A light portal formed, and I waited at the precipice, anticipating the unknown. The light pulled me forward, forward as the light changed and patterns emerged. What was once a constant feeling of everlasting love began to morph into other forms of light. The waves of energy began to grow dense and heavy on me, until I realized I could feel. For the first time, I could sense pressure and I felt alive with tingling sensations where energy began to send messages through me. I was becoming physical, and the shock seemed to come suddenly yet persist. Overwhelming sensations began to pulse through me, and I felt a rhythm and knew this was my heartbeat. The physical pressure and density grew and grew and the light changed and with a sudden burst, the brightest and most dense light flashed into me and energy waves transmitting sound hammered me from all sides. What this what it was like to be born?

Having this thought, I was suddenly able to ground myself and feel my way into the moment. I experienced what would come to be known as an out of body experience. I was able to view myself and the situation occurring.

I was in awe of what I was witnessing. Humans, bathed in compassionate rose pink light, assisted one in the childbirth in a small setting beneath a few trees. The sun shone brightly, and my fresh little body glowed in the light as they cleaned me. There was so much about Earth I wasn’t prepared for, and my first shock was the complex beauty of light radiating from and between all the living, physical forms. The ground gave off a vibrant blue-green wave-like pulsing energy, and the trees radiated that energy further out, changing the patterns and colors. I felt warm and the physical pressure returned as I was softly swaddled in a clean cloth that I knew had been woven just for me.

I had many out of body instances as an infant, able to watch what was happening around me, trying to comprehend the language and rituals, trying to understand human life. It was so raw, so fragmented and compartmentalized compared to the eternal, unconditional love energy and non-physical conscious-based “life” I was used to. Although all knowledge was constantly available to me, I struggled to ask the questions. I needed simply to observe to know why the plants leaned towards the sun, why the humans created new objects from their surroundings, and why they behaved the way they did.

In my infantile body, I was learning to connect a sensation to a meaning. I knew that a tickle or tingle meant someone or someone was making contact with my skin, my outer-most layer. I knew the images I was seeing where part of the world around me, and patterns began to emerge. The light would grow dim slowly, then return again after a period of darkness. There were faces attached to those who cared for me. They gave me everything I needed, and I was learning slowly that I had needs.

I knew my mother. I knew from the moment she held me in her arms that I felt recognition for the first time. Her scent was the first scent stored in my memory. The comforting and nourishing energy that radiated from her body healed in me that trauma I had sustained from the rush of becoming physical. She lulled me to sleep with a rhythm she created when she rocked me and hummed. It was a sound I recognized from someplace that seemed far away. Indeed, it was her very form that allowed me to know I could recall and recognize things; that some things were familiar and others were not. Thus I had a base from which I could determine what I knew and what I did not know, as a human.

I got to know my father and three siblings. There were others, older people, whom I had difficulty recalling. Certain foods began to smell good to me, allowing me to know that some sensations or situations were pleasant and others I did not agree with. Being cold, hungry or damp caused me to let out a wail until someone altered the situation and I became comfortable again. During these times I would sometimes have an out of body awareness, and I felt a sense of sadness towards those who would comfort me. I began to realize how much of a burden I truly was to the family, not being able to do anything for myself as they could. And yet, each action on their part was dressed in duty and carved out with compassion. Although my wailing was awful, and I turned a hideous dark color in the face, the love from my family never ceased despite the inconvenience of constant interruptions. An overwhelming amount of respect for them formed in my heart, settling there and never leaving. The unconditional love energy I was used to being bathed in inherently in my surroundings was here, physically, being carried out in the actions of these people. Emotionally, I would seek this always in all beings.

Being allowed to crawl on the ground was one of my greatest joys. Ribbons of brilliant light streamed around me, and I moved towards each one. At the base of these tiny rainbows, I would often discover a new object or place I had not yet noticed or examined. Sometimes my mother’s toes would enthrall me, and I would look up from them, all the way up her body and when our eyes met, a giggle would slip from my throat. Her face would change expressions and I would attempt to mimic them. Sometimes she or one of my siblings would carry me out of our grass hut into the field where they worked, and I would inspect the many creature beings and plant forms that rose from the ground, pouring energy forth. My greatest fascination was the energy streaming all around me in a myriad of forms, and I looked for it everywhere, seeing how it connected all life. I came to crave this experience more than food or comfort. It seemed to sustain me, to breathe life into me when I was tired, much the way my mother once had.

Gently, those around me reassured me that the adventure waiting for us in Mother Earth’s physical realm would be the best one yet, for us all.

