according to whether you are walking, riding a bike, or driving a bumper car. You have to actually be in another spot totally.

Once you can do that with a memory, you can start to do the same exercise when you want to see the future, or if you want to connect with someone who has passed on. I looked at recent pictures of the back of my head from my son’s wedding. With shock, I remembered my grandmother’s hair. I used to wonder why it was so frizzy. When I saw the pictures, I realized mine was the same frizzy only not dyed black. I stopped hating my old lady hair. My grandmother used to complain about hers, and I realized hers was also most likely inherited. Neither of us have control over that one. Suddenly I was with her, watching her get ready to go out and listening to her beautiful voice. She felt alive. 

Good luck with your time travel. It’s like flying in an airplane. In order to feel comfort, we have to let go of trying to control what is going on. Let another person manage that plane, just like when we were all young. I asked a 10-year-old piano student yesterday, where is your next trip? He vacations a lot. He shrugged. He knew they would go somewhere, since it’s summer, and he always had fun. 

Don’t get uptight when you time travel. Just try to float and have fun.

Secrets

Secrets, why do we keep them when they only involve ourselves? I realized this weekend that when I reveal my secrets on this forum, I’m embarrassed for days, but I get my highest open rate. So here is a secret story. 

It was early in my police detective work. A pal at work told me about a man who she said worked for the FBI. I met him in the north. He introduced me as a detective from Lebanon, and though that was accurate, I wasn’t a true police detective. It was late at night and the other cops looked up from their desks and computers, and then ignored me. 

Now girls, let me tell you, this man was gorgeous, with a perfect face and a small, strong body. First off, I knew he wasn’t FBI. Turned out he was a plant, and part of another agency, but I can’t tell you that secret part, meaning what he was spying on, but I can tell you it wasn’t a murder case. He was a sharp shooter and once called me from a stake-out. That was exciting. 

But let’s get back to my story. As we sat and then walked the town, I told him what I knew about his secret mission, and that my nickname for him was Robocop. He was sold after that, because when he doubled on weekends as a street cop, the kids called him Robocop. 

The man he was spying on was indicted later, a bad guy in the midst of politics and law enforcement, but at the time I worked with him, Robocop was a bit frustrated and sick of his assignment. I found it thrilling and a lovely change of pace from nice people getting murdered. 

We became close for a few days. I will never forget him. Soft-spoken with a hard body and a sweet soul. In the Vietnam War, he was a tunnel rat. Other cops told me that tunnel rats were crazy and brave. A specialized group of U.S. Army soldiers and combat engineers, along with some from other allied nations, tunnel rats ventured into the Viet Cong's vast underground tunnel systems during the Vietnam War. These soldiers were volunteers who were chosen for their small stature, agility, and mental toughness, as the tunnels were often extremely narrow, dark, and filled with booby traps. Other vets have told me that it was the scariest situation. The life expectancy of a tunnel rat in Vietnam was seven seconds.

I don’t know how to end this, since we lost contact. I just know that he was brave and fearless, and that he seemed to miss close contact. I always wonder why I didn’t ask how he kept secrets so easily.

Fostering and Facebook

I’m having a hard month that I wasn’t able to predict. A bad person took over my Facebook page and changed my password and the email in the middle of the night. Facebook didn’t care, until I asked forty friends to bombard them with “this page is a fraud” comments. Facebook shut my pages down, and I have no more access. But at least the bad person can’t continue to pretend to sell items and ask for a deposit so my friends lose money.

On the other hand, I’m having the time of my life. Most likely this is hardest thing I’ve ever done, which is to foster a 12 year old boy. I’m never bored, but he needs help with a myriad of issues. The love is boundless, but for the first week I wanted to cry every hour. I’m SO tired, but I’m better this week at expressing what I need, like to read and rest, instead of thinking of what he so direly needs every minute. I will never be able to catch up to his neglect.

My pal Leslie said, that must be hard intuitively, which is a sweet thing I had never thought about. All day long we connect intuitively with other people, and I know that some of you get worn out with people connections at work and in your social life.

I went to a little fair at the mall with my foster son. That was so hard. I’m a super smeller and the people hadn’t broken out their deodorant for summer. They wore strange costumes and had unusual, scary things for sale. My foster son asked 10,001 questions, and the vendors oozed kindness. Another huge kindness event was last week when he and I went birding with the Mt. Gretna Birding Club. We saw 43 types of birds, walked for three hours, trekked through swampland, and put binoculars to our faces, over and over. I explained how much I like nerds, and he asked 10,005 questions.

Whether you call it serendipity or synchronicity, people cross our paths and affect us. Sometimes for evil, but mostly for good. As the Wicked song goes, I have been changed for good.

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.