Before the introduction, I included my original poem, “Don’t.” I included it to make the point that even though my mother owns Puerto Rican descent and my father was Irish/English/American, I have connected with that part of my ethnic heritage which is descended from the Taino tribe on the island of Boriken (which is more commonly called Puerto Rico). Spiritually, I am of tribal, earth essence, which also includes other earth traditions, including Wicca. I included “Don’t” because I feel it accurately describes the me that is spiritual and not the me that appears European. As for this incarnation, I have been a freelance writer, accomplished equestrienne, former pleasure long distance swimmer, professional advocate, wife, mother and practicing shaman/spiritualist.
That is a mouth full, isn’t it? Many say that some people will believe anything because they want to or need to but my beginnings were very skeptical. Until my gifts fully developed within the last eight years, I thought of myself as an armchair metaphysicist/ philosopher. My gifts came into their own during this time but my experiences date back to my youth when I would overhear hushed whispers in Spanish between my mother and my aunt which I could not understand because I did not know Spanish at the time. Somehow I knew they were talking spiritual stuff. I don’t know how I knew, I just did.
When I was a child, I would see things—in the trees and in the shadows but also being raised old Catholic, I was afraid of what I saw because the Church would have called it evil. When I was about eighteen years old, my mother was going out one evening with her sister and I decided to go because as I told my mother, “You’re going to see a spiritualist and I want to know what this is about.” She asked me how did I know where she was going and I simply told I just did, which was the truth. I was expecting a half-hag, half-ogre looking woman, or a gypsy—like the ones that lurk in front of their storefronts and beckon you to come in. But she didn’t. She looked like anyone’s next door neighbor. And she knew things. All sorts of things but, I didn’t quite believe in spirits.
As a rebellious act against a church that terrified me into faith, I had decided that if a church needed to scare people into remaining faithful, how powerful was it’s god? That naturally led me to question if there was a god at all.
My childhood had been anything but blissful. I lived a life that was ravaged by an alcoholic father and a mother that became severely disabled due to a massive stroke. Most of my life was struggling through drunken tirades, more strokes and heart attacks that threatened my mother’s life with very few joyful memories in between. We lived in a poor, multi-ethnic neighborhood so although everyone was struggling, everyone else seemed to have surprise birthday parties and sleepovers while I didn’t dare because I never knew when my father would come home drunk and in a rage. Although I eventually came to understand that he was a soul in pain, when I was growing up my prayers for his sobriety and for my mother’s health seemed to fall on a deaf god’s ears. I wondered why god had given me this life, this family instead of a “Life with Father” family.
Although I found this spiritualist an amazing person, I rationalized her gift as a special phenomenon of having a more highly developed brain that was unaffected by filters and distractions. After all, I was a college student and spiritual stuff was just the mumbo-jumbo of the ignorant and superstitious. In college I made some interesting friends. We dabbled in tarot cards and palm readings and of us all, I surpassed everyone. I had one very unique friend at the time with whom I used to play mind games or telepathic communications. We were so in tune it was as if I were the receiver and he, the transmitter. He would hold a card and project a symbolic image into the pupils of my eyes until I would pick up pictures and images that I would translate into the suit of the card he held. This was all an exercise of the power of the brain, mind you.
When he would call, I would know it was him. When I was in class I would get the mental message to meet him in front of the statue of the college plaza at a certain time and sure enough, he would be there. He used to travel astrally so I would see him in my room at night. This became so frequent I would wake up and say, “Oh, go away” then turn over and go back to sleep. As far as I was concerned, I was working on eliminating my penchant for distraction in order for the fuller potential of the brain to be realized. This was scientific play and had nothing to do with spirits.
Well, this friend was interested in grave yards and zombies and was always trying to get me to go to a cemetery for a midnight ritual but, I was never so inclined because, quite frankly, it scared me. As I struggled with my fear of spirits. I was trying to approach intuitiveness and ESP in a non-spiritual manner. I would tell myself that if there were no God, that there would also be no ghosts, right? I guess I wasn’t that good of an atheist. Was I? (Isn’t it curious that we will dismiss the existence of a Creator, yet still cling to our fears of evil?)
Being a sociology major I found ancient civilizations and their religions fascinating. I would imagine living in a time when the gods, being so much like us, were more understandable and more approachable. People such as oracles were equally intriguing. At this time witches to me were synonymous with Satanists and I feared them as much as anything else. In fact, I was afraid of many things but I would go to ‘reunions’ (as the Spanish called them) where spiritualists would channel guides and spirits and deities. They would cleanse people of their spiritual problems, heal and advise. It was at one of these reunions that I saw a tiny woman, supposedly influenced by a bad spirit recoil, scream and fight six big, grown men in order to avoid the spiritualist to whom she had been brought. She writhed from their hold like a snake and pulled away from them with superhuman strength. Then, snakelike, she slithered along the floor! It was explained to me that the spirit that was bothering her knew it was going to be expelled and that was why it enabled the woman to fight so fiercely.
Still, I had an explanation. I knew there are many psychiatric disorders that endow someone with superhuman strength. I knew of the effects of sudden rushes of adrenaline as documented by women able to lift cars off their children. The fact is I was not easy sell.
I used to Ouija with friends on Friday nights, we would read cards for each other, and some of us did spells. I remember one friend who was having problems with her boyfriend. He was going through a nasty phase and aggravating her a great deal. (Hey, we were all young and young women often put up with aggravating boyfriends until we know better). Anyway, a friend of mine told her to do a certain ritual to make him apologize to her. It involved a coconut within which was a floating candle and her written message. There was a prayer to be said. Since these friends were roommates, the one friend put the coconut with the floating light in the washing machine for safety, which my other friend did not know. She then started a load of wash and it was not until they heard the banging in the machine that my friend remembered she had put the coconut in the machine for safe keeping. We all laughed at this incident and did not think anything else of it because whatever had been attempted had been ruined or so we thought. The next day my friend told me that her boyfriend had stopped by to see her and happened to mention that he had a horrible night’s sleep. He said it kept feeling like elephants were trampling on his head and he had awakened with a headache! We all just knew his nightmare and headache had something to do with that coconut riding around in the wash cycle.
Around this time, I began to realize that there was something to this spiritualism stuff but it still scared me. I did not like the idea that spirits were around anymore than I felt comfortable about working with them and asking them to do things or seeing them. This is why for many years I was “on again then off again” but I was always interested, even as an observer and something always happened that drew me back. My real journey, as I call it, really began with that house on the block.