The Energizer Bunny Learns the Rhythm of Nature (Part 1)

The Rhythm of Nature

strides as the turtle

who wins a race

he doesn’t know he’s in

 

Ever evolving,

neither static, nor constant

 yet slowly progressing

beats the rhythm of Nature

 

Even when we see not

the burbling beneath the volcano

the plates shifting into an earthquake

the atmosphere transforming into a tornado

the waves building to a tsunami

 

Even then, even when we see not the signs,

the Rhythm of Nature is ever evolving

neither static, nor constant

 yet slowly progressing

             I was trained not to stride to the rhythm of nature, but to the drum of the Energizer Bunny, that mascot toy for the battery that keeps “going and going and going” and, even after everyone else’s batteries are dead, is “still going.”  My mother is wired like the Energizer Bunny, and by some genetic quirk, I am not.  Vacations were full, as Mom booked each hotel with a “guaranteed late arrival” and even planned in which rest stops we’d take for our picnic lunches.  Her errands at home, however, were not planned and seemed to follow a random order, defying geographic logic, zigzagging out of the way, and then returning to previous stores that had deals three dollars better than the later stores.  Like all of the competitor bunnies in the Energizer ads, I, her tag-a-long had batteries that died part-way through, but hers were “still going.”  Thinking I should be wired – or “batteried” -- like her, once I had hit my wall, Mom had one of two replies: “Quit whining” or “The world doesn’t revolve around you.” 

            In time, I gained the endurance to quit whining and eventually grew into an Energizer Bunny myself.  Early in our marriage, my then husband teased me for my to do lists that also kept going and going and going.  I had a love-hate relationship with these lists; part of me longed for days with short lists, but the other part reveled in those days when I crossed out a multitude of items on a long one.

            By the time little ones arrived, my love-hate relationship with the lists turned to a hate-only relationship.  One sheet was no longer enough for all that I had to do; multiple sheets were filled, and included only what needed to be done at home; at work, I had another list.  My anxiety grew with the lists.  My chest, neck, and face flushed with a pinkish glow; my heart rate beat fast; my nights were endlessly sleepless, with a cherished hour or two of sleep.  My doctor prescribed me with Prozac.

The lists had to go, and so too did the Energizer Bunny still in me.  In 2005, while juggling a toddler, a preschooler, and a teaching position, I decided to pray every day of the year for a quiet and gentle spirit, and miracles came that began the process to loosen, layer by layer, that Bunny that didn’t belong in me.  Still, for years, vestiges of this battery remained, insisting that I keep going and going and going.

 My body knew what really needed to go were the batteries and that the rhythm of nature needed to come.  What my body might have known, I did not.  Having already been greatly healed, I didn’t know quite how much of this Bunny still beat its drum within me.

             Then came the pandemic.  “Stay at home.  Save lives.”  This was no time for an Energizer Bunny.  Even Mom learned to slow down.  The word Blursday was coined, time felt different, and the process in me was reignited to discard more of the conditioned Bunny within me.  Part of me rebelled; I got out more than most of my friends, but I also acquiesced to begin to learn the Way of Zen.  To my blog and my social media page, I posted this meme with my intent to learn this Way of Zen. 

        

         The Way of Zen is hard for an Energizer Bunny to learn.  In the summer of 2020, we had begun to “flatten the curve,” and we were all getting out more. Feeling I had had my zen, I was eager to get out. My inner Bunny was relieved.

Then came the wildfires, 1800 of them raging throughout the western states.  Our masks returned, we once again retreated indoors, and even more of the Bunny in me was called upon to let go.

             The West burning in flames mirrored my life, as both my marriage and my career also ignited with burning embers.  My husband and I were compatible for projects and parenting, but not for love-making, nor for my soul’s transformation.  He met someone else with whom he shared the right mix of love elements to maintain a thriving marriage.  The following year, after months of marriage counseling and a trial separation, we chose to close our marriage with friendship, which still continues. 

