Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Gifts and Poltergeists

This is just a chatty post to catch up a bit on recent life.

It's going fairly well here in nowhere Oklahoma. It's spring, which aside from Autumn is the most glorious time of the year. It ranges from super-blue sky with super-green everything and flowering trees, to awesome thunderstorms and pouring rain.

In the spring here, everything grows. This includes the 1,029,392,877 little tree seeds that have distributed themselves all over the landscape from every tree in the neighborhood. I'm the Maple Killer: I ripped out dozens of maple tree starts from a small mulched area the other night. This is definitely Ozark territory here in the NE corner, not the plains. Oh, and that's not counting every weed that ever considered taking up residence in my landscape, especially my lawn. By the time I got my mower started, my lawn -- along with much of the city -- was a good 12-20" long in places. I say 'in places' because I don't actually have a lawn. I have some very interesting weeds which, when mowed, and slightly at a distance, give the illusion of a lawn. I'm not complaining. It's green, it grows, I mow it, what's not to love?

I managed to get all my official garden beds planted, no thanks to killing my own seedlings (never mind how, it's just too stupid). In the beds, which are 24-32" high (it's a 'standing' cinderblock garden, see some old pics here), I've got something like:

half a dozen red bell pepper
half a dozen orange bell pepper
nine green bell pepper (most of which I wait till red to pick)
nine jalapeno pepper
a couple italian peppers (sort of a cross between a bell and an anaheim)
eight cayenne peppers
(did you notice... I like peppers? I'd have more but the local selection of seedlings was pathetic.)
eight roma tomatoes
one cherry tomato
one oregano
two basil (standard)
half a dozen daikon radish (all that sprouted, from old seed)
around 10 shallot sets
around 60 garlic sets
around 200 yellow, white and red onion sets
about 25 each of normal, japanese long white, and red, scallions
and that's about all there is room for in the beds.

I plant close, 'sort of' in a square-foot-gardening style, but not THAT close... about 1.5-2' between peppers and small/determinate tomatoes.

I didn't plant anything on the arch trellising this season, because I still need to tear out the odd square little beds that DP (as my lowcarb girlfriends call him, my Ex) created, and use their cinderblocks to make permanent beds between the arches. That is down the road some... there is only so much time in life, and let me tell you, it does not take much hauling of 30# cinderblocks before your hands and fingers hurt and you're weary, and this is probably even for people in good physical shape, which I am definitely not.

I do, however, have the containers left. I had to buy an entire new spate of containers this year, as the recent ice storm that wiped out 70% of the trees in my city (including mine. They are leafing out--their shredded remains--but at some point I'll have to pay a small fortune to have them cut down and replaced, as they are trashed) also wiped out my containers, which had actually survived five years of winter outside without even a crack until then, but they literally shattered and cracked and broke all over with that freeze. These are big, 16-40 gallon (varies) size "tub" like containers you can get at dollar stores and walmart.

The rain and wind have delayed delivery, but hopefully Thursday I will get the "soilless premium potting mix" from the local soil company (they sell mulch, rock, you name it), a dump truck with a scoop is going to drop it in my driveway, then guess who gets to shovel it all into containers and wheelbarrow them around the property. I will be in slightly better shape when this is all over, that's for sure.

Last week, a friend online sent me some clothes and shoes in my size and some quality cat food. Free stuff! Awesome. My boyfriend sent me a movie ("Kama Sutra" - do you think he's trying to tell me something...?). A coworker sent me an exercise video and two cookbooks. My dad gave me a whole bunch of DVDs, me and Ry will be watching "The Golden Compass" tonight. And yesterday I got a $100 gift card from my boss. So it's been a good time for the influence of others the last week or so, for sure.

Thanks to the gift card yesterday, I was able to go to a local nursery and buy about four dozen seedlings for all the containers (from the big tubs to lots of hanging flower pots). A dozen are flowers; a dozen are herbs; a couple dozen are some more veggies. Anaheim chili pepper, mole chili pepper, hungarian wax (hot banana) pepper, couple more italian peppers, a golden tomato, cherry tomato, some more roma tomato, some more cayenne pepper. (Fresh cayenne are my fave peppers, although there are several in that class that are nearly indistinguishable from one another and they're all good.) This Friday (payday) I hope to buy whatever the last things needed for this year's garden: maybe more containers (not sure), and a bunch of hose and a good punch, a manifold and timer for the backyard, and a couple more fancy-spray nozzles for the garden hoses. From that point on, all I need is a couple scoops (dump truck full) of new cedar mulch and a LOT of incredibly hard work, and by the time Fall arrives, when it's time to tear stuff out and clean up for the winter, I'll finally be done with the stuff I should have had done by the arrival of spring, heh!

