June 13, 2007

• My Psychic Career

  When I use the word, “psychic,” I often put it in quotes.  It is a problematic word.  I don’t have as many problems with it in its adjective form as when it is used as a noun, but psychic abilities themselves are controversial, so the word is troublesome.  I have gotten to know enough other people with psychic abilities to realize that intuition, empathy, telepathy, psychokinesis, psychometry, remote viewing (or clairvoyance), clairaudience, and other forms of ESP are human capabilities that might be normal if they were accepted and allowed to develop naturally.  Instead, some people fear them, others condemn them, and still others have such overblown fantastic views of them that they think a “psychic” is omniscient and omnipotent.  It’s all bullshit, of course:  the fear, the superstitious condemnation and the fantasies.  But that’s the way this culture thinks, at the moment.

  Five people, more than any others, were instrumental in getting me started on what would end up being perhaps the greatest part of my life’s work, my career as a “psychic” counselor.  In conversation within my family, that word I have put in quotes is used casually, and often humorously, such as in the running in-joke, “You must be psychic!”  My husband says it to me occasionally, when I answer questions he hadn’t gotten around to asking or when I say something like, “I knew you were going to say that.” 

  I have picked it up from him and now say it to him or to my son, Doug, when one of them intuits, anticipates or perceives something that some people would consider to be out of the ordinary.  It’s one of the ways we process, play with, and cope with a world in which one or another of us occasionally has to deal with looks of amazement and exclamations such as, “You’re for REAL, aren’t you?” from our clients.  If they don’t think we’re legit, I wonder why they consult us.

  The first mentor of my psychic career was my mother.  She usually knew who was calling before she picked up the phone.  As a child, I couldn’t hide much from her and she always knew when I was lying.  So did my father.  For some time, I took that as a challenge and put a lot of effort into becoming an effective liar.  Then later I came to understand that I have a talent for projective telepathy and, as I started developing it, I stopped trying to lie.  The two things are incompatible.

  Nobody in my parents’ household or our extended family used the word, “psychic.”  I was an adolescent before I became acquainted with it.  I didn’t have any word for my mother’s (and my own) good guesses about who was on the phone, my knowing at the start of a live televised horse race which one would win, or the way my mother and I tended to answer questions before they were asked.  It was just the way we were.

  Rhys Court was my second mentor.  At a critical time in my life, he gave me my first Tarot reading.  It told me what I needed to know to get through that crisis.  Impressed, I came back and asked Rhys to do another reading for me, but he told me to learn to do it myself.  I shoplifted my first deck of cards.  At the time, I was not yet aware of the traditional superstition that the Tarot is sacred and “money should not change hands” over it.  I didn’t have any money, which was part of what that crisis was about.

  During that homeless period, much of my time each day was spent in the public library.  If I wasn’t there, I was probably in the Odyssey Coffeehouse, sitting at a table made from a cable spool, with a deck of Tarot cards and a book on reading Tarot by Eden Gray, the third of my early mentors.  To get practice, I’d ask my friends and acquaintances if I could read for them.  I was too reticent to approach strangers and ask them.  Sometimes, I would have to pick up the book during a reading and look up the meaning of a card.  That was how I learned them.

  My fourth and fifth mentors were the first two “strangers” who approached me and asked me for readings.  An older man named Bill Baker would let me practice on him each time he encountered me at the coffeehouse.  He gave me feedback on the details and accuracy of my readings, to help me fine tune my skills.  He wasn’t into metaphysics or Tarot.  He was into words, as I have always been, and he commented on my vocabulary.  He said that one thing which impressed him about my readings was my sincerity.  I recall little else about him, except that his encouragement helped me continue in my metaphysical studies, even in prison where books on the “occult” were forbidden.

  The other person there at the Odyssey Coffeehouse who helped me along this road was the late astrologer, Esther Leinbach.  She pointed out the astrological symbolism in the Tarot, and as I would read for her and others, she would comment and fill in details from the astrological angle.  It was during those days sitting around one or another of those big spool tables with a group of interested observers, reading cards, that I first began to be called, “psychic.”

  That was in winter and spring of 1970.  The following summer, I went to prison for possession of marijuana.  I was there for fifteen months, after which I spent a rootless time riding freight trains and hitchhiking (all covered in various memoir segments linked from this hub page–let me know if you want to be on my protected list to access the links).  By that time, I no longer needed to look up the meanings of the cards.  It has never been easy for me to break the ice and start a conversation, and I discovered that my Tarot cards were effective in letting me meet new people and get to know a lot about anyone in a very short time.  I’d pull them out at parties, or anyplace where there were time, space, and people.

  I came to Alaska in 1973, and in 1976, during the economic bust that followed the pipeline boom, my then-soon-to-be-husband, Doug’s dad, Charley, and I were unemployed, eating out of dumpsters and selling at flea markets the junk we salvaged from the trash.  Each morning, he’d go to Denny’s for coffee with a bunch of his friends who were carpenters and building contractors, looking for work.  One day, he came home with a clipping from the newspaper.  It was a call for vendors, musicians, jugglers, fortune-tellers, etc., to participate in the first annual Girdwood Forest Fair.

  In the forest behind the Girdwood fire hall, he put up a frame from the same salvaged 2x4s we used for our flea market booth, and I covered it with India print bedspreads and furnished it with floor pillows.  My table for spreading the cards was a scrap of plywood laid across a melon crate.  He stood outside talking to passersby and explaining how I worked.  In answer to the first person who asked how much it cost, he said, “Whatever you think it’s worth after you hear it.”  That was my first gig as a professional psychic, and I still use those words to answer that question.