Meanwhile, the university where I taught as a non-tenured track (second-class) faculty member was grappling with a severe budget crisis and turned my employment ladder upside down.  Instead of downsizing and laying off those on the bottom rungs of my ladder, they transferred assignments from many of us like me who had earned the highest promotions to our lower paid colleagues at the bottom of the ladder.  I was eventually downsized all the way, and given with notice, citing a loophole, that I was to be laid off.  But I found a loophole of my own: Emeritus, the university’s honored form of retirement.  My promotions and 23 years of service qualified me to apply.  I did, and I got it, but I was also too young to actually retire. 

The anxiety, tight chest, rapid heart beat, and insomnia returned.  It was the summer of 2021, and I was now both separated from my husband and without work, a financial double-whammy.  I had put out applications, had interviews, and even had completed new hire paperwork, a month earlier, but still had not yet been called with a start date.  The Bunny in me begged to make phone calls and put out more applications.  But the whispers and synchronicities encouraged me to wait.  It will come in its own time.  And it did. 

But first, I had to wait and learn the rhythm of nature.  It was then that I decided to hire myself for the landscaping project to the side of our house that had been itching at me for four years.  Roughly 40 feet long by 14 feet wide, this plot had previously housed two vegetable gardens and a play sand pit, each bordered with bricks and stones.  But our kids had grown; the gardens had been left to waste; the bricks and patio stones were broken, scattered, and buried; what amounted to seven 20 gallon tubs of stones to be collected that were then also mostly buried; and weeds, many thigh high, had taken over the entire plot. 

Since the plot is right outside my bedroom window, every morning when I opened the shades, this disaster welcomed my day, and then it presented itself to me again in the evening at my favorite outdoor spot, also immediately adjacent to it, our hammock. 

For the plot’s neglect, I mostly blame the wildfires, of which we had already had three since 2012 even before the 2020 fires.  While one came as close as three miles, most were further away, but we live in a valley, where the smoke from all of the neighboring fires comes to settle itself as an unwelcome guest for weeks of choking, hazardous air.  How does one care for vegetable gardens in the likelihood of such toxic air?  To those who do, bless you.  By 2018, after the third set of fires, I was done.  With some help from my then husband, I began to clear out the plot of weeds, bricks, and stones and hoped to clear enough to hire a professional landscaper to build a stone patio, for which I was also saving money. 

In the summer of 2021, I needed peace at my window and on my hammock.  And between jobs, I needed that savings for the landscaping.  Why not use the stones and bricks I was collecting and hire myself?  

Continue to Part 2

© 2023 by Karina Jacobson.  All rights reserved.  Please use only with permission from the author.

Remembering with Mom (Part 3)

Part 3 of "Translation Overload" sneak preview.  Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.

May, 2005, home in Washington State, talking on the phone with my mom, in California

            “You remember that?!”  Mom applies strong emphasis to the “mem” of “remember” and I can hear the shock in her voice.  I am now home from the mission trip I had taken to Venezuela, where my “waterfall of memories” poured forth from our life in São Paulo, Brazil, where we lived from the time I was 6 months to nearly four.  I’ve just shared with Mom my memory of the lead up to my graduation from my crib to what she called my “big girl bed.”  Mom is stunned, almost shrieking in disbelief.  “But you were only 22 months old!”

            I’m not crazy.  My friends doubted the auditory and visual extrasensory perceptions, but what about the “waterfall of memories”?  Did they think I been making those up too?  With this confirmation from my mom, would they listen to the rest?

Most of us can remember only back to about the age of four.  That had been true for me too, and my parents had returned to the United States in time for Christmas in 1975, and therefore, just before my fourth birthday two days after Christmas.  Any faint blurs I may have had from our life in Brazil were little cloudy bubbles.  Nothing distinct.  Then I went to Venezuela, ate those black beans at Samuel’s home, and the catalana de recuerdos – waterfall of memories -- came gushing out, in detail.

