May 30, 2002
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My most recent blog was a trifle obscure, filled with jargon and needing some rather specialized knowledge to be fully understood. I don’t think I’ll be doing that again, at least not until I get ready to write about Timewave Zero.
I found it interesting how many people responded to my tossing off, ironically, at the end, the classic pick-up line, “What’s your sign?” Apparently my jokes are as obscure as my text. Perhaps if I used more smiley faces…. But seriously, if anyone were to send me his birth chart, I’d know more about his personality than his therapist knows, unless the therapist is an astrologer, too. Sun sign astrology is too general to be anything but crap.
The following is my longest blog yet, and I’ve already had comments about my verbosity. Please be aware that although I use the term, “fortuneteller”, and many people apply that term to me and the work I do, I don’t consider myself a fortuneteller. Fortunetellers are generally considered entertainers and their readings usually concern the future. I consider myself a counselor, and my readings are grounded in present realities. The future is what one makes of it.
Metaphysics and me
There have been questions and comments about my psychic abilities, experiences and beliefs. “Psychic” wasn’t part of the lexicon as I was growing up. I don’t recall hearing the word before I’d started school. My mother was highly intuitive and I am, too. She usually knew who was calling before she answered the phone. I remember her expression of disgust once when she was interrupted by the ringing, and knew the call was a wrong number. But she answered it anyway. I do that, too. Go figure.
Fortune-telling, astrology, and the paranormal were viewed by my friends and teachers as dangerous superstition. My parents seemed to have open minds on such things, neither promoting nor criticizing. Early on, I went along with my teachers and friends.
Astrology was the first fringe science to chip away at my indoctrinated beliefs. My friend Carol brought me a paperback to amuse and occupy me while I was convalescing from a severe case of flu. It was Write Your Own Horoscope, with planetary tables and brief interpretive guides. I did mine, and had to admit it fit me, but wasn’t really impressed until I’d done my husband, parents, and a few friends and saw how clearly it nailed their traits.
As I studied astrology, I found a lot of familiar concepts such as the classical four elements and many names from myths. I also found fascinating, challenging geometrical and mathematical concepts. The more I learned, the more utility and validity I found in it. One aspect of it that intrigued me was the predictive angle. I really wanted to know what the future would be.
Other people I knew were reading and doing divination with the I Ching, and I started doing that about the same time I was reading C.G. Jung–they’re connected by synchronicity and synchronicity became a big part of my life. Synchronicitously, this was a time (1969) when there was some intense outer planet stuff going on, as well as a big dip in the Timewave. We were all groovy and in sync with the Cosmos.
I had a number of intense psychic experiences including precognition, projective telepathy and a sort of traveling consciousness thing where a friend left my house and walked across town and my awareness went with him. I also became aware of some spirit presences who were interested in what I was doing. Their interaction with me, their “guidance”, consisted mostly of connecting me with various people.
Then came my three-month amphetamine run–my summer of speed, the autumn in jail, and after my guilty plea, release on my own recognizance for the duration of the pre-sentence investigation. Out of jail, no job, no home, in shaky health, I’d keep warm in daytime at the public library. Evenings I spent at a coffee house, where I could always find someone willing to let me crash on their floor.
In the morning, I’d clean up and go to the library to look at the classifieds. Then I’d check in at the state employment office, and stop in at a few cafes and stores looking for a job. Weeks went by with no success. I’d always end up back at the library until closing time.
I read metaphysical works by Ouspensky, Blavatsky, Dion Fortune, Alice A. Bailey and Anton Szandor LaVey. They had lots of other books, too… I read Asimov’s series of science popularizations, read everything they had on semantics and semiotic (three books), and I read a lot of holy books of various religions. They had seven different translations of the Christian Bible. At one point, I had four of them spread out on a table at once, comparing texts.
One evening at the coffee house a bunch of us were sitting around a big spool table discussing my predicament. No answers were forthcoming. One of the women asked if I had ever had a Tarot reading. I hadn’t, and I expressed my skepticism. She said that the guy who worked in the head shop down the block did readings for free, and, “What do you have to lose?”
