Right. My heart. I didn’t care about my heart. I cared about my book.
She didn’t get points for knowing about the book. During the introduction session I told the group that I was writing a book on Lily Dale. I always announce myself when I’m working because I don’t want people to feel deceived. If they want to avoid me, they ought to. By now I’d recommitted to writing. The mystery of what was going on in Lily Dale had hooked me entirely. Her contention that I was fooling myself about writing a book caused my face to fill with such alarm that she began to stammer.
“You’ll do the book,” she said. “I’m not saying you won’t, but that’s not the purpose of your visit here. You’re here for a spiritual experience.”
I thanked her. Were these people ever going to stop with the spiritual talk? Did they say that to everyone? Sure they did. Did people collapse in a grateful puddle when they heard it? Maybe they did. I didn’t.
The next time the music stopped I faced another woman. This one hadn’t been near when I received the first message, but she too wanted to talk about my heart.
“Your heart is closed, but it’s going to open,” she said.
My smile was getting tight. I’ll put my open heart up against anybody’s. Not the Dalai Lama’s or Jesus’, but most anybody’s. There’s nothing closed about my heart.
She could see I wasn’t receptive, but this newby medium wasn’t budging. The third time she told me that my heart was going to open I muttered, “I think my heart’s okay. Really. It’s pretty open if you ask me.”
“Well,” she said, in that smug voice that I’d heard come from my own mouth at the last workshop. “It’s going to open more.”
Great. I’m going to go around loving everybody up and gushing about how much they all mean to me? I don’t think so.
The music started, and I walked around the circle again, peering into my classmates’ faces. The music stopped. Another woman was in front of me.
“I’m feeling a lot of energy around your heart,” she said.
“Right,” I said, putting up my hand to halt her. “Everyone wants to talk about my heart.” I wasn’t bothering with gracious. I was tired of defending my heart against these ninnies. It was too absurd.
“I know. I know,” I said in a singsong voice. “My heart is closed, and my heart is going to open, and that’s what I’m here for. Thank you very much.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Your heart is wonderfully open. It’s a strong part of who you are.”
“I’ve just been told by two people that my heart is closed and I need to open it,” I said.
“I guess you could open it more,” she said, “but it’s definitely open. I’m very good with chakras, and I know what’s coming from your heart chakra. It’s strong and open.”
Thank God for that. I hate to be told who I am. I hate to be told what to do.
Saturday night we went to the Stump. We started out at about nine o’clock. It was a cool night. The moon was out, but the trees in Leolyn Woods are thick, and the path was unlighted. Several people had flashlights. Charles, our leader, asked us to leave our drinks behind and realize that we were entering a sacred space. Before we entered the woods, he directed us to stop while he said a prayer and asked permission to enter. If he sensed that other entities were using the woods, we couldn’t go in, he said, because the woods were their territory and we were only visitors.
After a few moments of silence he said it was okay to go in.
We hunched in little groups, running into each other, giggling, apologizing as we stumbled after the dim flashlight beams, feeble against the black night. Dark swallowed us if we moved even a foot away. Leaves crackled and swished under our feet.
In the clearing where the Stump is located, we could see the moon and stars above. There was only enough light to see the shapes of each other’s bodies. Leaves were falling in showers of gold all through the forest. We couldn’t see them now, but the woods were full of faint shifting sounds as they fluttered loose, colliding in their flight, settling with a million sighs. We took seats on the hard benches before the Stump. I sat on a row by myself.
Charles said anyone who received a message should feel free to come forward and give it. An ebullient African American woman, who was the only person of color in the class, went first. She said that the falling leaves were a sign of how happy the spirits were with us. The leaves were like applause from them to let us know how glad they were that we were learning to be more aware of them. They want to help us, she said, and are so excited now that we will be better able to let them.
I sighed. How nice it must be to believe that you’re the little darling of the universe.
A few more messages were given, and then a solidly built young guy got up. All I knew about him was that he and his wife had just had a baby.
“I don’t know your name,” he said, “but is the woman who looks like Annette Bening here?”
I slid down in my seat. He meant me. I had a new short haircut, something like the one Annette wore in that movie where the president of the United States falls for her, and ever since I’d gotten to Lily Dale people had been telling me that I look like Annette Bening. I don’t. Except for the hair.
Everyone laughed when he said it. I didn’t answer. How could I claim that?
A couple of women replied in mock fluttery voices, “Oh, dear. You must be talking about me.”
“Are you here?” he asked again.
I cleared my throat. “Uh, yes,” I said. “Uh, I’m here.”
The dark shape of his body turned toward me. I couldn’t see his face.
“The angels are all around,” he said, “and they’re smiling.” His head tilted up and moved as though he was looking around at the sky. His voice was filled with awe.
“There are spirits joining them, and they’re smiling too.”
I looked around. Didn’t see anything.
“They are so happy and pleased with you. They say that you’re a kind, loving, generous woman, and they’re so proud of you. You make them so happy.”