On the phone with Mom, I describe the inside and the outside of our house in São Paulo, our neighbors’ sticks and plywood shelters across the street, the house of our close friends the Williamsons, and my preschool, both the outside playground up a gravel hill from the little classroom, and the one room classroom, where both the floor and the walls were made of basic wood beams.  I relate with joy the memory of driving the toy push cars at the Williamson’s home with their kids, eating dinner at their home, our maid painting my fingernails in the front yard of our house, Mom reading Monica to me at the little table in our kitchen, and this memory, the earliest, of the big girl bed, at 22 months. 

I tell her I recall being in the back seat behind Dad driving and Mom in the passenger’s seat.  We were descending down a great hill at night time into a glorious span of lights in São Paulo in the “il-bu-car” (toddler for “little blue car” for our VW Bug).  Mom turned around to tell me we’d be going out to dinner and I could order my favorite grilled cheese sandwich and fanta l’arange (orange pop), and “and then we’ll come home and you’ll get your ‘big girl bed’!” 

Mom, astonished, says the memory is returning to her, and she fills in the details: the hill into the city with its “city yights” (toddler for “city lights”) was the return drive from the university Brazilians affectionately call “USPi” (pronounced “oo-sp-ee”), the highly acclaimed University of São Paulo, where my dad was teaching.  We had only one car, which my mom needed, so together as a family we made the daily trek to and from his work.  Sometimes, instead of coming straight home, my parents would stop at the Clube de Campo (Country Club), usually for their monthly payment.  Then they’d stop to eat at the snack bar.  Mom laughs that my memory from toddlerhood recalls the snack bar as “going out to dinner.” 

Home now from Venezuela, more memories are coming, but this time from our early years in San Jose, California, and, unlike those from São Paulo, these memories are hard and tighten up my chest.  I don’t share any of them with Mom this day.  I like our bonding, and I mostly need confirmation that the memories are true, and I am not crazy.  Because I’m still seeing visions and hearing voices, but some severe, and having nightmares too.  A few weeks later, I would also be vomiting and suffering from migraines, unusual for me, and I would soon be calling these three and half months from mid-May to late August, 2005 my “summer in the twilight zone.” 

But this is late May, before I conceive this time as a twilight zone, and what I most need is strength to make it through the nightmares and their chilling daytime effects.  In one nightmare, my feet had been tied up and roped to the back of a car speeding down the highway.  I woke chilled, associating the nightmare to end times persecution within my then-Evangelical consciousness.  I woke with a recollection of a prophesy I thought was in Revelation of two prophets dragged through the streets behind a chariot driven by charging horses.  Perhaps my perception of such a prophesy came from a commentator embellishing an image from Revelation out of a similar image from the prophet Nahum.  I can’t find the prophesy now and don’t know if it exists, but the image fit into my terrified consciousness of the time.

 In another nightmare, a few of us are at a zoo, had gotten lost, were now in the grounds of the lions, and we were trying to find our way out before the lions noticed our presence.  I awoke, sweating, and connected the dream to Daniel, the pastor I had just connected with, and the biblical Daniel, deemed by many to have been another apocalyptic prophet.  Daniel in the lion’s den. What about the young pastor Daniel I just left in Venezuela?  With whom I shared special a mutual attraction?  Is he okay?  What is happening to him?  I became terrified for him, and I kept seeing the vision during the day, and my mind kept expanding upon it and increasing its terrifying nature.  This vision tormented me. 

 These nightmares threw me into Evangelical apocalyptic terror.  Today, I mostly see apocalyptic imagery as metaphor for an internal transformation, akin perhaps to what I was going through at the time.  But in 2005, my evangelical consciousness held too much stock in a great global apocalyptic catastrophe.

 What a time in my life to be gripped by such fear.  Evangelicals have been trained to know the group of people expected to face the worst: pregnant and nursing mothers.  The account in Matthew said to be from Jesus describes climate disasters, wars, the call to flee, and the warning to the most dire group to face that time: “But woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing in those days!” (Matt 24:19) 

 Perhaps, I muse today as I admit this fear with shame, that I might have needed to have that consciousness quite literally scared right out of me.  I wonder if that’s what I had needed more than the Prozac, prescribed for my overwhelmed angst, which my doctor had diagnosed as post-partum depression.  The nightmares were purging out of me this internal terror I didn’t know had been gripping me.  Could my anxieties have had less to do with post-partum depression than to evangelical terror of an apocalypse? 

