Memoir writing is very Aquarian.

Aquarius, the water-bearer
pours the water
back from a container
into the free-flowing stream.

Mēm in Hebrew means water
Moi is French for me
Mem-moi: water me
Moi-mem: I water myself.

How do you know
—until you water yourself
—if you can bear it?

Nancy Wait

oil by NW 1987

How’s Your Shift Coming Along?

(A dialogue between me and myself, posted by I.)

Me: How’s your shift coming along?

Myself: Very well, thank you.  And how is yours?

Me: Oh, mine is just great!  Thank you for asking!  I’ve been wanting to tell someone.  So many new things are happening.  It all seems to be happening at once, too.  Quite discombobulating at times, but to be expected, I guess…given the energies now.

Myself: That’s for sure! I hardly know what I’m doing from one minute to the next!

Me: Yeah, I know! So let me tell you what happened just today. I was working on my book, and—

Myself: Still working on the same book?

Me: Well, it takes time, you know, to figure all these things out. Memoirs. Know Thyself and all that.  Doesn’t happen over night you know.

Myself: But didn’t you start it back in ’97? That’s the last century. You’ve been working on it since the last century!

Me: Don’t remind me.  But here’s the thing. This is what I wanted to tell you that just happened today. Because when I first started recalling and remembering events, it was very painful you know. I had to relive all that stuff in order to write about it.  Go back there. It was like going back into a dungeon. Remembering how it was before there was light. Before I saw where it was all leading to.  It was like time-traveling.  It was really bad for a few years there. Feeling all my sadness again.

Myself: But you got through it.

Me: Sure, I got through it. And you know, when I finally thought it was finished back in 2007 I think it was…I felt like I had been on the dark side of the moon.

Myself: But you emerged.

Me: Yes. I came out of it. But I was changed. You know? Because we forget the feelings. We remember events, but we forget the feelings.

Myself: I think that’s called a survival mechanism.

Me: Well, you know what they tell writers. Sit down and open a vein.

Myself: Geesh!

Me: I didn’t know how to do it at first. My advisor at Goddard said I was like a tourist in my own life, riding by on a bus, looking at it from a distance. He told me to get off the bus. I always like to do everything fast you know. I paint fast. And now I was writing too fast. I had to slow down. Relive it all inch by inch.

Myself: Ouch. So, what were you saying happened today?

Me: I felt the love come back! I was working on the revisions. It’s coming along really well. And then I got up to take a break, and that’s when I realized what was happening. I felt this surge of love for all the characters. For my character, too!  It’s the way it goes though, I guess. First you have to go back and feel how it hurt.

Myself: Opening yourself up to the hurt.

Me: Yes. Opening. Feeling. Then creating out of that feeling.

Myself: Until you get to the other side?

Me: Going over to the dark side of the moon. Then coming back into the light.

Myself: Well, the moon has phases.

Me: It’s so hard to see, when you’re there, that you’ll ever get through it. Ever be able to forget again, all that sadness.

Myself: So what happened then? Did you forget it?

Me: No, silly. I remembered it. But it was through the remembering that I transformed it. I think that’s what must have happened.

Myself: Sounds kinda airy-fairy.

Me: It’s hard to explain. It took a lot of time, see? Piecing things together. Seeing the big picture. But first I had to live through all those moments again.

Myself: So you said.

Me: I had to dig up a lot of old ground, see? Uncover the wounds again. Feel the hurt, again.

Myself: Better you than me.

Me: Yes, but you know what I kept telling myself? I kept telling myself to remember the light. Remember where the light was. I wasn’t thinking of inner light. I was thinking of lamp light. Winter light. Summer light. How the light changes. But mainly where the light was in the room. Whatever room a scene I was writing about took place. Because somewhere it’s still there, you know. Those scenes are still there in my mind. It’s like nothing ever disappears. The memories are still there. The light is still there, and the darkness too. But the darkness doesn’t scare me anymore. I’m not afraid of it. Because the love has come back. It may not be in the lines, but it’s there. Maybe between them. And maybe no one else will see what I’m seeing, or feel what I’m feeling, but it’s there. It’s there for me. The love has come back.