The angels and the spirits were all gathered and now beaming over how perfectly perfect I am? There it was again. That Lily Dale extravagance.
I put my head in my hands. I’d already copped to looking like Annette Bening, as mortifying as that bit of overblown ego was. Now I was being lured into greater grandiosity. If I am a kind, loving, and generous person, and I’m not claiming that I am, but if I am, those are qualities I ought to lose. They don’t do a thing for me in the market economy. For a journalist, they’re a handicap. You fight such impulses. If you’re a woman who wants to compete, they are a weakness.
The student medium wasn’t finished.
“They say that you need to let your voice be heard,” he said. “They say you don’t speak up enough and you should.”
Well, yeah. If people are kind, generous, and loving, they ought to speak up. The world needs them. I’ll give the spirits that much.
The next day, as we were gathering our things to leave, I stopped at the table where Gayle Porter was selling books and tapes. We had talked a little during the classes, but not much. I reminded her that she had promised me an interview. She gave me her phone number.
“So what do I do with all this?” I asked as I was about to turn toward the door.
“You live with it,” she said. “You use it in your life.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“You’ll find out.”
36
It’s as though we live inside a big egg, whose shell is made up of a million perceptions, comments, and occurrences that have hardened around us and blocked our view of anything else. All we see are the calcified remains of our experience, and every day the shell gets thicker. Lily Dale’s spirits tap, tap, tap away until they break a tiny pinhole in the shell. A strange light comes through. And some of us start to kick our way out.
That might be true.
When I returned from Lily Dale I tried to use
my new powers. I prophesized that Gore would win the election. He didn’t. On Thanksgiving I was invited to my neighbor’s house. Her parents and sister were to be there. I’d never met them. Before we left our house I carefully conjured an image of each of them in my mind. Nobody looked anything like I imagined. My sister and brother-in-law were trying to have their first baby. I told my sister that she would be with child by Christmas. On December 13 she called to say, “I’m pregnant.” One out of three. Not too reliable, and I’d cheated on the last one. During a five-dollar reading, Gretchen had told me I would be holding a “chunk of a baby” next year. My sister came to Lily Dale while I was there, and Sherry Lee told her she would be pregnant or have a child by August. My nephew was born August 7.
I was a psychic flop. Whatever happened to me during Spiritual Insight Training seemed specific to that place. I called Gayle Porter. She asked what I wanted to do with the book.
“Set your intentions,” she said, echoing Elaine. “That will determine everything.”
I told her I wanted to write a true account of the mediums and the town and my experiences in it. She said that mediums and messages didn’t interest her much.
“Do you think they can bring through spirits and tell the future?” I asked.
Yes, but she didn’t want to be part of a book about that, she said. She came to Elaine’s classes because she wanted to hook up with a force of love and energy that she believes is available to humans. She thinks she did that.
She wished me luck.
After Pat Naulty received messages she believed were from her son John, she left the Dale in such a state of bliss that the outside world seemed coarse and jostling. At the truck stops where she stopped for coffee on her way home everything seemed too loud. She and Shelley continued to meet for long lunches in which they talked about how women ought to trust their innate knowledge. Pat joined a Spiritualist church but left after a while because people seemed too content to settle into whatever knowledge they had. She wanted to explore change and potential and new ways of being.
Once she had a vision of John. He appeared to be about thirty and was dressed in a white linen caftan. He was just as handsome and happy and wise-looking as she hoped he would be. When she reached her hand toward him he reached back, and, just as their fingers would have touched, he disappeared. Before Lily Dale, Pat might have doubted that vision and convinced herself that it didn’t mean anything. Now she treasured it.
She had ignored her intuition when she knew that she ought to leave California to be with her son. That failure to heed herself may have contributed to his death. Lily Dale comforted her and fortified her determination. She would never again ignore what her own mind told her was real.
She remarried. Her new husband was a physics professor whose wife had died a decade earlier, leaving him with a young son. Pat loved the boy. His mother had favored violets, and after Pat moved in violets began to come up all over the yard in places they had never been. She took that as a sign that the boy’s mother approved of her. Once, when her new son dreamed about his mother, Pat told him that she believed he truly had been visited by his mother and that she was still with him.
Shortly after her marriage, Pat became so ill that she could no longer get out of bed. Poor health had always plagued her, but this was worse than anything she had ever experienced before. She had inflammatory bowel disease, arthritis, and fibromyalgia, which caused every fiber of her body to throb with pain. Lying in a darkened room all day gave her plenty of time to think about her old boast: “Just pop my brain out and put it in a computer. I’m all intellect.” She sometimes laughed about that odd delusion as her body taught her a new lesson every day in how connected to it she actually was.
I spent a weekend with Carol Lucas seven months after Noel’s death. She was fairly dazed by how well she was doing. “I’m not half a person,” she said. “What happened to me in Lily Dale made all the difference. Just knowing that Noel is all right meant so much to me. I can go on. I never would have believed I’d be doing this well. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it hasn’t yet.”