 And this was the life moment to grip me with the greatest terror.  I had weaned my little girl only six months earlier.  Two of my friends in my moms’ support group were pregnant.  Two others were nursing.  All with little ones, once a week, we met at church, chipping in to a pool of funds for two babysitters to watch our toddlers and preschoolers, keeping the babies with us, while we talked, prayed, and helped each other through the drama of raising little ones.   I could not tell them about my apocalyptic fears.  Either I’d contaminate them with my terror, or they’d really think I was crazy.  Probably the latter.  But I needed help, and they were the friends I had been bonding with at that time. 

 “You haven’t been sleeping,” one of them replied to what I had just shared of a couple of memories and, without any details, that I was seeing things and battling nightmares.  “It makes sense that you may be seeing some pretty crazy stuff.” 

 “And you went off your Prozac.  That can throw you into some really wild places,” added another with tired nonchalance.  Really wild.  Maybe that can explain some of the nightmares, but it can’t explain the rest . . . ?   “How about you double up on your meds?”

 A third, who had been listening intently with compassion in her eyes, scrunched her mouth, a little worried over these replies, especially that last one.  Will she understand?   She seems to get that this is real.  Can she offer support?  She took a deep breath, affirmed that I had obviously encountered some powerful experiences, and even ones that had brought me back to childhood. Can she help them see that this is real and I need support?  “I’m not sure we can help you,” she said, shaking her head.  “I wonder if you could find a counselor, even one who specializes in childhood issues?”

 I sighed, frustrated.  I didn’t want a counselor.  I wanted a friend.  But this was my support group for new moms, and what I needed went pretty far beyond how to handle the terrible twos or how to potty training while nursing.  I wanted to know how to manage confusing world of the extrasensory, how to confront the nightmares, and how to honor the “gift” Samuel said I had been given, if that was true, and without getting swept into its never-neverland.  Most especially, I wanted them to affirm that I wasn’t crazy.  But I couldn’t tell them any of that.  So I paused in silence, and then said, “I hear you, but I want the spiritual strength to get through this.”

 The friend who had suggested I double up on my pills nodded.  “How about talking with our pastor?” 

 If they don’t understand, how will he?  That’s what my husband had been wanting me to do too, but I was recalling one of the pastor’s recent sermons when he was preaching on one of those passages of the Spirit’s move among the prophets, and he began fairly apologetically.  “Now we today probably don’t understand this very well, because we don’t see it ourselves, but . . .” and then he continued with the visions of the prophets.  If that’s what my pastor believes, how could he be of help?

 I gave a slight shake of my head and remained silent.  I could think of only one person who could really help.  And he was in Venezuela.  Samuel.

 I had already reached out to Samuel, twice, first in an email, to which he replied with encouragement, and then, in a moment of desperation, at 10 pm on the phone the other night.  He listened with understanding, assured me that Daniel was okay, offered his encouragement, suggested I find a local spiritual mentor, and said that I had the divine strength within me.  “Karina, tu tienes el poder.”   Karina, you have the power.  He spoke with conviction.  Whatever is happening, he understood.  I said I doubted my strength.  Then he spoke again, still in the same warm, soft voice.  “Karina, son las tres de la mañana.”  Oh goodness.  Valencia is five hours ahead of Pacific Time.  It’s three in the morning.  I was horrified.  How could I wake him like that?  I deeply apologized and wished him a very good night sleep.  That conversation at 3 am for Samuel had been about three days earlier, and, as it turned out, it was my last contact with him.