Non-physical me, comprised of warm love energy and concepts, had yet to ever be physical. This was a new plan, ordained by the high lords who were encouraging us to take part in the embodiment of our entity selves to create and move a world of love like we had never seen before.

I selected the task of the healer; a guide which was to help others in the journey, but I was still unsure of what this would entail. Slowly, those around me gave way to a larger one, a brighter and stronger teacher entity who was to brief me on what to expect when I descend to Earth.

“The journey that awaits you is one of great importance,” said the teacher. “But before you begin the tasks laid out for you in the journey, you must first acclimate to life, sensory input, and other humans as you learn to become a human yourself.

Only those in your immediate surroundings can show you how to be human and you must follow them as they teach you. The light energy that radiates from the sun will warm you, and the absence of it will be felt as cold upon your new skin. This skin will contain your non-physical self, and you will need to use it as your vessel. Care for it, nurture it, and heal it as you would heal those around you. This will be known to you as your body. Each human has one body. Each human life will be influenced by that body’s state, and it is your job to help those around you care for their bodies.

Because the body is a physical construct, you may aid your healing practices with other physical items. All physical constructs are made up of life force energy, that which you are now. Thus, you will seek the energy that heals and feels best. This life force energy will allow you to find it by that which you most desire, as your thoughts will manifest into physical reality; though not instantly. The journey is to see the path to what you most desire illuminate even in the darkest of times.

You will come to understand the concept of time; a measurement of space with intervals consisting of punctuating occurrences by which life is calculated. Though it may seem stagnant and pre-calculated, time is malleable and varies greatly.

The journey will guide you to understand the distinct juxtaposition of life and death, and how each physical entity in nature continues to move itself forward, even at the expense of other life forms. While this is regarded in a matter-of-fact way by most physical life, human life will begin to build emotional value towards life and disgust for death and will question itself when confronted with moving forward at all costs and having to choose between life and death both for itself and those around it. This will birth itself in raw form, and grow to complexity only to question its own maturity from time to time. Your task is to aid in healing caused by the trauma that may arise in human life from the pain, sorrow or heartbreak that can occur.

Stay close to the Earth and to those energies with which you most closely relate, and these will guide you. Non-physical entities such as myself will be available to you for assistance, unconditionally, for as long as you are physical.

You will be born unto a family that already has other children who can help you grow to understand human life, who can teach you how you are expected to behave and what language to use. But this conversation, this information being relayed to you currently, that will most likely be gone.”

Sitting with my back against a tall oak tree, upon an ancient and twisted pile of roots, I am looking out into a valley from a cliff at the edge of an old forest. In the valley below, a river runs in a horseshoe bend, snaking through the geology, nurturing the wildlife and flora around it. It’s here, that I can see far into the future, as images paint themselves upon the canvas of the river and the open sky. The clouds make way for visions depicting the answers to the questions I ask the earth.

Bird fly around, the sun shines and the only sound I hear is the wind blowing gently through the trees. I’m deeply connected to the earth, to all the life around me, feeling no separation from the other beings as cosmic energy ripples through us all.

But I’m not there. I’m sitting at my desk at work, in an office full of silently typing co-workers, sitting at cubicles. Occasionally they speak to one another, one smirks, the other shakes their head, but they never stop typing. The phone rings, and I’m taken aback by how rude my coworker can be to a stranger asking a simple question.

“It’s not my fault they’re stupid,” she says.

Something inside my stomach tightens. My boss clears his throat, making me jump in my seat. My anxiety is strong, and I’m drink coffee, which doesn’t help. It’s intended to make me work harder, but the distractions are taking over.

I’m standing in a meeting to pitch the news stories I will pursue that day, when a shimmering blue portal opens up to the side of the room.

“Is this really happening right now?” I’m thinking to myself.

Back at my computer, the Internet browser has slowed to a crawl, bumping up my anxiety. “I so don’t want to be here right now. I hate this job. This work sucks,” I’m thinking to myself, stuck in a negative feedback loop, making my body feel like it’s weeping. Suddenly, my computer shuts down.

I can’t help but burst out laughing! Thank you, I tell the universe. I needed that!

Pretending to be upset by the setback, I fight to get my computer back up and running, when the office manager arrives to let us know the main server needs to be switched off because the entire system has gone screwy. I’m overjoyed.

The deeper I’m pushed into the corporate world, the harder I’m pulled into the spiritual. Living in the city may have been the best thing for me spiritual, in an ironic sort of way. To escape from mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcies, layoffs, annual revenue growth percentages and employee headcounts, I’ve turned to meditation, energy healing, psychic readings, calling upon spirit guides, receiving divine messages, prayer, and books.