Myself: Hmmm….

Me: It’s true! And I knew it! I knew it last fall when the Little Man (click on it to see who he is) came back. I was so excited opening the box. I took all these pictures of opening the box and unwrapping him. I thought I’d do another series of paintings of Little Man. But then I didn’t. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t doing those paintings.

Myself: Maybe you didn’t have to. Maybe it wasn’t important.

Me: I know, I know. But he was a symbol. The funny thing is, I remember when Love left me. And it wasn’t even in this life time. It was long ago. Or, maybe it was just a dream. But I died. I think I died when Love left me.

Myself: Inside, or out?

Me: Does it matter?

Myself: Right.

Me: But he came back.

Myself: Yes.

Me: And you know what I just thought? What if he never left at all, and I only thought he did?

Myself: Hmmm…..

Introducing Nancie, who lived with me from 1971 until 1977 and who I appreciate (now in hindsight) very dearly.  For she was as brave as she was young, as foolish as she was fearless.  I must never forget her.

Anyway, I can’t.  The internet won’t let me.  So, I have decided to embrace her.

I didn’t really forget about her, for she is part of me and the crux of my memoir. My still unpublished memoir which has gone through untold revisions and name changes too, just like me.  Am I still trying to get the story straight?  No, but I am still trying to make sense of it all.  Which is why it has gone through so many name changes.  First I called it A Mask With Wings. Then I decided to call it Girl Under Water.  And now it is simply The Nancy Who Drew. But whatever I call it, it is still the same story.

And when I think of the Nancie who did Au-Pair Girls, I no longer want to cringe.  I want to remember the comment of a young woman in my memoir class at the New School back in the 90s who said after hearing my synopsis, that she wanted to grow up  and be just like me.  Well guess what—I want to be like Nancie too!  Ridiculously brave, throwing caution to the wind, let the chips fall where they may.

But I must tell you why I changed my name in the first place.  When I was 21 an astrologer said that if I changed the spelling of my name to N-a-n-c-i-e  — it would bring me more luck.  As an actress I knew I could never have enough luck.  Luck is so vital in theater that no one even dares wish each other luck before a show.  Instead it’s “break-a-leg.”  So, I said yes to having more luck.  And when shortly after the name change I was offered a lead in a film, it seemed nothing short of magical. I said yes to that too.  When afterwards my life fell apart and continued to unravel for a number of years, I never thought to change my name back to its original spelling.  I waited until I gave up acting altogether and tried something else.  (Painting.)

Au-Pair Girls (1972) –  (trailer) youthful folly, or the wisdom of a fool? Fool, like the Tarot card. For there would be no hiding from myself ever again.  So, Nancie, I salute you.  From the time you began studying acting in earnest at fourteen, you were told that you had to “bare your soul” onstage.  And then when you were offered a movie where you would have to take off your clothes, you wondered if baring your body would help you to bare your soul even more?  That was how your mind worked.  All those acting teachers and coaches always reminding you and the others that you had to let go of your ego.  Forget “self.” Be naked in front of the audience.  They meant it only metaphorically, but still, it was the 60s and Hair and Jerzy Grotowski and who knows how many others trying to free us up from being bound by the shell of skin.

I’ve always thought it strange how reckless so many of us are when we’re young.  We’ve lived for so few years, and yet are so willing to take chances.  Then, as we get older, we seem less willing.  As if the more years we have under our belts, the less we want to let go of life, or the perception we have ourselves, forgetting that change and movement and staying in the flow, being in the life force itself, are what keeps us vital.

I took a risk with Au-Pair Girls, and my acting career never really recovered.  So I moved on.  I moved on to find a way to really bare my soul.

And now I have a new name, at least on the Gold Ring, where I call myself Nanineko, (my profile here) which means – she who is one with her Destiny.

Amen.

(By the way, in the photo here, doesn’t it look as if I am undressing for the “boogy-man”? That big dark shapeless mass?  I think I was, you know…)

watercolor by NW 1984

Update on Going Deaf in One Ear  – link

I am coming up to my fifth anniversary of going deaf in my left ear, a totally unexpected occurrence on Groundhogs Day 2005.  I woke up that morning with a strange ringing in my ear and shortly afterwards realized I couldn’t hear in my left ear.  How strange!  I assumed it was the temporary result of a cold.