 Hoping to find confidence in the memories, I’m closing my conversation with Mom with a description of our home in São Paulo.  I start with the kitchen, since that’s where we always entered the house, and describe it from the view walking in.  Our small, square kitchen table is to the left, against the wall, with three short, steel chairs on each side.  Our sink is in front of us and the stove is to its right with a kettle sitting on it.  The oven is beneath the stove and I see Mom pulling out pots and pans.  Mom laughs.  “That’s right!  The oven didn’t work!”  The fridge is set against the wall to the right.  Down the hallway to the left was Mom and Dad’s room and to the right was my room, which I also describe with its “big girl bed” against the right wall, a little nightstand next to it, and the closet chest on the left side with my toys at the bottom.  Then at the “back” end of the house was our little living area with a tweed tan love seat and a big black chair with a cushion that sunk down so far that we didn’t use it much.

          “Wow.”  Mom can utter only one word.  She is silent.  I have one final question for her.  All of the homes we entered in Venezuela opened at the front door to the sala, a little living area, small like ours, and then led to the kitchen at the back door.  “Why did our front door open into our kitchen?  Was that normal in Brazil?”  Mom laughs.  “Our front door didn’t work!”  The door had been damaged and got stuck.  Their landlord had warned them that if they tried to open it, they wouldn’t be able to close it again, and if my parents did that, their landlord said with a smile, they would have to pay for a new door.  Mom chuckles, remembering the smile.  It was like their landlord was hoping they’d mess up, try to open the front door, and have to buy a new door for that house.  “So we always came in through the back door!”

             My mom laughs again, goes silent, lets out a deep sigh, and speaks again. “Wow.  I can’t believe you remember any of that, let alone all of that!”

 I’m not crazy.  What a relief.

Continue to Part 4: Misunderstanding with Pastor Tired

Return to Part 2: Understanding from Samuel

Start at Part 1: Translating for Daniel

Understanding from Samuel: Part 2 of "Translation Overload"

Dear friends, what follows is the second of what will likely be a four part sneak preview of a memoire I think I'll "Translation Overload."  Click here to see Part 1, "Translating for Daniel," and if you'd like to see another facet of this time in Venezuela and the memories that accompanied that time, click here to begin another four part series.

Beauty and terror.  No middle ground.  Mother Nature kept changing her mind.  Throughout our time in Venezuela, bursts of thunder, lightning, and heavy downpours of rain raged between moments of gentle warmth with blue skies and a brightly shining sun. 

I love thunderstorms.  Electrons are popping off in a charged atmosphere, hence the lightning, and I feel the electricity surging through my own body.  None of us North Americans had thought to bring an umbrella for a mission trip in May, but our Venezuelan hosts were too kind to us -- too kind, that is, for me.  A few of our hosts sacrificed their own umbrella for us us, gratefully accepted by my other visiting teammates.  Please, may no one offer one to me.   I wanted to walk through the streets drenched like Daniel and the young men.  But head elder Samuel, the one who had served the black beans that ushered in my waterfall of memories, graciously offered his to me.  With his round face and big, warm smile and eyes that dance, Samuel carried a lovely childlike warmth about him.  As a grandfather to a four year old, the age my son had just turned, he felt like a father to me and acted as one with the offer of his umbrella.  How could I refuse?  I compromised: “solomente si contigo.”   Only if I join you.  He smiled and held the umbrella for us both.  If I had to be covered from the glorious energy of a thunderstorm, at least I did so with my father figure Samuel.

 At night, I was battling a life-long familiarity: insomnia.  I had mistakenly left my Prozac, prescribed for my Post-partum Depression and to help me to sleep, at home.  But this time, the sleepless nights were elaborating on the waterfall of memories, which came to life more vividly at night.   I was shown my toddlerhood in São Paulo, Brazil as a place of warmth where I had felt loved and at home.  There, my family was living a life without wealth, but a slow and peaceful one, quite different from our later rich and fast-paced life in Silicon Valley.  An epiphany was dawning.  Was this why I had felt so lonely and overwhelmed in San Jose, wasn’t fitting in, and had to take summer school to avoid repeating first grade?  Could I have been in culture shock?