I hadn’t read a book in years until recently. One day I purchased several books from Amazon, realizing I would read subjects that interested me. My burning desire to become a shaman pressed on my brain, egging me to soak up all the information I could about different types of shamanism, methods, healing treatments, plant knowledge, animal spirits and journeying. The stack of books beside my bed keeps growing, and so does the pile of sage ash by the pheasant feathers.

Laughing with my husband and the dog, flinging socks around the living room, having tickle fights and ‘pants-ing’ the dog are a constant reminder of the balance I have to strike between corporate life as a business journalist and spiritual life as a healer and counselor. It’s about joy.

I once heard Abraham Hicks say in a YouTube video, “Do only want you want to do.”

I’ve carried that phrase around in the back of my mind, and it echoes out whenever I am forcing myself to do something I don’t want to do. Clearly, it doesn’t mean don’t do the dishes if you don’t feel like it, or don’t call your friend if you don’t feel like talking today. While that may be part of it, it’s a much deeper reminder.

Don’t do what doesn’t resonate with your soul. If you find yourself forcing yourself to do projects that bore you, working with people who frustrate you or bring you down, eating food you dislike that makes you sick; stop. There’s a reason you’re not happy. What is it? You always already know the answer.

Beating yourself up for being unhappy is like scolding a dog for showing his teeth. He snarls to tell you he’s feeling scared. Being unhappy is a reaction to the discord between your soul and the life you are leading.

The difference between a job and a calling are humongous.

I didn’t know many people in the small Southern town where I went to high school, apart from some of my classmates. Yet, I somehow came to know a local artist, who hired me from time to time for odd jobs including alphabetizing all of his books into a library and posing clothed for paintings. He once held a party, at which I met a man who creeped me out as much as he fascinated me.

He was White Eagle, you could tell by his hair. Thin, yet tall and straight, it was difficult to discern his age. He walked with a stick, not to assist him, though. A string of beads and feathers dangled from the top of the stick. A man of little words, he only nodded when I asked him for a cigarette as a bashful teenager, sensing he wouldn’t judge me. He told me I could have as many as I liked.

White Eagle seemed ancient, while seeming light years from death’s door. He was plainly dressed in jeans and a vest with no shirt underneath. I wondered if he was poor.

Over the years I have briefly spotted him in town, and sometimes on social media. He’s not a man of the town or a friend, White Eagle is a shaman.

If he’s native American, I couldn’t pin him to any particular tribe. He hits the nail on the head in his medicine ways, speaking little, thinking and feeling some of the time, but mostly walking in spirit.

When he walks by, there is no sound, only a gente knowing that a spirit has come or gone. Moving quietly down the sidewalk minding his own business, he could easily step out of his skin, leaving the carbon behind in flesh or ashes and move through to the ethereal, blessing each curse and spilling healing out onto the world around him.

Native Americans and other indigenous people grow up immersed in spirituality, in the connections between plants, animals, directions, elements and the cycles of the natural world with the human experience. Coming to the table as an adult in the modern world is like getting thrown in the pool from the second story and trying to learn to swim.

The doors have been blown wide open, and at times I’m drowning in what feels like my soul and spirit being pulled in a million different directions. The energy of others around me pounds me like the waves of a tide coming in. The spirit world holds my attention hostage, with the dead beckoning me to be their messenger. My teacher told me not to make any more excuses; meditation was the only way to slow down the barrage, and I’m learning to not be a doormat for the spirit realm. Now I take appointments, and I make them regularly. I’m learning to look inward to see outward; a phrase that gets tossed around in the New Age community. I didn’t get it until I saw the proof in the pudding.

Meditation, followed by opening myself up to the spirits for answers, messages, visions or anything else they wish for me to know. I write down what I see, even if I think my mind created an image and drew upon it with associations. I write it down and acknowledge it regardless of its origin. I accept all information that comes across on that blank, dark screen in the mind. Then I examine the information, and research symbolic meanings. You’d be amazed what lines up with reality.

I had a vision of trees, birches to be exact. These have a symbolic meaning associated with the week after the Winter Solstice, ushering in the first of the Celtic calendar. This came to me on the Winter Solstice.

I walk in two worlds, a psychic told me. Another said my obstacles are small enough to simply step over.

