The Shared Diary of a Novice Paranormal Investigator, aged 52 and Three Quar

When you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer.

(Stevie Wonder)

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamed of in your philosophy.

(Shakespeare)

Ri fol ri fol tol de riddle dee.
(Traditional)

Friday

Meeting my Guardian Angel?

‘Look for little messages and signs,’ Kindly Lady had told me.  ‘You will find signs that your Spirit Guides are near.  It might be something you see, a scrap of a song you hear… and if you find a white feather, it means your guardian angel is close.’

I will go along with anything.  For two weeks, I have looked out for repeated signs.  I have been a little concerned that seeing secret signs and messages may well be a stage in developing a serious illness, but I have stuck at it.  I can state that the following are daily repeated:

  • Large, unwrinkled individuals appear in the house, eat a lot of food then melt away.
  • LSS smells of beer and secretly consumed cigarettes.
  • The garden is full of magpies.
  • The street is full of dog mess.

At weekends, buzzards and kestrels come and go a great deal, and curlews, unaccountably, give me the creeps.

I mention the birds because, although I know so little about them, I am always conscious of their presence.  Cousin Keen Twitcher recently complained how irritating it was to receive texts from me reading: ‘I have seen a bird.  It had feathers and things.  What was it?’  I always notice the birds of prey.  Once, during a soporific yoga lesson, when we were all prone on dusty floorboards in a chilly community centre, I had a strange waking dream.  I became a hawk of some kind, swooping over Kinder Scout.  I saw the flagged path, I saw cotton grass.  I think I was above Edale, not far from Grindsbrook Clough.  Not long after that, early one morning, a large hawk, I do not know what sort, was sitting on the telephone line behind our house.  I saw it from an upstairs window, and I swear it looked me straight in the eye.

Nothing connected with Native Americans appeared during my observation, except for a motto spotted on someone’s shopping bag.  It was the one about how, when we have all destroyed the last tree and the last animal, then we will learn we cannot eat money.  That is apt indeed, but my guess is that only seeing it once in two weeks was the unusual occurrence.

Many years ago, as a teenager, I did experience the touch of something larger than myself.  It happened as I walked home from a rather odd event.  In those days, I was a confirmed, conventional Christian from a High Anglican background – so close to Rome, one could smell the cappuccino.  By some bizarre accident, I had spent the evening at an evangelical prayer meeting run by visiting preachers.  It was an unusual experience for a young person who expected religion to come with cake and gentle boredom.  I am afraid I found them a little on the hysterical side, and not quite the thing for a fifteen year old intellectual snob, but, being game for most things, I cheerfully went up along with the rest of the sinners, to be prayed over and saved.  I remember the pal I had dragged along with me being rather cross that I should first pick an argument with the pastor and then keep her waiting while I got saved.  Until I started the little walk between the bus stop and my house, her temper had been the only entertaining part of the evening.  It was a quiet, clear night, and I was alone.  You could still walk around a small town then, without the twenty-four hour drone of traffic.  About fifty yards from my house, I was stopped in my tracks by an overpowering sensation.  A thick blanket of strong, unconditional love was above me, keeping me safe.  I imagined myself sheltered by huge angel wings.  I stood for a short time, puzzled, happy and grateful. 

I have wondered since, if I what I did next was the right thing.  Never still for long, I continued walking home, and whatever it was slipped away, leaving me once again in ordinary air.  I have never before mentioned it to a living soul.  I do not know if I was left with a small gift that night, or if I would always have developed it, but I do know, that despite enduring the normal doubts and dangers which beset humanity, I have a tiny voice inside which tells me it is good to continue trying.  It was the direct opposite of seeing something nasty in the woodshed.

Religions are our metaphorical ways of describing our experiences of, or yearnings for these things bigger than ourselves.  The kind lady I had been talking to at Cosy Local might have told me it was my guardian angel visiting me that evening.   Someone else might conjecture that the evangelicals had affected me more than my conscious mind knew. 

I believe that it was a powerful, life-changing episode, part of a whole series of lesser events, which all prove to me that there is Stuff going on which we can’t understand, and some of it is Stuff we need.

Dear readers, especially the new ones, now might be a good time to point out that Rifol, although she tells no lies, is not inhabiting the same time as ourselves.  She is therefore expressing her sense of confidence and security in a time before the present government came to power.  Who knows what she might say today?

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