 Although the memories brought me healing at night, the day time called for much strength.  My legs were so unsteady one Saturday morning while trying to walk into our hotel’s breakfast room that I almost fell, but, thankfully, my hotel roommate caught me.  Don, our main leader, witnessed my near fall, pointed to me, then up toward our hotel rooms, and said, “Rest.”  “They’ll be without a translator,” I said.  “I’ll call Daniel and let him know you need to rest.  He’ll understand.”  True.  He would.

             While resting in my hotel room, another thunderstorm erupted.  I opened the shade to watch the downpour, see the lightning streak across the sky, and listen to the bomb-like blasts and drum rolls of the thunder.  I had been ordered to rest, but wasn’t sleeping.  This was my chance.  Free of the umbrella, I left my hotel room and went outside to the storm.  The thunder was loud and the lightning was bright, but the rain was gentle and the air was warm.  As I walked away from the high-rise hotels and into a residential zone, I was getting wet, but not drenched, and the warm air tingled on my wet face.  Living in the Pacific Northwest, where rain usually comes with cold air, this warmth on my wet skin felt invigorating.  The exhaustion of lost sleep was gone, and strength was built into my legs.  I almost felt like I could defy gravity and levitate through the electric air. 

When I came to a fairly open field on the other side of the street, I watched the lightning show of bright lights streaking from one end of the sky to the other. Then my eyes took on an unknown sight.  I could see beyond the lightening and into the heavens.  Waves of purple, blue, lilac, and magenta, spotted with little bubbles of yellow and green, spun together into a stunning and artistic spiral. An aurora borealis?  I had never seen an aurora before, and I knew this wasn’t the time and place for one, but the photographs I had seen by those who had captured these magnificent heavenly events were the only comparison I could make to what I was seeing in the skies, but this aurora, behind and beyond the lightning, seemed like a stage set backdrop for the performers of the dancing lightning streaks.  No, not an aurora, I thought.  Heaven.  And I marveled.  Who is this Choreographer? 

Yes, Heaven.  Another of those mysterious whispers had just arrived.  But you think heaven is the afterlife.  No, heaven is here.  With you.  Now.  This was the same soft voice that had whispered that I was to be the fourth translator.  It had been right; no one else had stepped up to the plate, and, I smiled to myself, I was the right one to be Daniel’s translator.  Could I trust this whisper too? 

            The thunder, the lightning, the aurora vision, these new whispers, telepathy with Daniel, and the waterfall of memories kept building, to my amazement, and ushered in a three and a half month period that I would later call my “Summer in the Twilight Zone.” 

            The day following the aurora vision was a Sunday, Mother’s Day, celebrated as such in both the United States and in Venezuela.  Daniel’s church put on a grand Mother’s Day celebration, led primarily by the youth.  As the mother of two very young children, one who had just turned four and the other a year and a half, I was torn between missing them and feeling relieved to be liberated from their needs.  My husband and I had both felt this trip would help treat my Post-partum Depression better than any drug, and that impression was proving itself to be true. 

The celebration began with a drama presentation of mime to a song playing in the background.  The scene began to our right with a boy about twelve lying on his bed, tossing and turning, unable to sleep.  Like me, he was suffering insomnia.  Then a woman entered from our left, with a slow backward jazz walk to the slow paced rhythm of the song.  She began to mime anger through her contorted face and index finger pointing toward something in front of her.  Still with a backward jazz walk, she bent her knees lower.  The youth continued to toss and turn.  The music picked up and a man entered also from the left, also with a jazz walk, but this time forward, with more speed, and straight legs.  They mimed a fight.  The youth continued to toss and turn.  

The scene brought me back to my 5 and 6 year-old self in San Jose of my own parents fighting soon after we had moved there.  I wondered if that’s when my insomnia had begun.  If only we had stayed in Brazil.  The song progressed into a peak of quick, strong beats.  So did the fighting.  Then the song slowed, as did the fighting.  The parents shook hands and walked to the child, one parent on each side of his bed.  Each parent took one of the child’s hands and lifted him up to a sitting position.  Then they lifted him off the bed and took him into their arms and a full family embrace.  The song closed with the words Estás en casa.  You are at home.  