It was blowing snow as I headed down there and shyly asked Rhys Court what it took to do a reading. He had me cut the cards. He told me I was in the middle of the biggest crisis of my life and it would take all my wits and help from my family to get through it. There was probably more, but that was the gist of it.
I had not let my mother, who lived halfway across the country, know about being a speed freak or getting busted. She had enough worries of her own. I called her, collect. She was relieved to hear that I’d gotten away from the Hells Angels, but she started crying when I told her about going to jail. She sent me $12.00, all she could spare. It came to the Western Union office next day, and I used it to rent a sleeping room for a week.
Then I went back to a taco joint where the owner had said he needed help, but (sorry), he couldn’t afford any. I offered to work a split shift and cover his mealtime rushes, for meals. He went for it. I went back to tell Rhys that I’d worked things out, and to thank him and ask for more. More, more, I wanted more of that! He told me to learn to do it myself.
He used the Rider-Waite Deck, and I picked up one of them and a book by Eden Gray on how to read it. From the book, I got the basics, and more of those already familiar archetypal concepts. I didn’t connect with the deck, though, and soon replaced it with The Book of T: New Tarot for the Aquarian Age. I’ve worn out five of them in my career, abraded and obscured the pictures through use. The deck is long out of print, the author and artist: John Cooke and Rosalinde Sharp; and publisher Western Star Press, have dropped out of sight.
In the coffee house, at first, I shyly asked a friend, then another friend, to let me do a reading. I shuffled back and forth in the book, looking up meanings. But after I got the new deck, with symbols that spoke to me, I didn’t need a book, and soon people were coming to me asking for readings. They started calling me psychic. Around that time, I was in close communication with my guides, and I was getting a lot of the prescient experiences I’d been asking for. It became burdensome (be careful what you ask for), and I negotiated a little deal with my spirit helpers: I’d quit trying to map out the entire future and they would let me know if anything big was around the next bend in the road for me. That’s the same deal we still have.
Eventually, I found a live-in housekeeping job, had my drug-possession case adjudicated and met my probation officer. My boyfriend the dealer got out of jail and we zipped over the state line and got married. We had met a couple in jail who knew some people who had gotten around the probation prohibition on associating with each other by marrying. That didn’t work for us. Crossing the state line was just one more violation, plus the PO had video of me on the U of O campus at an anti-war protest rally, right behind the (illegal) barricade. I was off to prison.
That institution, affectionately known as OWCC, had just gone through what they called a “witchcraft scare”. All books on metaphysics and the paranormal were forbidden. That was okay. I started requesting religious books through Inter-Library Loan. Kabbalah was one of the books I read, also Autobiography of a Yogi, Popol Vuh, and The Golden Bough. For the library, I ordered CastaƱeda’s anthropological classic, Teachings of Don Juan, and several works on pop psychology that were helpful not only to me, but to a few other motivated lunatics in there.
Prison is an excellent place for meditation. I’d done a little bit of OOB “astral” travel from my little room at the live-in job, and I continued to practice that. My husband was out on the streets at that time, and I visited him out of body. One night I watched the Johnny Carson show with him. From where I sat, Johnny appeared to be projected on the toilet in my cell. Later, after my husband had been locked up in the big prison whose wall loomed over the high chainlink fence around our little feminine joint, I visited his cell block, and caused a little stir (a stir in stir, so to speak
while I was looking for him. This took a lot of effort and energy, and didn’t afford as much pleasure as just flying around, enjoying the scenery. Not long ago, I learned that Robert Monroe also preferred just winging it on OOBEs, over trying to follow a map or complete a specific quest.
When I got out of prison, my old tarot cards and books were gone, along with everything else. Somewhere, I’d read the tradition that Tarot cards were not to be bought, but either stolen, found or received as a gift. I’d stolen the first ones. My first full day out of the slammer I was walking to my sister-in-law’s house when I saw a small paper bag on the ground. It contained a deck of my favorite cards. Then, I ran into an old friend who had grabbed my I Ching from our house after we’d all gone to jail, and he gave it back, a little richer in marginal notes than it had been.
