Dreams do come true.
America has always attracted me. This attraction began with me reading about Huckleberry Finn and his adventures along the great Mississippi River. As I grew a little older and read more about America and its vast land mass, especially the Western part of America, I began to develop a longing to see certain parts of that country, especially the area around the Midwest and the great Mississippi. Later still, when we began to get free entry into Big Kyrl’s cinema, the Wild West became an area I deeply longed to see ‘before it was gone’ according to Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves, my favourite film of all time. But above all, there was one area that had a really powerful draw on me spiritually, and that was the Monument Valley area on the Utah-Arizona border.
We have all seen this amazing place in numerous films, especially the cowboy films of John Huston and John Wayne. The movie Stagecoach is one of the most famous early ones, and Back to the Future a later one. There was never a time when I saw that vista, composed of the tall Buttes and the Mittens set against the backdrop of a deep blue sky, that my heart did not skip a beat, and it still does even today. I simply love the place. My only explanation for this longing is that in some past life I think I must have lived there. A psychic once told me that I had lived many times with the Bird Tribe. Every chance I got to see a picture of that area I took it, and I would just stare at it forever, hoping to someday go there. One of the most famous road photographs in existence today is the view from North to South, looking into that famous valley on Highway 163. It was there that Forest Gump stopped running, and I wanted to stand where he stood, and have my photo taken on what I believe is one of the most historic roads in the world.
For as long as I can remember this was a secret dream of mine that I kept to myself, believing that if I told people they would say it was totally impossible, and in so doing somehow make me believe they might be right. However, I kept it alive within myself, and daydreamed of going there a thousand times as the years passed by. About twelve years ago I began a dream journal; not a journal of dreams but a secret journal of my most hoped-for desires. In this journal I placed a picture of a man in a blue shirt and black pants walking on that famous road in Monument Valley. This would be me some day, I hoped. I had found the picture in a magazine and I studied every detail of the picture, even down to the tumbleweed that was blowing across the man’s path. I made up my mind that somehow, someday I would be the man in that photo. I had no idea how it might happen, or how long it would take, but I kept the dream alive all the same. Then almost ten years ago I began to think that it might happen for real because of JoAnn being an American.
Since meeting JoAnn, and probably because I was growing older, I drifted away from reading electronic books to reading a more spiritual type of literature, and my whole outlook on life has begun to change. I began to study more and more about who we are, and what we are, and I came to the conclusion that the whole area of Sedona, and especially Monument Valley, had some spiritual significance for me.
I started to make my computer screensavers show different pictures of Monument Valley and Arizona, as well as my dream car; a red Corvette. This area of America was becoming my obsession. I studied the maps, studied the satellite images, drove the valley from space (thanks to Google) and I saw the rock formations known as the Mittens from a hundred angles. I read all about Goulding’s Lodge and Harry Goulding who built a famous trading post, and who later convinced John Huston to begin the whole movie business in the valley. Then later still I read about a new Native American hotel known as The View. It’s an eco friendly hotel, and orientated so that every room faces east. This beautiful building is owned by the Navaho and is built on their sacred grounds. I wanted to stay there.
Almost every week in some guise or other I would do some research on the internet and learn a new tit bit of information. As my knowledge grew, so did my desire to be there. Even though I had been to the USA many times since meeting JoAnn, we had never ventured south of Missouri. When I finally told her of this place that I so wanted to see, she said it was just a desert, and who wanted to see a desert, preferring the beautiful lakes and forests of her home state, but I longed to be in that desert, and I knew that we would go there together.
The big problem had always been my belief that the cost would make it impossible for me, and rather than be crushed by a confirmation of my fears, I always chickened out when it came to just checking it out. I dearly wanted JoAnn to be with me on that trip, desert or not, and so for years more I continued to dream as life passed me by. One day I woke up and I was sixty years old.
