The Accidental Medium

 

 

Spirit gives me messages in movies.
Not in Hollywood movies.  Movies in my head.  They play on a screen in my third eye.  I can see them best if I close my eyes.

But when Spirit wants to give me a heads-up about something particularly important, it gives me a snapshot. I could be looking at something as innocuous as a kitchen tool, then my eyes zoom in on the item. And I hear a “Click-Click”, like the sound of an older model camera that’s taking a photo in my head.

I’ve learned that the “Click-Click” is telling me to remember the image – it will be important.  It’s telling me – “Just file that picture for future reference. You’ll need it.” I’m not told why. I just have to wait patiently for the answer to be revealed.

Our long-awaited family reunion has started.
And we’ve just arrived at my great Aunt’s family cottage compound where the party is already in full swing. My husband goes with the kids to watch the croquet tournament on the back lawn. I head to the kitchen to pitch in with the dinner that my Aunts are busily preparing. I once managed restaurants in my former pre-kid life.  The kitchen is a welcoming place that quickly plugs me into the social whirl.

One of my Aunts immediately hands me the job of slicing cold meats for the buffet table. Her younger sister whispers in my ear,  “We’ve been avoiding this job. I hope you find something decent to cut with.  These knives are AWFUL.”

Like the rest of the females in my Mom’s clan, I’m pretty handy in the kitchen. We don’t wait for a man to sharpen kitchen knives – I learned early on to use a sharpening steel or a second knife to get the job done. I open the drawer and find a half-decent slicing knife. But what catches my attention in the bottom of this kitchen drawer is a very old whetstone.

“CLICK-CLICK.”

Spirit is very subtle. I would have totally ignored the “Click-Click” before. It’s just an old fashioned knife sharpener after all. But I’ve learned that the simplest things can hold important messages. I file the image of the old whetstone for future reference.

Fast forward 28 hours.
I’m talking with my cousin whom I haven’t seen in a long time. We’re standing in front of the urn he has lovingly carved out of wood. He lost his Dad 6 months before. It’s been a tough time. My cousin has already opened up to me that he feels and even sees his Dad around – out of the corner of his eye.  It comforts him.

My cousin is one of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet. Calm, gentle natured. Great Dad. Caring husband. Reliable. Trustworthy.  Solid. An empath. He takes care of other people before he takes care of himself.  The Go-To Guy. (Every family has one.)  He takes on way more than most.  He keeps it to himself if he gets anxious, frustrated, fearful, angry.

As my cousin talks about his Dad, his Dad appears behind him. I’ve never seen this before, but with the family reunion, and his family around, my Uncle appears surrounded in a dark purplish blue radiant aura. It’s stunningly beautiful.

My Uncle gently lays his hand on my cousin’s left shoulder. I’m thinking – okay. what’s up? And in my head I hear the instructions,

“Wait for it…!  Wait for it….!”

I wait and I listen to my cousin recounting the last days of my Uncle’s life. Even though it was agonizing, he and his Mom stayed with his Dad to the very end.  Looking back, he says he’ll never regret spending those final hours with his father.

And then my cousin says, “I have one regret.”

Here it comes…
My Uncle starts whispering “It’s okay. It’s okay.” Over and over again.

My cousin tells me a story from long ago. He was still in school. The family was going through difficult financial times. My Uncle was coping but not so well. Like many people, he’d resorted to numbing his fears with alcohol.

After school each day, my cousin would come home and immediately start chores in the family business, doing a lot of the heavy dirty work. On one particular day when my cousin was home and well into his chores, my Uncle sidled in. My Uncle was having a particularly hard day coping and was already well into his cups.

My cousin has set exceptionally high standards for himself. He doesn’t blow. But he blew then. There was a heated exchange between them.

This altercation has been emblazoned on my cousin’s psyche – deeply affecting him some 20 years later.  He cannot let go of the incident:  The argument was not up to the expectations he has for himself. I’m thinking that this incident was probably the first time my cousin ever stepped forward and countered his father, showing the depth of his frustration and disappointment with his Dad and the situation.

My cousin bursts into quiet tears.
His pain is a wave that hits me. But I’ve already prepared myself and let it wash over me rather than absorb it.  Because I’ve stayed grounded, I can clearly hear my Uncle saying reassuringly, “I deserved it.”

I tell my cousin his Dad is standing behind him. I let him know his father does not hold anything against him for what happened in the past.  He needed to hear what my cousin had to say. He knows he had it coming.

But my cousin is still deep in the pain. He explains there is no excuse. He shouldn’t have lashed out in anger. His Dad was doing his best, trying to keep things together. He was human.

Then I get a download and continue talking. On automatic pilot.

We’re ALL human. We can get angry. We can clash, especially in stressful situations. Maybe, just maybe, this is the first time his Dad actually started to listen – because the anger came from a supportive loved one who’d never expressed an angry bone in his body. It just may have been the first of a series of wake-up calls that helped my Uncle to redirect his path for a better future.  He got his Dad’s attention. And that was a very good thing that came out of their fight.

I tell my cousin about boundaries (important for an empath). That if he hadn’t said anything about the situation, that he would be part of the problem. Co-dependent. While it wasn’t pretty, he’d made it clear to my Uncle there were other ways to cope, and that my Uncle was fully capable of coping differently.

My cousin gradually calms. But he’s holding on to this pain – perhaps he’s had if for so long, he doesn’t really know how to let it go. It’s part of his story: In his mind he’s disappointed himself and his Dad. There’s no changing it.  And that view has kept him in his place, holding my cousin back by keeping him full of guilt, and now regret. It happened. It can’t be undone.

Or can it?

Fast forward 17 hours.
We are now on the old family farm – now parceled out. Barns, silos and out buildings long since torn down. Just the big old farm house still standing. It was where my cousin and his family spent the first years of his life. My Uncle was the last in our family to farm this land more than 30 years ago.

A gang of us – three generations of relations spanning 80 years – start the walk into the fields and back towards the woods. There is a special place where my Aunt wants to spread some of my Uncle’s ashes. My Aunt stalls the walk to the woods – it’s overwhelming. My Mom stays with her, in what used to be the farmyard, as my Aunt talks about the old days, getting up her nerve.

The humidity hangs glistening over the cornfields.   We all wait for the two stragglers, while trying to stay cool in the shelter of trees at the edge of the woods. My cousin decides to make the long trek back through the oppressive heat to fetch his Mom and my Mom. When he finally returns with the two women, my cousin is quietly elated. His eyes are sparkling.

He shows me a dusty old whetstone in the palm of his hand. We’d all traveled single file down that same narrow uneven path by the side of the corn field, carefully picking our way across the deep furrows where the corn rows end.  But it was my cousin who found the well-worn whetstone sticking out of the sandy loam – it was the same color as the earth.  Hard to spot.

My Mom comments that whetstones were commonly used by farmers working out in the fields to sharpen the old farm implements on the fly.

My cousin is smiling and shaking his head. “I don’t know why nobody else saw the whetstone. Everyone was on the same path – you all walked over it. It was right there – sticking out of the ground.”

I know why.  My cousin had gone the extra distance. This was meant for him.  I look at my cousin. I smile. I murmur to him. “That’s a gift from your Dad.”

I never tell him why I am absolutely sure it’s a gift from his Dad – About the heads up I got two days earlier while working in the kitchen with my Aunts. CLICK-CLICK.  “It’s important.”

But my cousin doesn’t need that verification. The look on his face tells me he KNOWS it’s a gift from his Dad.

Maybe the healing has begun.

— With thanks to Spirit for infinite return.
(c) 2010, 2011, 2012 The Accidental Medium. UltraMarine Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.