“You don’t have to wait for the shoe to drop,” medium Mary Ann Spears told her. “It’s not going to come crashing in on you. You have this knowledge that you didn’t have. He is alive.”
Carol is haunted now, not by any kind of ghost but by the recurring image of a butterfly breaking free from its cocoon. “It’s leaving behind a dried-up, useless husk,” she said. Like Noel.
She hasn’t seen any visible manifestation of her late husband, and she realizes that she may never. But her four-year-old granddaughter says she has seen Grandpop, and Carol believes her.
As for Sherry Lee’s other predictions, Carol doesn’t have a male business partner/future husband yet, but she did find herself counseling a young girl who was part of a grief recovery group. The future marriage partner was the one item of Sherry Lee’s reading that Carol never believed and never wanted to.
The first Christmas without Noel was difficult, as she knew it would be. She was feeling blue on her way home from her daughter’s house and decided to stop by a small-town crafts market. After browsing a while, she got in her car and began working her way back to the freeway. Lost and searching for the way home, she glanced up at a street sign. It said: N. LUCAS.
She knew that “N” in a street sign stands for North, but by then Carol had a little practice in accepting the fullness of serendipity. And so she let herself be delighted and filled with the comfort that life sometimes gives us if we’ll let it.
Marian is divorced now. She works for a printing company and is still pursuing her interest in spiritual matters. She doesn’t talk compulsively anymore, and she’s gained much of her weight back.
“Seemingly my life has been destroyed, but I am more at peace than I’ve ever been,” she said. She believes that she would not have survived if the anger and fighting in her marriage had continued to escalate.
All the spirit help in preparing for divorce didn’t help her much. Her husband won one financial battle after another, she told me, but her new sense of meaning held. She reframed her defeats as spiritual lessons and tried to learn from them. Greg told her, “What you resist, you perpetuate; what you fear, you manifest.” That pretty much explained what happened to her, she said.
“I feared being financially insecure, and I wanted power,” she told me. “So I manifested someone who seemed to have those things, but it was an illusion.”
She has continued her search for spiritual growth, but she no longer consults mediums. “I believe you put out more than you realize you’re putting out when you talk to the mediums,” she said. “As I became calmer, the mediums became less accurate. I have friends who are mediums. When I talk to them I talk less about events than about the spiritual process.” It’s their optimism and hope that she values.
My own life has also been changed.
Patricia’s story of two spirit mediums at my shoulder showed me that I didn’t have to treat life as a battle I was always about to lose. The more I tried floating through the day, drifting toward what I wanted to do and away from what I didn’t, the easier work became.
That experience set me up to consider what Shelley’s friend Lynn said about listening to myself and doing what I wanted. Such license attracted and at the same time repelled me. I didn’t trust it, but I did try it, and I surprised myself. Life didn’t change that much in outward ways. I didn’t start shoplifting or kicking dogs. What changed was how I felt. I began to know my own mind in a way I never had. I became noticeably freer and stronger in myself. I even did a few altruistic things that I wouldn’t have done before—just because I wanted to.
The spirits I saw at Spiritual Insight Training also affected me. I couldn’t forget the woman whose ex-mother-in-law appeared in my mind to say that her former daughter-in-law was still at the table. I didn’t want to give that message, but I did. If I hadn’t, would anyone else have given it? Maybe not. Maybe I was the
only person there who heard the message of acceptance that the ex-daughter-in-law wanted so much to receive. Was it a true vision or something else? I don’t know. But it helped her. It may have even healed her. So that was good.
Maybe all living things are linked together, and maybe we all have something to give one another. Who knows how we get it? Maybe the spirits exist. Maybe we invent them to justify knowledge that we draw from some all-knowing, all-wise core within us, from telepathy or from the Cosmic Consciousness. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
The spirits haven’t visited me since those October days in class, but when my friends are talking about something that’s important to them I sometimes know what they mean so deeply that it is as though mere words couldn’t have conveyed so much. I haven’t used my medium’s voice, that fast-talking fount of authority, since Lily Dale, thank God, but I tell people what I think more than I once did. It seems as though I ought to. Maybe no one else knows what I know, and maybe they need it.
I worry about the egotism of that idea. So I tell what I think is right. The listener judges whether it’s true or useful. Maybe the mediums and their clients work on the same system. The Lily Dale visitors I interviewed at the five-dollar Monday night readings seemed to follow those rules. They paid their money to hear the mediums, took whatever was said, and then threw out what they didn’t agree with.
Maybe Shelley was right when she said Lily Dale is the closest thing we have to the Temple of Eleusis. I wanted the temple to deliver clear answers that were always right, but even the best oracles can’t do that. The mediums and their clients work together. They may or may not bring in spirit helpers. I’m not sure it matters whether we agree on that. What does matter is that human beings make meaning out of their experiences. They pull purpose and direction out of their lives. Maybe that universal human tendency is based on delusion; maybe it’s based on a deeper wisdom than our conscious minds understand. Maybe other people tap into those unconscious streams to help. Maybe a host of spirits and extrasensory perceptions help too.
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