Every year JoAnn returns home to her family for some months, and this parting is always very hard on us both. Usually within a week or so I get terribly lonely and long to be with her in America. It was during one of her extended visits, when I was feeling very low, that once again I returned to my computer and the Valley.
I had been reading one of my many spiritual books that were all beginning to point me in a particular direction. I was learning about consciousness, and how powerful this kind of thinking could be for us all. The teaching seemed simple, yet very hard to put into practice. It basically says that in order to achieve our dreams, all we need to do is to first develop a burning desire for our wish to be fulfilled, then imagine as often as possible, especially before sleep, how we would ‘feel’ when we realized our desire. Consciousness, or the Universe, or the God that created us then takes over and handles the details of how it will manifest into our reality. The guarantee for success seems to be that our desire must benefit all that it touches and be love driven, while the guarantee for failure seems to be a belief in fear and a doubting mind. To take this kind of teaching on faith is incredibly hard to do at any time, but for someone coming from a logical and scientific background, it’s almost impossible as it smacks of being a daydreamer, not a doer. To even begin to grasp the concept had taken me well over ten years, and I was still somewhat skeptical about it until recently.
So on a beautiful summer’s evening while sitting alone with my laptop, and missing my Punkin, I decided to test out the teaching.
In complete faith I returned to Arizona in my mind and turned on my laptop. I decided to dream big, and re-read my dream journal, which I had a devil of a job finding. As I read it, I realized that not alone had I wanted to walk in the Valley, but I also wanted to see the town of Williams on Route 66, and have my photo taken beside the train that took tourists on to the Grand Canyon. I found that I had drawn two stick figures standing on the platform on a photo of the train station. On a whim, I decided to include the town and the train and the Grand Canyon in my big dream. And if I was going to go mad with the dreaming, I may as well do it in style, so I also included a trip to Meteor Crater where thousands of years ago a vast explosion took place as a result of a meteorite strike. I felt that we should also go to Sedona, and Flagstaff on Route 66, and to top it all off, we would return to Missouri by sleeper train, crossing America in the style of rich people. All of this just came to me as I let my imagination run wild.
The more I imagined about this amazing trip, the more I became convinced that we just had to do it, but not in a rushed way. We should take our time, at least ten days, and stay in old Route 66 motels whenever we could. I just knew too that we would stay in Goulding’s Lodge where the movie stars had stayed, and I was equally sure that somehow we would sleep on the rim of the Grand Canyon, ideally in a log cabin.
Of course this was all just a massive daydream on that evening, but I did get a map drawn out, and began to make a plan, all the time assuming that money was not a problem, which it clearly had to be. In line with the teaching, I ignored the financial problem, trusting in a power within me, or beyond me, I cared not which. After hours of fun, playing with every kind of possibility, it became clear that the best way to have this grand adventure was to fly to New York, and then on to Phoenix. There we would hire a car at the airport, and drive the rest of the trip, using Flagstaff as a kind o
f base. On the last day we would drop off our car, and get a taxi to Flagstaff train station early in the morning for our twenty three hour sleeper train journey back to Kansas City, Missouri. Then after spending a day exploring Kansas City, we would take yet another train on to Washington, Missouri, and there be picked up by JoAnn’s family, and be taken home to Steelville.
I became quite sure that it could now be done physically; financially was another matter entirely, so I decided on a ‘feeling’ to challenge my fears and cost the whole trip.
The internet is the most amazing invention. I was able to find out quite quickly that this dream trip would cost about three thousand five hundred euros all in, plus about five hundred was needed for food, and that cost seemed a lot less than I had ever imagined it would be. There was never any doubt in my mind that my dream trip was worth the money, but I still could not contemplate the idea of going into debt for my dream, and I had many more pressing calls on that kind of money. Yet I remained faithful to the teaching, and adopted an air of ‘I don’t care, if it’s to be, then it will be’ and that night I went to bed on a high.
During the night I woke from a dream where I saw JoAnn and I sitting on the road, watching the morning sun rise slowly over the Mittens.