Or, it could have been a wax build-up.  This is what I thought several days later when my ear was still blocked up and I made an appointment with the doctor.  My doctor cleaned the ear, but I still couldn’t hear a thing.  He sent me to a specialist.  The specialist gave me a course of steroids.  I loved being on steroids.  They gave me tons of energy.  I needed little sleep.  I got lots of things done that I had been putting off.

The problem with the steroids was when I went off them.  That was when I lost my balance and had such a bad case of vertigo I had to go to the Emergency Room.  I think I was in the hospital for a week.  They gave me steroids intravenously and the dose was so large I became psychotic!  I think that’s what they said.  All I remember is that I was singing at the top of my lungs at 4 in the morning.

It’s all ancient history now.  I’ve never had to have the operation because my tiny tiny acoustic neuroma hasn’t grown any bigger.  It was just there to cut off the hearing on my left side, forcing me to find a new balance, a new way of being in the world.

Five years later I no longer wonder why this happened to me, and I don’t usually think about trying to cure myself with visualizing white healing light.  I accept this condition.  Accept it totally.  When it first happened, my instinct was to read Louise Hay and practice the meditation, “I hear with love.”  That really worked!  It’s an on-going process of course.  But I’m usually able to catch myself right away when I react to something unpleasant, turning my resentment around to acceptance and loving understanding lickety-split.

Why I am writing this update now is because another factor has come into play, one that seems vitally important to my consciousness at  present.  Because I am beginning to understand my loss of hearing on a different level.  I know that I create my reality.  I know this.  So why would I choose to go deaf in one ear?  A permanent condition, unalterable apparently.  Well, look at it this way.  What if there was a person who was so very sensitive to everything, and especially to noise, that life became extremely stressful?  And she had no idea how to remove herself from that noise as it followed her everywhere.  If you were her guardian angel, don’t you think it might be nicer for her if you cut off her hearing at least in one ear?  So at least when she lay her head down on the pillow, deaf side up, sounds would be muffled?

But wait, there’s more.  The above is what I have become used to thinking over the years.  It’s only lately that something new has entered in.  Because in effect what has happened is that I now have one side for hearing the world, and one side for listening to my inner voice.  If one side of you only hears – what to me sounds like when you hold a sea shell up to your ear – it is a reminder, a constant reminder, to listen to my inner self, my own inner voice.

The outer world and its sounds have come to seem a separate thing from what goes on inside me.  Growth and development in consciousness is always personal, always completely relevant and specific to us as individuals, no matter how much we have in common with others.  So, at times there is a need to let go of the self and experience our oneness with other people, and at other times we need to go within and separate ourselves from what is happening around us.  There were many years when I came to see separateness as a dirty word.  Well, not exactly dirty, but definitely misguided and backward.  But lately things have become more blended.  I see concentric circles spiraling out from one another.  I experience Oneness already, so there is no longer any need to remind myself of it.  Instead, I can move back (or forward or sideways) into the place of also experiencing my own uniqueness.

Having one side of my head totally deaf to the world around me is an incredible gift!  It is a constant reminder that I am in the world, and also not of it!  I am someplace else as well.  A place that feels very right to me.  In other words, I have come to see this whole experience of partial deafness as an enormous blessing~~~~~ 

Sometime earlier this year, I don’t remember exactly when, I began hearing a voice from inside that said, “I’ve got you.”

I’ve got you.

What a wonderful feeling it gave me, knowing that I was being held.  Knowing, that someone had me, and wouldn’t let me fall.

I don’t actually remember having a fear of falling; it was more a fear of getting lost (again).  The fear came from a deep well of loneliness, a loneliness I have known all my life.  And sometime earlier this year it had come back, and come back in such a way as to make me feel I was losing ground.

I’ve got you.

But now, here was this voice, over and over again it seemed, every time I needed to hear it.  I wouldn’t exactly say I was having mini panic attacks, but fear was definitely there.