Ry had her sixth grade chorus concert last night, so we piled into the city's big-brag fully-restored landmark Coleman Theatre for it. She's so adorable it just melts my heart.

Meanwhile, my friend X is having a rather severe problem in her house. Her husband and both her children -- now 10 and 11 -- are quite psychic in the 'medium' sort of way, although her husband is a rationalist who works very hard to stay in denial of this. They began with a number of random occurrences and knocking and things like this, human-shaped shadows visible only to the three of them (X's oblivious), etc. They believed they had some kind of ghost. I told them to talk to Archangel Michael and ask for his assistance in helping someone move on, and they did. Her father died as all this was happening, which probably didn't help, except that it restored some sense of benevolence to it all.

Not long later, this amped up into Amityville territory. First stuff started moving. I've had this effect myself during my bewilderness era and I know how crazy-making it can be. A dresser fell on her daughter (a bird-boned sort) several times. (And no, this is NOT like child abuse projected or anything like that. Stuff started falling and flying all over the place regularly, all four of them reported it to me separately at times.) The knocking increased. The out-of-corner-of-eye visuals increased. Writing started appearing on the mirrors. The TV remote control constantly vanished and would appear on the ceiling fan in the kids' room, which nobody there can reach without a ladder. They could all be sitting in the living room, all is well, the cat walks out of the room, and runs back in 10 seconds later--covered in mayonnaise or something and very unhappy about it.

One time her husband got so pissed about the remote control he duct taped it and CHAINED IT so it couldn't go anywhere. The cat got coated with something again, his bottle of scotch vanished and appeared stuck in the dirt upside down and open in the backyard after having been poured everywhere, and after searching, they'd just given up looking for the vanished remote when they found it -- in the butter container in the door of the fridge. The little girl would sometimes wake up with her long hair wound up and 'hooked' on this tiny hook in the wall above her bed.

They kept taking the kids to sleep with them because they were all worried, but even when they do, the apparitions and stuff continue off and on, and her husband is often woken up by someone poking him HARD -- physically -- on the shoulder, even though he makes sure and nobody is touching him that he can SEE, yet it's 100% physical and once he felt a whole hand slide down his arm. (Grossed him out.)

They called the Oklahoma branch of some kind of ghost like society that has a TV show. Useless. These people had a huge stack of paperwork that took X a really long time to fill out. They show up, they set up a camera for ONE HOUR, and they leave--just leaving all the paperwork they worked so hard to prepare. X asked if there was someone they knew who could clear houses of this kind of thing and they only said, not in this region. And this was all just really annoying, frustrating, aside from the occasional things that seemed like a potential threat to the kids, until recently when

The little girl can see and hear a spirit there. She says it says that her name is Sabrina and she died in a fire. She heard another who said her name was Debra, and she was several generations ahead of Sabrina. After the prayers with Michael, Debra went away. Meanwhile, they've now progressed to some impressive EVP (electronic voice phenomenon). Sometimes on the telephone, AFTER someone hangs up, there is a voice. Allegedly there is a spirit named Tim, an angry man who says he set the fire that killed Sabrina. Debra says that she is trying to help Sabrina 'go to the light' but Tim doesn't want to let her go. Sometimes Sabrina quits talking and when asked why says that "he will hurt her" and then there's sounds like a hard slap and her crying out. Meanwhile, they were all trying to keep this quiet -- except for hoping the ghost hunter people might have some clue -- because they don't want anybody to think they are crazy, obviously, and if you tell someone that a small dresser threw itself on your kid, they're probably going to think it's child abuse and that'd be a total nightmare. So they've been suffering in silence about all this for awhile.

Recently, they got some third party verification. The little girl had been on the telephone with a little girl who lives near me. When her little girl hung up, a voice came on the line, and the other little girl stayed on as a result. She gave the phone to her mother, who actually heard it. It was 'Tim' and he was foully cursing and threatening and saying, I can't recall, but something like they couldn't take Sabrina I think. X felt tremendously validated that someone outside their family had finally experienced this stuff.