Already elated by freedom, I was awed by these little gifts from the Universe.
In prison I had met two women who had lived in Alaska. One was an inmate, the other a volunteer who came twice a week to teach a typing class. Together they convinced me that I would like it here. It took about a year and a half after my release before I got here. Without money, the trip went off perfectly. Long, involved story, adventures at every turn, and finally, with a lot of help on this plane and others, arrival in Anchorage with a duffle bag and about three bucks and change.
This was my first big object lesson in the rewards for following spiritual guidance. Before long I had two full-time jobs and found a community where I felt I belonged. Another year after that, I was sick, out of work, but on an incredible spiritual journey with the Urantia Book. Just routine, story of my life.
Seven years after I’d done my first readings in the coffee house, I was still in Alaska and the economy was in the big bust that followed the Pipeline boom. I responded to a request for “musicians, jugglers, entertainers, fortune tellers…” for the first annual Girdwood Forest Fair and made that my first professional gig. It became my regular summer occupation, and I traveled to as many as half a dozen festivals each year.
Then, trading readings with another psychic one time, I asked her what I could do for a winter income. She asked, “Can you do an absent reading?” Without pausing to think I said, “yes,” though I’d never tried, really. I had done one for two girls who were concerned about a mutual friend in a coma… I suppose that counts.
I placed a few inexpensive print ads and supported myself and my kid that way for five years or so. During that time, I started doing past-life regressions, had a lot of past-life memories come through in dreams, then finally, had them coming through consciously just as those of earlier years in this lifetime.
This guy I call the old fart wrote to me for a reading, and sometime near that time our fey and jaded MisFit Sarah also wrote to me for readings. We recognized each other as soulmates. Greyfox had been losing interest in his government career and found himself drawn to shamanism. Our long-distance courtship and meeting are the basis of one of my most exciting chapters.
Then I married the shaman and we worked together a few years. By then, that stuff wasn’t so trendy any more, and we couldn’t compete with the ad budgets of the 900-line psychic networks. Three of them solicited us to work for them, but I wouldn’t work under their “for entertainment only” stupid CYA disclaimer.
I don’t advertize any longer, but I still get occasional new clients from ads in old magazines or referrals from old clients. I still get letters and email from past clients and a few have become friends, but in my business I don’t think it’s ethical to hang onto a client and keep him dependent. I prefer to give them the keys to go out and get their own answers. That’s what the smart ones do. Some others just go and find another psychic more willing to take their money and the responsibility for their lives.
Doing readings is fun for me, and when I feel the desire for a metaphysical fix, I go to the chatrooms on a psychic website from the UK and do readings pro bono, or I frequent the boards at Morgana’s Observatory.
I haven’t said anything about my beliefs except that they had been shaken by my metaphysical discoveries. While Greyfox and I were publishing a newsletter on shamanism, book publishers sent us review copies of their new releases. One of them was titled How to Believe in Nothing and Set Yourself Free. Its concepts meshed with my experiences, with the Avatar teachings of Harry Palmer, and with the shift from the Piscean Age of Belief to the Aquarian Age of Knowledge. Since then, I’ve been transcending belief.
Any questions?
Comments (13)
No questions…wow…
I was raised a scientist’s daughter… I think I rejected everything that required some amount of faith at a young age, including my parents’ religion. But as i get older, and I become more open, I really dont know… Sometimes I know things I really shouldnt know, I see things that end up happening. I know what it is, but still I choose to just ignore it. I’m hoping that someday I’ll really be open to it all.
Very interesting story.
No, that doesn’t do it justice…. I got a real aura of who you are thought that excellently written um, piece of writing. (-;
I don’t like to argue with people about their beliefs, but what do you need to do a person’s “Chart”? I know my birthdate (down to the minute) and I can find out where I was born (Somewhere in Brooklyn, but I’ll get the street addy of the hospital if possible). What can you do with that information?