For many months I had been reliving my fear of abandonment.  An age-old fear, and one that all of us have felt at one time or another until we are secure in our connection to Source or the Creator, or any one of the names we might call God.  But as my personal life was also filled with particularly harrowing events of abandonment at a young and vulnerable age, it has been difficult for me to ever feel safe.  To feel that I was being taken care of, and that I was not alone.

I’ve got you.

In my experience, healing takes time.  It may come in a flash, and it may be forgotten in a flash.  It may take many months, years even, for it to finally sink in that all is indeed well.  There is certainly a lot to the saying that we have to go through it and go through it until we grow through it.

I’ve got you.

But maybe this last healing I went through this year will be the last time I need to be reminded that I am not alone, and indeed never have been.  For just today, yes – this very day! I remembered I had a couple of drawings in one of my old sketchbooks from 1984.  Twenty-five years ago!

I was at Omega for a weekend workshop with Jean Houston called Shape Shifters.  It was a marvelous experience and the beginning of many new relationships.  And while I was there I made these drawings, no doubt prompted by something Jean Houston had been talking to us about, because the drawings didn’t come out of their own accord.  They were prompted.  But still, they came out!  I saw what I saw, felt what I felt, and these old drawings are the proof.  Even if they were only wishes, I made my wish.  I drew my wish!

I’ve got you.

These drawings might have been made 25 years ago, but it was only this year that I heard the words.  Could it be that I have moved, progressed, shifted, ascended – enough so that I was actually able to hear what I had once, so long ago, only imagined, or wished was true?  I think it really is something like that.  That we can visualize and picture all we want.  And then, one day, the pictures start talking to us.  Or rather, we hear them talking. Because we have passed through enough of the heavy stuff, the shadows, the darkness, the chaos and noise of the world and our own chaotic thought patterns, for us to finally be able to listen.  To hear things like, I’ve got you.

Poem by Leticia G. Dominguez

All the Angels from above
Be with me now in light and love
Reveal to me what I should know
As I go within and let life flow.
In love and light, love and light, love and light…

Goddess of both earth and sky
Be with me now as I fly
With your light along my way
Watch over my hands and feet I pray.
In love and light, love and light, love and light…

Guides of heaven, Guides of earth
Those with me now and from my birth
Be with me as I work and play
Guide my thoughts and words this day.
In love and light, love and light, love and light!

From Angels, Goddesses and Guides

Awaken Your Potential blog by JoyIsLife

Sometimes it doesn’t matter who says it, as long as you hear the words.  They can even be spoken by a stranger.  An angel dressed up like a man who was sprinting up the subway steps like the man I saw yesterday.

First, a little background.  I live in the city.  I walk everywhere.  Even if I take the bus or the subway there’s still a lot of walking.  As a life-long city dweller I am a sidewalk veteran.  When I’m walking fast and paying attention to my surroundings, I don’t even have to look at people in order to navigate my way around them.  I have built-in radar that let’s me keep to a certain speed without bumping into anyone.  The only place this doesn’t work is around Times Square and Rockefeller Center and other tourist sites where people wander unhurriedly and often don’t know where they are going.  But still, even in those places, I’ve noticed that if I walk with an air of determination, my eyes straight ahead not looking at anyone, people make way for me.

However, none of this holds sway if there is a man barreling down the sidewalk, running perhaps.  When that happens I get out of the way, and fast, as if he was a huge snowball hurtling down a hill in my direction.  It’s the motion combined with his weight.  The thud of his weight hitting the pavement.  The force of a heavy object moving through space.  In the interests of self-preservation I get out of the way as quickly as possible.

I think it must be wonderful to know one has tremendous physical power.  Those that have it must know it gives them an edge to take up space that way, making people step aside for them.  Then there are those like me, light-weight with small bones, treading lightly, taking up little room, and rarely if ever, barreling down sidewalks.

I’ve never been very sturdy on my feet, and can be knocked off balance quite easily.  I laughingly call myself a “pushover,” because the physical truth often becomes the psychological one as well.  In other words, I am easily moved, easily swayed.  I am more like a sea plant wafting about in the waves than a sturdy tree.  Yet when I am focused and set on a goal, I usually get where I’m going.