Walking along a fence is tricky, you try to balance yourself so you don’t fall to one side or the other. You can see both from there, but can never fully be in one and the other at the same time. This is what it means to walk in the spiritual and real world. The spirit walkers are like grandparents, and I feel as though spiritually, I am still a child, learning to swim. I’m doggy-paddling in the deep end while my spirit animal, the Great Blue Heron, wades quietly, nearly motionless through murky. Teach me to move like you through multiple worlds, Heron.

Walking in these worlds means always standing in your truth. To practice this, I act on every spiritual/emotional impulse I feel, mustering up trust that the spirits won’t misguide me, and that the universe always supports me. My higher self is constantly guiding me towards the greatest good, and acting on impulses never leads me astray.

And so I walk forth into the commercial, industrial world as a child shaman in a business suite.

“Do you sometimes feel like you try to look through people?” asked Ed.

“I feel like I do,” I replied. “I try to pick them apart, I don’t know why.”

“I know I do,” said Ed. “I don’t know why, but I know I do it.”

He leaned back into the wooden chair at his computer desk. He crossed his legs and ashed his cigarette in a stone ashtray.

“I don’t like people that don’t like the earth,” he said after some time.

As he spoke to me about being a teacher, working at the nuclear power plant, and trying to kill himself, he kept stopping. He would shut up for a moment and stare at the small baby possum I was holding against my chest with my hand. She was fast asleep on me like she’d known me forever.

“Idn’t that something? My, I’ve never seen this. She knows you’re different,” said Ed. I figured he meant she could tell I was a female. I assumed she smelled my hormones, and my lover’s hormones on me. Yes, I was definitely pouring hormones from a steamy moment earlier that nearly made me late for this.

It was funny that he told me he tried to kill himself. Not because that amuses me, because it doesn’t. It’s not funny.

It’s funny to me because I told him stories were important. Then I brought up Johnny Murphy, at the Hermitage Retirement Home in Rockingham, who tried to kill himself and failed. He never said how exactly. He lost a lot of fine motor skills but over the years has regained them with the help of music, playing the piano. Johnny was a man with no family. He had unofficially adopted the Thursday morning nurse, who had two children. He said this made him feel like a grandfather. His girlfriend of five years spent her days beside him in a motorized wheelchair. She had some form of mental handicap which I could not identify. She was nice, and invited me to be her guest at the retirement home’s next dinner function. She told me a man would come to sing on their stage, and Johnny would play the piano and the harmonica.

“That’s my singing partner,” she said to me about the singer. “He said he doesn’t sing without me. He said I was his singing partner. When I sing I get glad. It makes me happy. I sing for the Lord, I’m a Christian.”

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure why I brought it up to Ed.

Ed’s girlfriend Karen was awesome. She was a writing teacher at a nearby community college. She knew a lot about wildlife. She told me all about possum defense mechanisms and diet.

“They are omnivorous; they can eat pretty much anything,” she explained. “It’s difficult to keep them in captivity because they need to have a very diverse diet.”

Ed seemed to be on the same page as me. He didn’t like people, apart from the storytelling he did on stage at various events, sometimes attracting hundreds of listeners. He spun lies and tall tales and amused you with the fantastic and ridiculous. But at the end of the day he just wanted to go home to his possum and sit in the woods, drinking coffee.

“Dawn, I’m pretty much reclusive out here. In the five years I’ve been here, not more than ten different cars has come down that dirt road of mine. But you’re welcome here anytime. I wouldn’t invite just anyone down that dirt road. I might meet them someplace else. No one comes here.”

I actually found it a little odd when he told me about sitting in the woods at 2 a.m. drinking coffee, waiting for his possum to wake up. Maybe it wasn’t really coffee.

I was raised by parents who believe in having standards. I’ve been thinking for a while that standards get in the way of real life. I don’t have time to judge people if I’m here to write their stories. To get at the meat, I have to go where real people are.

Ed Duke lives in a single-wide trailer somewhere on the line between two cities, but not within city limits. He has several cats, smokes cigarette after cigarette and probably has a drinking problem. But for whatever reason I can’t seem to judge him. Even when he busted open his hand and was bleeding all over what I imagine is one of his only clean shirts without noticing, I couldn’t judge him. I felt a pure friendship, a platonic trust for him. I felt sympathetic towards him, and asked him frank questions. I did what I could to keep him talking because his voice had a deep, smooth quality to it that rolled like boulders on granite slabs.

He was like a mountain, ancient and weathered. I was like a tree, growing and bending to adapt.

Sometimes when I don’t know how to act in a social situation I just pull out the reporter cards and pretend I’m interviewing.