She tells me because I've had poltergeist phenomenon and I believe her--and the most unbelievable parts, for anybody who's had it, are the most believable because that's really how it works--like you don't usually see stuff floating through the air from point A to point C, it's just that something is at point A and a micro-instant later it's at point C, for example. (Moved through time, not space.)

Recently, her little girl was sleeping in the living room while she watched TV real late one night, not more than 10 feet from her, and in the space of an hour, when she woke up, part of one eyebrow had been shaved, her upper lip hurt, and she had tiny razor marks around her legs. Not cuts, but scrapes. Now, this seems as impossible as every other poltergeist thing seems: X was RIGHT THERE, though not looking, and her daughter was wearing clothes!--and this happened "under" them--and we suspect the sudden pain was what woke her up. She called out to her mom who said what is it baby? and looked back at her and instantly noticed a whole big rectangle missing from one of her eyebrows. This event scared the hell out of X, who sought out every razor and bundled them up and hid them in a closet somewhere, and made her husband SO pissed that he stomped around the house cursing at Tim and telling him he was a balless coward for picking on little girls and why didn't he pick on HIM instead. He's been trying to harrass Tim into spending his energy on him rather than the kid.

Now, poltergeist activity is nearly always associated with children, and both of hers are near 11, which is about the age it usually kicks in. The family watches all kinds of spirit-related crap on TV, like Buffy and Angel and so on. I assumed, initially, that this was just PK activity, and that the slightly younger brother, despite that both the children are very healthy and happy, that this might be some subconscious PK acted out toward his sister. But I don't think so anymore. The whole repetition of the spirit-stuff, along with the writing, voices, and the poor damn cat LOL, the endless issue with small items especially remote controls, is a little too constant.

I told her, you "pay" attention. Every bit of attention you guys give this is just feeding it energy, period. QUIT! Ignore it. Marginalize it. Don't give it any free energy. But of course over time, more and more, they could not ignore it, even though she says they tried that for awhile, along with prayer and so on. At this point they're willing to save money (they're pretty poor) for an exorcist if they only knew where to find one and it'd have to be someone that works on 'houses'. She tells me there is so much stuff so constantly that I wouldn't even believe her if she bothered trying to recount it all. I probably would, but I know what she means.

I was so irked about the razor incident that I seriously considered stomping over to her house and seeing if I could call Michael and the spirit and do something about it all myself. But at this point, I've been out of mental work so long except spottily, I can hardly pay attention through a brief chakra meditation, never mind something that major, with an energy so turbulent. In other words, I don't think I'm qualified, and I think as a result it might be dangerous. I'm ticked though. I want to be qualified to deal with that. It is inappropriate. I feel the need to "facilitate the adjustment" of the situation. I always said I knew the first time I saw the Thoth tarot deck that "Adjustment" was my card, and funny enough things often feel like that to me, like I simply feel some inner need to bring things into balance via adjustment. I know all the cosmic wiccans are the Empress and High Priestess and stuff like that, so Adjustment seemed a little disappointing and unglam by comparison, but it was a gut-knowing, what can you do, I didn't consciously choose.

(It just occurs to me that maybe the tarot is a map of humanity the way The Four or the Tree of Life is, and so maybe every person has one card that basically they fall most into the pattern of. Hmmmn.)

I recently seriously acid-burned my fingers by spending like 7 hours cutting peppers and garlic. They hurt so bad I thought they would split open or something. I was talking to Nero (a guide) about it, and he made it go away totally, the pain, for about ten minutes. I shifted my attention and it came back. I was pretty damn impressed that he could do that though. Or maybe I did it but either way it was impressive. (By the next morning they were ok.)

It's raining, supposed to thunderstorm today. The back seat of my car is stuffed with four small flats of seedlings. The thunder is rolling and I think I'll do something constructive here. That about sums up my recent life. Mostly I've been doing archmeds -- or trying, denial puts me to sleep often lately! -- and gardening and spending time with the kid. Viewing... barely... still working on getting 'regular' time for that. Around "having a life" that's kind of hard. It's a matter of priorities, and viewing is so important to me, and yet... so are other things. Ah, the dichotomy...

PJ