Yesterday morning my goal was the subway.  The day was bright and sunny and my head was down.  I was completely focused on the shopping I had to do and how I was going to get there.  Then, just as I was making a sharp turn to go down the subway stairs, I became aware of a man lunging up the steps.  I quickly stepped back.  My head was still down, focusing on the staircase as he flew by me, a man in running clothes and a black watch-cap.  As he flashed by me he said, “Excuse me.”  Just those two words sounding right above my head, and my whole being felt altered.  Excuse me, in the voice of an angel.

Well, who knows what angels actually sound like?  But we know when we hear one, just like I knew yesterday morning.  How shall I describe his voice?  Soft, caressing, sweet and resonate?  Yes, all those things, and beautiful, too.  His voice with those words had the quality of Beauty.  I never saw his face.  I was so focused on getting to the train that I couldn’t switch gears so quickly.  And something told me not to look up, just to keep going and not look up.  There was no time to look up.  It happened so fast I think if I had looked up all I would have seen was the back of his head.  So he passed, and I continued down the subway stairs, his voice reverberating in my head.  I replayed it over and over as I rode the train into Manhattan.  Those words, excuse me, suddenly seemed to make everything all right.  Things I hadn’t even been aware that were not all right.  But more than that, his asking to be excused, this stranger I had passed for the briefest moment in time, seemed to be speaking for the entire race of men.  Certainly perhaps, for those men who had barreled through my own life, unaware or unconscious of my fragility.  For how easy it is to suppose that others are like ourselves, whatever we may be like.  If we are strong, why are others not?  If we are achingly sensitive, why are others not as well?  Can’t they see us?

The answer is they don’t, usually.  So, on this one morning, a few days after the magic of a snowfall, that great equalizer, when the city was covered in white, blotting out sore spots and any rust and dirt or grime, and a few days before Christmas, when the thoughts of unjaded spirits waft towards the miraculous, the divine, I received my gift.  The gift of an apology I didn’t know I was looking for, but one that I must have needed, because that was what I got.  A passing body, a being going in the opposite direction to me that I made way for, who thanked me by asking me to excuse him.  Which of course I did, instantaneously, joyously, gratefully.

Awakenings for me have tended to be just that—waking up one morning and feeling radically different.  Waking up to a completely different reality than the one I’d gone to sleep in.  Naturally these experiences did not come totally out of the blue.  They were preceded by days and weeks of tumultuous happenings.  The awakening was like a crescendo.  Boom! The cymbals clashed and I woke up to a new reality.  Outwardly, everything appeared the same as it had been when I went to sleep the night before.  But I had changed.  My world had altered.  And afterwards, in a matter of months, my whole life would radically change too.

The first time it happened I had dreamed of my death, so when I woke up I was amazed and happy to be alive.  But a transformation had occurred.  My old life was gone.  It was over.  The second time it happened, eleven years later, I woke up one morning and thought I was dying.  But I was really awakening to another new life.  As if I had shed another skin.  It was all about shedding, about getting to my core.  Shedding ideas of who or what I thought I was.  And in the process, dying to my old self.

I’ve called both of these “spiritual awakenings” because they took me to places not of this world.  It was a world of visions and voices and strange goings on, especially the second time.  But what they both showed me was an inner world of my own imagination that was as true and vital and real as this one is.  And, while they seemed to happen overnight, they were the result of years and years of preparation.  Yet this preparation was nothing special.  It was no more than just leading my life, following my dreams, following my passion, my bliss, and often stumbling horribly.  But in the end, who cares about the stumbles if eventually you arrive at your destination.

I’ve tried before to write about what I call my “second awakening,” and it never came out right.  I’ve sounded psychotic or manic because I had so obviously taken leave of my senses.  Which is why the experience makes little sense without putting it in the proper context.  And the context has been difficult to arrive at.  The context has taken years and years to establish.  But without it, neither of these awakenings would have given me the deeper knowledge and insight that I’ve longed for.

I have come to believe that both these awakenings, or dying experiences, really,  were about reliving a previous death.  A very traumatic previous death.  A death of someone else, not me, unless I am her reincarnated.  And I don’t remember anything about her life; only her death.  And remembering her death seems to be what my life’s been about.  So whether I am her or she is me is rather beside the point, because we are connected in profound and startling and unarguable ways.