If they are being emotional, I shut up and let them talk. Silence pulls on the heart, and after a while the words come.

There were several times I thought he might cry. He said it was old age that made him stop killing things. Karen and I agreed it was sympathy, or empathy. He insisted on it being old age, but later revisited the topic with tears in his eyes in the middle of another conversation.

“I was sittin out there and I was watching Dude hunting a frog who was hunting a bug. Dude got the bug and the frog got to live.”

He choked up.

“It really taught me something, you know?”

He stood in the trailer’s kitchen, looking out over the sink into the living room where Karen and I sat. He leaned forward, propping himself up with his arms. He talked for a minute incoherently about losing family, or taking them for granted, I’m not sure which. He sunk his head for a moment and was silent.

The possums are his teachers.

I’m a firm believer that you have to find your vibration in the world. The world around you is composed of vibrations moving slowly, quickly, all speeds, making matter. There is always a perfect harmony to be achieved. Some people find their vibration in an airplane, while weaving, meditating on the back deck or fishing. The woods give Ed his vibration.

“People don’t know how to listen to the trees anymore. I can hear them.”

I remember the first time I found a vibration I liked. On the car ride to and from school as a child we would leave the village and drive through farmland through a forest to the Army base. Just before the forest there was some property that had a pond on it. I can recall seeing the fog change over the pond, seeing the vegetation change during the seasons and over the years. And one blue heron. He came back year after year. Perhaps it was a different heron each time, and perhaps there was only room for one at that pond. I’m no scientist, but as a child I was fascinated. I could feel that pond inside me. I could draw that place to this day. I would have dreams about creeping up on the heron in the fog on the opposite side of the pond and scaring him off on purpose, just by startling him. I would stand up among the reeds, and frogs would slip into the water. And sometimes the blue heron didn’t get startled.

I pride myself in being able to match most people’s vibrations.

I can connect to anyone. I can relate. There are few I cannot relate to. Ed feels like he can relate to me. Yet I’m a 23-year-old girl and he’s a sixty-something-year-old man.

He had a stroke a few weeks before. He said he can’t use his right hand as much anymore. I wanted to cry.

He likes to make people laugh. He’s kind of a clown. So even when he’s serious, he’s still entertaining. It’s hard not to laugh sometimes.

When I want to cry, I give a small giggle instead.

He gave me a book by a writer he knew that did well. He was a North Carolinian Thoreau, and his book was called “Coming Out of the Woods.” Ed seemed to think this man could get me published if I wrote something good.

IF.

“If you ever need some place to just get away, you can come here,” he told me in all seriousness, tilting his forehead down to me and raising his eyebrows. “You don’t even have to get out of your car if you don’t want to talk to nobody. I’ll leave you alone. Hell, you can get out of your car and walk butt naked across the yard and won’t nobody see you but The Lord.”

I told him I believed that each interaction you have with another being should be a positive one, because if you have a negative reaction, it will somehow affect you.

“It might come back to you right around the corner. It might come back to you long after you’re dead. But it will.”

He has a tattoo on his arm that says, “Acting or Reacting?”

What is it called when you do both at the same time?

Channeling?

We are channeling an experience. How odd that we should project this into TV. Someone saw how fundamental this part of the experience is to the human species.

We talked about TV. We talked about light and the effects of being indoors, away from the sun.

“That’s rock and roll right there, huh?” he said about his TV in the corner. It was a silver box that sat on some kind of wrought-iron farm equipment. This man was more interested in having his portraits taken with an antique chamber pot than having a nice TV or even a computer for that matter.

I wonder what “Coming out of the Woods” is about. Right now I can only think of going in.

On my way to Ed Duke’s house I got lost. I got lost on the way home as well.

The world is not enough. But it is such a perfect place to start, my love. And if you’re strong enough, together we can take the world apart, my love. People like us know how to survive. There’s no point in living, if you can’t feel alive.

Several months went by in silence from Ed. I often wondered how he was getting along, in the woods by himself. At some point he called me and told me he was taking a road trip with his possum, to do some storytelling. Then a few more months went by.

One morning I received an arrest notification from the Sheriff. Ed had been arrested for assault on a female and intent to kill with a deadly weapon. According to the arrest report, Ed had chased his girlfriend into her own home and pistol-whipped her and threatened to kill her. The news startled me and his mug shot made me want to cry, although I couldn’t. Perhaps the disbelief held the tears at bay.

Ed is in jail under bond until his hearing. I don’t know if I’ll hear from him again, the possum rehabilitator, the man who begged me to write his biography so he could take his life and have something to leave his daughter.