When I switched on my laptop at work I was greeted by my screen saver of Monument Valley, the road, and those beautiful Mittens. I clearly remember thinking I dreamed of this place last night and ‘I’m going there this year’. I was feeling a kind of certainty, the same kind of feeling I had felt before our Seville adventure. This feeling was very strong and reassuring, yet gentle. Then the phone rang and I began my day’s work.
Lunchtime came round. I went home for my bit of food and saw my post on the floor. There was a letter from the taxman, as well as a few bills which I decided I would not open till later, not wanting indigestion for the rest of my day. I ate my sandwich and sat in the sun, and then on a whim I opened the tax letter. To my absolute astonishment, disbelief and shock, there was a cheque inside it. It was made out to me for the huge sum of….. three thousand, seven hundred euros approximately. I had to check and double check that it was an actual cheque, not some kind of tax demand. It was indeed a cheque, and it was for the exact amount I needed to comfortably pay for my entire dream trip, with some money to spare, as if the taxman had said, “By the way, have a drink on me”.
The tax letter explained that I had been overpaying tax in the Tiger Economy times, and to their great credit they had reimbursed me. This refund came at a time when everyone feared clawbacks of every kind, and we were in the middle of the worst recession in history.
I’m not ashamed to say that I thanked God over and over, as well as the taxman. I thanked my spiritual books, and the Universe, and everyone who had passed over in my family. Once again I experienced yet another extraordinary miracle. All I needed then was to find the spending money and food money, and suddenly I remembered that earlier in March my wonderful colleagues at work had made a collection for my sixtieth birthday. They had very kindly presented me with five hundred US dollars, and had written on my birthday card the words ‘for your next trip to America’. That money was still in its envelope in a drawer beside my passport. At the time of their presentation I had resigned myself to the fact that an American trip was impossible that year, and I had totally forgotten all about the money. Now the icing had just been poured all over my cake. I became very excited and just wanted to spread this great news, so ignoring the cost, I called JoAnn in America and told her to ‘prepare for the desert’, that we were going on the trip of all trips. When she asked me how we planned to pay for it all, I just said that a miracle had happened, then I hung up and went back to work on a cloud.
For the rest of that day everything went extraordinarily well. It was as if I was in a kind of crystal zone, and that evening I booked our flights, our car, and the great train journey across America. When I checked on availability for Goulding’s Trading Post, it seemed that they had a long waiting list, as did the brand new View Hotel. For us to stay in the middle of Monument Valley, we had to stay in either one and it looked impossible. Then on checking availability for the Bright Angel Lodge in the Grand Canyon National Park, I also discovered that they too were booked out for the days we planned to be in Arizona. In spite of the seeming impossibility of sleeping in my dream places, I had no worries at all, especially after the earlier events of that day. I became relaxed and sure in my mind that somehow we would be staying in Goulding’s Trading Post, and we would be sleeping on the rim of the Grand Canyon. Like the funding for our trip, I was happy to leave the Universe or Consciousness to handle the sleeping details as well. Quite certain of it all then, we would be heading to America at the beginning of October in 2010, the year I turned sixty years of age, and I couldn’t wait for JoAnn to come home and begin the packing.
She returned home and both of us decided that in order to do justice to this adventure, we should both lose weight and become fit. The plan was for us to rise every morning at seven thirty, and walk for about an hour or more along the bank of the Blackwater River. We began immediately, and soon we were becoming so fit that we could jog part of the way. This walk took us through the woods and along a narrow ledge, and in places it went right down to the water’s edge before rising and falling again for much of the journey. It was muddy in many places, and quite dangerous in places, and all the time we did this JoAnn began telling me that she didn’t like this walk as she felt one of us would get hurt in this place. I ignored all of this, as I knew it was working and we were definitely fitter. About six weeks before our departure, on a beautiful sunny morning, JoAnn was proven right. She had been trailing along behind me when suddenly I heard her scream out. When I turned around she was lying on the ground with her leg all twisted behind her. She was crying and scared, believing her leg was broken. We were a long way from our car, and after doing my best at first aid, I became her crutch, and somehow managed to get her home. Then the ‘ice pack’ days began.