  From then through most of the eighties, I worked summers only, adding more fairs and festivals.  I began to encounter prejudice and religious persecution, and made it my mission for a while to demystify all that psychic and metaphysical stuff and open some of the closed doors.  For a while, I was the only card reader working the festivals.  Then, suddenly, one year in the mid-eighties, six others set up booths in Girdwood and shocked and frightened the xian fundies into action.

  Previously, they had contented themselves with sitting down in front of my booth to sing hymns, and haranguing the people sitting around outside waiting to get in to see me, until Charley or one of my neighboring boothies would notify the management and the bouncer would come remove them.  From about the second or third year of the Forest Fair, there has been a sign at the entrance, saying, “No politicians, religious orders, or dogs, allowed.”

  With so many of us there, I suppose they felt we were too great a threat, and a delegation appeared at the planning meeting for the next fair, trying to get us all banned.  They succeeded only in part.  There were enough xians on the board to get everyone else banned, but I had enough supporters there who knew, respected and trusted me, that they were able to get me “grandfathered” in, since I had been there every year since the first one. 

  I was at the Girdwood Forest Fair just a few days before Doug was born, having Braxton-Hicks contractions, with paramedics from the first aid booth coming by to check on me every half hour or so.  The next two summers, Doug sat on my lap and nursed while I was doing readings.  I not only fed him as I worked, I ate in little snacks between clients, because the crowd outside waiting was so large that it could take hours to get in to see me.  Charley kept encouraging me to speed it up, cut it short, move them through.  I got better and better at cutting straight to the important stuff and getting it across.

  Anchorage, where I still lived at that time, had a few well-known psychics.  One had helped searchers locate survivors of a plane crash.  Another had been shot in the face three times by someone who thought she knew too much about his criminal activities, and survived.  There was a cadaverous, hard drinking, chain smoking guy who believed that he kept his psychic powers at a peak only by keeping his hold on this life as tenuous as possible.  I met them all, one way or another.  Many of them passed through the Astrological Center of Alaska, where I minded the bookstore when the owner was away, and taught classes a few evenings a week while Doug was small.

  Then we moved to this valley when Doug was two years old, and two years later Charley moved out.  I kept working the festivals in summer, and made a few trips into Anchorage during the winter to work parties, see longtime clients, or read cards in the front window of the Source Metaphysical Bookstore.  It was there that a young woman consulted me about her relationship with an abusive boyfriend. 

  The cards advised her, through me, to leave him.  Instead of leaving him, she told him that the fortune-teller had told her she should leave.  I don’t know if she ever did leave him.  She was still there, according to him, for the next few weeks as he made repeated threatening phone calls to me, warning me to leave his woman alone.

  Readings were as good as currency, a lot of the time.  I traded readings for all sorts of goods and services.  I had standing arrangements with a few Anchorage merchants, massage therapists, and other psychics, to stop in for swap sessions when I was in town.  I was trading readings with Nancy Swanson one cold winter evening before heading back out of the city, when I asked her for advice in expanding my work so I’d have some regular income in winter as well as summer.

  She asked me, “Can you do absent readings?”  I didn’t even think before I answered, “yes.”  Just once, two young women had come to my booth at a music festival asking about a friend who was in a coma.  I generally consider it unethical to read for one person at another’s request, but in that case, and in a few cases when parents wanted readings for their children, I have done it.  Nancy suggested that I start advertising and doing readings by mail.  My first ad was in the Old Farmer’s Almanac in 1987.

  I advertised in Psychic Guide (later Body, Mind & Spirit), in Gnosis, Magical Blend, Fate (horrible experience, tons of crank letters), Voices from Spirit, several other magazines, some local publications, and the National New Age Yellow Pages.  JadedFey doesn’t recall which magazine it was that she picked up in a tattoo parlor and found the ad she tore out and kept for a while before writing to me, but that was what led indirectly to my blogging on Xanga.

  I was doing about a dozen readings a day by mail at the peak in the late eighties.  One interesting request came from a mathematician.  He apologized, said he really didn’t believe in psychics, but he was desperate.  He had been working on a proof, and his equations were not coming out right.  He wanted to know what was wrong, if he was wasting his efforts.  I told him he’d made a simple error in calculation.  He found it, corrected it, thanked me, apologized again for not believing in psychics, and sent a generous check.

  The publisher of a small pagan newsletter, The Graverobber’s Gazette, wrote to me for advice about relocating.  He wanted to establish a Museum of the Occult and had several locations in mind.  He liked my work so much that he not only paid me, he put a glowing review and a free full page ad in the newsletter for me.  I didn’t even know he’d done that, until Greyfox answered that ad.  That was how I happened to encounter my soulmate of several millennia and many lives, this time around.

  After Greyfox came into my life, bringing his addictions and personality disorders, we worked as partners for a couple of years, until it all dissolved into chaos.  Without money for advertising, my mail order business diminished, but I still get occasional requests from former clients or their referrals, or from someone who has found the National New Age Yellow Pages in a library somewhere.  Around the turn of the millennium, I became too ill to do the summer festival circuit.

  I thought of myself as being in semi-retirement until I got the inspiration to create Coyote Medicine’s Klinic.  I used that outlet to publish a collection of FAQs covering many metaphysical topics and the most common questions I have been asked by clients.  I posted readings there for many Xangans until Xanga changed its Terms of Use to allow only non-commercial use, and I was forced into retiring again… retreating, I suppose, is a better word for it.  I work when I’m able and don’t even try to do readings when the brain fog is too thick or the clutter too deep on my worktable, but I still work from time to time.
  

  • 9:19 pm
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