My last child was born in 1971, a Down Syndrome child with a terminal (at that time) mitral heart defect. Trying to make sense of this unexpected event which was traumatic to me (for years I couldn’t mention it publicly without crying), I sought out a psychic reading  in an attempt to make it fit into my experience of the world.  I just came across something I wrote about the reading, written three years later:

My aura is muddy with fear

the psychic said, three years ago,

as I sat hesitant before him,

searching out dim forces of my destiny.

A two-fold karmic mission

lies in wait for me, he said.

Mine to scale the heights of consciousness

and mine to loosen passive bonds.

Through action shall I free the captive

Soul of eons whose receptive mold has

fashioned the aura which I wear,

passive becoming active, opening up

my third eye and our third world

in a consciousness both higher and raised.

Today is Monday, June 30, 1975 AD.

Three years hence where shall I be?*

__________

The psychic reader was an official minister in his other role, and when my father subsequently died I asked if he would conduct the funeral service and include a “life reading” for him, so I could better understand why my father lived the life he had.

It was clear the psychic/minister was scandalized at the suggestion he bring his psychic activities into the church in a funeral.  I wondered how he put it all together in his head, or rather why he didn’t.

I reckon I’m going to have to work on freeing my captive soul the next time round.

(If nothing else works, a psychic reading can be briefly useful).