Waking Up!

Today starts a whole new beginning for you and me! I’ve been on this journey called life now for 51 years. I’ve always felt like I’ve had so much to say and teach. As a child, I was often dismissed and deemed overly sensitive and mellow dramatic. What can I say? I just wanted to be heard and understood.

I didn’t quite realize that what I had was a gift until I was about 8 years old. One night at 11:10, I awoke to a “feeling”; an instant knowing, you might say. I felt my grandmother close by drifting into the stillness of my mind and bedroom. I sensed her words of comfort as she told me she was free and happy and to not worry about her. I felt her love. I felt her pass to another dimension in which I did not know. I laid back down as gently and naturally as I had been “woken” up.

I’m not sure what time it was that I felt a gentle hand rubbing arm and my mom’s voice ushering me out of bed to the dim lit living room. “We wanted to tell you kids Grammy passed away tonight”. Silence. Sometimes comforting, sometimes torture. For me at this moment, neither. We sat quietly for a moment waiting for someone to mend the tension. Finally, in a faint, sleepy whisper, I simply said, “I know. She died at 11:10. She said she is happy.” I kissed and hugged my mom and dad and toddled down the hallway, crawled back into the comfort of my bed and drifted off to sleep.

My childhood of awakening went beyond this one experience. There were others before, but this was my most memorable. Later that year, I would announce my Aunt’s new home was “haunted”, which became quite evident. I always knew things ahead of the news or local community. I envisioned the world like the crisscross highways seen on the TV show C.H.I.P.S. Well, that’s how I described the other realms that I somehow knew existed. I was, at that young age, limited by my vocabulary to explain the pictures that formed in my brain. The only thing that has yet to be explained to me, witnessed one night with my Dad and Sister, still leaves me feeling bewildered.

The night my father found out he had esophageal cancer, I stayed and talked for hours with him in that pale hospital room. We brought up this one night, feeling as though it had only been yesterday, and still could not come up with any plausible explanation for the odd phenomena.

Looking out our bedroom window on Davenport Street in a small town in Maine, my sister and I saw the most odd thing. Running out to get my dad and disrupting his movie on HBO, was our first instinct. I’m sure he thought it was a plot in order to stay up later. In the late 1970’s, we had a bedtime of 8:00 during the school week and 9:00 on the weekend. But occasionally, we could navigate our way to watching a late movie on the weekends. Tonight was not a ploy.

Dad came in probably to amuse his two young daughters and dismiss whatever concoction we had imagined. However, there he too, stood staring out the window into the clear sky night of a full moon. “Hmmm?” Was all he got out at first. “What is it, Dad?” we chimed in unison waiting for words of wisdom and comfort. But he had none. He assured us it was nothing, in a wavering voice and heralded us back into bed. With kisses on our forehead with a whisper of “Love you. Sleep Tight”, Dad went back out to watch his movie. I laid awake wondering what this was. What did it mean? Somewhere between thinking it was a sign Jesus was coming back or an alien invasion, I somehow wandered into sleep. That night in the hospital, Dad said he looked out the window several more times and often wondered what it really was he saw with his little girls that night.

Perhaps it was that night that gave me my true awakening. My curiosity for wanting to know more. My courage to ask the questions I desperately wanted to know. And the ability to reach beyond my own comprehension to the possibilities of all that could possibly exist. What was this thing that left such an impact? Simply a beautifully clear night, with the full moon showing…..and right in the middle of that beautiful full moon was a perfect, bright Red Cross!