I was breathless.  The drama presentation had just confirmed and reinforced the epiphany.  Here, in South America, I was at home.  I fell onto my lap.  Into my journal a couple of years later, I recorded the moment as feeling “like I had entered a place of Harmony, as if everything, including me, was interlinked with everything and everyone.” 

A rocking, rhythmic whooping that celebrated each mother attending the service concluded the Mother’s Day Celebration, led by a youth musical team singing, clapping, and playing the drums and tambourines.  Orchids, Venezuela’s national flower, lined up the center aisle.  Two teens, a boy and a girl, stood at the front holding flowers.  Another young man, appearing to be about 20, led as master of the ceremony calling out the names of the mothers one by one, preceded by a special beat of about four measures, and then followed by another beat as long as necessary for the mother to dance through the center aisle to receive her flower.  The mothers were called in alphabetical order by first name, each starting, lovingly, with “Mama.”  Half way through this rocking celebration came my turn.  The familiar four measures of beats ran through while the mother who had just received her flower was returning to her seat.  “Mama Karina!” cried out the young MC, while casting his hand, palm up, toward me.  I was included.  None of these young people had met me, but someone must have cued them to the presence of every mother in the room, including me.  In San Jose, I had been so invisible, but here, where I thought I was a foreigner, I belonged.  I was en casa, at home.  A dancer myself, I hopped up to chassé to the drum beats and finish with a chaine turn at the end to accept my orchid, a lilac one, reminiscent of the aurora. 

            After the service, Samuel, smiling big, approached me.  He said the Spirit had prompted him to watch me during the drama presentation, that he saw my chest fall into my lap, and that the Spirit spoke to him that I had been granted a gift, a gift of the Spirit, a concept believed in charismatic churches, but not generally in those of our denomination.  His comment came as a surprise.  Were those “gifts of the Spirit” real? “Viste el cielo, no?”   You saw heaven, right?  Yes, sort of.  I thought, still confused.  But not in the way Samuel probably meant, and not at that moment, but the day before, in the sky, during the thunderstorm.  How do I explain this to him? 

            I tried to affirm what he witnessed was a powerful moment for me, and that I had felt like I had seen heaven, but the day before during the lightning storm when I saw colors, like a— I paused.  How do I translate “aurora borealis”?  I said I didn’t know the word in Spanish so I spoke it in English.  His eyes and face lit up as he exclaimed, “Aurora boreal!”  Beaming, he added that I had received a great gift.  I couldn’t make sense of Samuel’s expression, but perceived something ineffable taking place. 

I was silent for a moment and then shared with Samuel that I had a question for him.  A couple of days earlier, Daniel made himself absent for our next appointment, letting one of the others lead in his place.  Most of the team-members, both North American and Venezuelan, had also taken a break, me for my near fall and the others for sickness.  But Daniel didn’t look sick.  When he returned, I asked Daniel if he had been sick, but he assured me he had not been; all was well.  He was calm, pleasant, and returned to normal, except a little more distant from me.   Could it be, I asked Samuel, that I was Daniel’s “sickness”?  Samuel threw up his head and laughed.  “Siii!  He chuckled. Verdaaad!”  Yes, that’s right!  Still chuckling, he asked if Daniel was also a “sickness” for me.  Also chuckling, I had to admit that Daniel was indeed a “sickness” for me too.  Beneath the whirlwind of my memories and the paranormal, my attraction to Daniel had been somewhat buried, but his telepathic eyes of interest clicked my own awareness on that I felt the same way.  But my reply to Samuel was simple: I also love my husband.  “Bueno!”  Grinning, Samuel promised that he and the elders would be praying for me and supporting me right along with their support of Daniel. 

            Little did either Samuel or I realize at that moment just how much support I might need, and for more than just Daniel, and especially from Samuel himself, for no one in North America would understand what was about to come for me upon my return to the United States.  The Summer in the Twilight Zone was about to amp itself up, and like Mother Nature, hold two distinct states.  Beauty and terror.

Continue to Part 3: Remembering with Mom