I had hoped that in America JoAnn would do all the driving, as she loved it, and I was scared of it. Now she could not even walk let alone drive, and we were only six weeks away from departure from Shannon Airport.
Rest and ice packs, as well as bandaging were all we could do, and instead of getting fitter, we both actually got fatter. It was definitely my fault as I should have taken her advice, but dismissed the Indian ways in her as just unnecessary fears. Weeks of suffering went by, with her slowly improving, but she was always in pain. With a week to go, we decided to visit a healing area in West Cork, and on the way back she got a feeling that something very bad was going to happen in America. It was not that we would die in a plane crash, but she did not know for sure what would happen. This time I believed her, and was half thinking of cancelling the whole trip.
From deep inside me though a kind of gentle voice said over and over, “It will all be wonderful and ye are protected. Go ahead, as I have provided the way”. This was not a voice inside me, but a kind of feeling in words; a ‘word feeling’ is the best way I can describe it. In any case we decided to go ahead.
On the day we were leaving, my son Kyrl drove us to Shannon and everyone wished us so well. JoAnn’s foot was not better yet, but she could walk for short periods, and then rest with her ice pack.
From the moment we left Shannon I began to feel wonderful. The journey of my life had begun, and was uneventful until we were flying into Phoenix Airport in the late evening.
The plane had gone into a holding pattern and slowly circled the airport. Then I noticed a violent thunderstorm with fork lightning in the near distance. The plane could not land because the airport was under the weather, and we were flying around it. Every so often we would hear the announcement that ‘soon we should be able to land’. Our jet was hanging in the sky, and even though it had to be travelling at well over a hundred miles an hour, it just seemed to be stationary. JoAnn read and I looked at the storm as some passengers became edgy. Then my wife
from ‘Tornado Alley’ said, “This feels like a tornado to me. It’s got that kind of feeling in the air”. She was overheard by the old ladies sitting near us, and they vehemently disputed this, telling her, “We are in Arizona now. We rarely if ever get tornados”. JoAnn said, “I come from Missouri, I know what a tornado feels like, and this has that feeling”. The plane began its decent. Suddenly there was a massive bang. It sounded like a huge hammer had violently hit the entire plane. The shuddering travelled all along the fuselage, scaring the hell out of us all - me included. The whole plane shook terribly and suddenly went into a steep nosedive. Some screaming began, and JoAnn dug a hole in my hand with her nails, feeling it was all over. In that moment I too questioned my inner voice, wondering if she had been right about the bad thing happening in America being our untimely death. Then I distinctly heard the ‘word feeling’ say, “No, you are protected and all will be fine”. In that minute the plane levelled off and we landed soon after. By sheer coincidence, the day before we had left I had been reading all about wind shear and how dangerous it is in the West. It had brought down a number of cargo planes before they finally figured out how to deal with it. The symptoms were identical to what had just happened to us. As we left the plane the captain was standing at the exit, and I said to him, “Thank you for your skill. Wind shear I think”. He smiled with a knowing look and said, “It was a close one”. After surviving that incident, I told JoAnn that no matter what happened next, we would be safe for the rest of the adventure. From then on I was prepared to enjoy every second, and care nothing for my safety either.
By the time we collected our hire car it was about ten thirty at night, and JoAnn very nervously got onto Hway 17 heading north, as I did the navigating. We came to a roundabout and she had her first of many panic attacks, stopping right in the middle of the road in a multi-lane roundabout. No one honked, or got annoyed, and after the initial screaming and panicking, she got round it. We drove on for an hour or so, and then well outside of the city we found our first motel. The room, which was awesome, was incredibly cheap due to some deal going on, and the manager told us that his people all came from Ireland, and he wanted to go there so badly.
Two Walls and a Roof Page 41