Wow, I’m very glad you decided to comment on my blog that day, otherwise, I’d never have found your site. Funny how things work out.
-|Joe|-
Interesting … the decks I do best with are the ones that have been given to me (Thank YOU) … I haven’t stolen a deck … Yet.
Heh …
I did read this earlier … and was side tracked by Ye old butthead coming home for lunch which is why I didn’t comment.
Last night, at work, I was asked by a customer if I’d do a reading for her. Someone up front had told her that I do that *sort of thing* … never in my life thus far have I not wanted to do a reading for anyone.
It happened.
I told her as gently as I could that I simply wasn’t up to it, and she began throwing dollar signs my way.
Lot’s of them.
I looked her straight in the eye, finally, and said, “Now is not a good time.”
She then clasped her hands in front of her, began praying loudly to Bog to save my soul from the evils of *The Devils Work*. They had already paid their bill … thank God, and they left.
How weird is that?
Actually, now that I think about it, I’m very glad that she prayed for me. I need all the saving from the Devils work that I can get! FOFLMAO!
are you a witch?!
thanks for the info; i enjoyed myself…
I have a million questions. At least. But I’m too spellbound by this blog to articulate any of them. Amazing. Thanks for sharing all that!
All I need to say is that I am a Gemini.
Long ! you can say that again, I think I could have shortened it somewhat by a few terse words stating that you could do this and that and leaving it at that. I used to dabble with the cards a bit and I am psychic. I know what people are thinking before they say things and even if they don’t. I sense atmospheres in rooms, and often leave quickly because of them. Still all I really wanted to say was I was not chagrined by the word ‘Bonk’ my goodness everyone uses it, I was just amazed that my so refined lady doctor could mention it. She is in her 50′s and dresses like a teenager, and preens with her hair. I just felt I was lowering myself to say ‘having a bit’ which is an expression I grew up hearing. I would have liked to have said something more refined. Still I suppose nature will out. I think she thought she was going to shock me, but at my advanced age nothing shocks me, just cruelty to children and animals that horrifies me. I look like a prude but I am not one. Good luck with your (NOT) fortune telling, as Sarah said ROFLMAO. but is it that funny?. Cheers Portia


It’s interesting…
Feh.
Okay, I am almost cautious in what I say to you here. I have a desire to be very accurate in what I say and really think everything through that I say… And, so I’m thinking maybe the comment I was going to start with “It’s interesting” is not all quite there.
So, I’ll start again. I’ve noticed some of the things that you glean on in the opening paragraphs. Verbosity is not necessarily encouraged on Xanga. Isn’t that odd? Isn’t this a place to write? I find verbosity, often, to be a necessity when you are trying to communicate via words with others.
I’ve also noticed that people will latch on to the “closing joke” as it were and not comment on the rest of the post. So… maybe some of the people get it, and are looking for an easy way to prop. Maybe some don’t get it and are answering the sign thing because that’s all they got…
All of this may or may not be irrelevant…
And, really, that’s all I have to comment on right now… The rest is very rich… I just have to let it sit and digest for a while…
I’ll have comments in a month or so.
I have lots of questions, but will limit myself to saying that was an fascinating story.
Ya know … I came back to see who had commented and to *evesdrop* … for a couple of reasons.
Todd is right. This is a writers community, but heaven forbid we blog over a couple paragraphs. And lawdy if we get too deep. I’ve been out here over a year now, and I became addicted to e-props. Oh they feeeeeeel so gewd … I’ve finally cropped the sites I read list to … The Sites I Read and not just skimmed the surface of what a bunch of folks were saying.
I wanted to see if anyone was catching the drift here.
It seems that a few really have. That gives me hope!
What Xanga did for me was encourage me enough to believe that if I actually publish something, it will get read. You too, you know. You’ll get read.
I had enough of what I consider the GREAT writers out here tell me to quit blogging and start the damn book.
Xanga did more than just that for me, however. It connected me to a crew of folks that has literally changed my life.
And now … back to our regularly scheduled program.
You’re just amazing *hug*.
Tess – the atypical Virgo with major attitude