You see, there was this young girl of eleven who was killed in World War II.  Her plane was shot down by the Nazis over the Bay of Biscay.  The aircraft burst into flames before falling into the sea, disappearing forever.  Thirty-three years later I dreamed that I was shot and fell to the bottom of the sea.  But then a door opened underwater.

When I was a child of eight, I used to have a recurring nightmare of being enclosed in a steel box with water pouring in, and no way out.  The water got higher and higher, until it reached my nose.  And just when I thought I was going to drown, I would wake up.  Waking up always got me out of that death trap.

The little girl who died on that plane was eleven.  When I was ten my eyes suddenly went bad and I had to wear glasses.  I could no longer see into the distance without wearing glasses.  I think I was afraid to see ahead.  Maybe I was afraid of turning eleven.  Then I did turn eleven and nothing happened.  I wasn’t afraid of flying, and I didn’t learn about the little girl until I was fifty.  But I had gone to live in the country of her birth, because that was the place where I felt most at home.  And later on I painted her picture, still without knowing who she was.  There are things that we don’t know, yet we somehow know them anyway.  Things that come to us in dreams, because we want to remember.  Or we long to live in another place, because we feel more at home there.  We have these longings, these dreams and inner urges to make something familiar manifest in the real world.

I must have wanted to remember very badly, because after the first awakening when I was shown the door under water,  I became a painter and painted from my imagination.  I wasn’t really imagining things though, I was just using my intuition, painting my dreams, my visions.  It wasn’t an imaginary world, it was what I felt inside.  The only way I could reach those feelings was through pictures, not words.  One day she came out, this little girl in a red dress sitting at the bottom of the sea.  Her eyes were open; she didn’t look drowned.  I didn’t know that it was now forty-four years after that plane was shot down in World War II.  But after I painted her, I kept noticing when my digital clock said 4:44.  I noticed that a lot, but I didn’t know what it meant.

I didn’t know why I was painting all those drowned people, either.  Or those figures on fire, falling into the sea.  But it must have been time for me to know, because of what happened that July, 1987, forty-four years after a plane was shot down over the Bay of Biscay.  It was the Fourth of July, Independence Day, and I woke up feeling like I was on fire.

I’d had a premonition the day before.  I saw my neighbor come in with a new barbeque for the holiday.  “Getting ready for the Fourth?” I said.  Then, for some unaccountable reason a wave of fear shot through me.  I suddenly felt that I was going to be barbequed.  Fried.  Burned alive.  My worst nightmare.

I was living alone in a beautiful studio in the East Village.  The walls were covered with my oil paintings.  I took them all down and stacked them against the wall.  I couldn’t bear to look at them anymore.  It was crazy, I know, but it was like I was suddenly seeing them for the first time, seeing what I saw, as if I was seeing myself in the mirror for the first time, as if my awareness had been magnified a hundredfold.  We know that our eyes actually serve to block most of what is out there—and there’s a reason for it.  It can hurt to see too much.  It can be confusing.  I hid the paintings as if that would help me to be blind again, but it was too late.  I’d seen something, and it scared me.  So now I saw the bare while drywall with nails sticking out, and I knew I was being nailed. I thought of pulling the nails out too, but then I would see the holes in the wall, and somehow that seemed worse.

#

By the spring of 1987 I had been painting non-stop for nine years, both commercial work and work from my imagination, which was all figurative, and mostly of the female form.  Early on it had begun to feel like I was painting a journey.  I called it Journey To The Deep, because I was drawn to painting figures falling into the water or rising up from the water or crawling out of the water onto dry land.  I thought of the water as a metaphor for the depths of my psyche.  The paintings seemed to paint themselves.  I didn’t question whether they were good or bad, or care really, what anyone else thought of them.  And then, as suddenly as the series had started, it came to an end.

I didn’t know it was the end at the time.  That the last of the drowned figures would be the one I had painted of a little girl sitting at the bottom of the sea in a red dress, with eyes open as if she wasn’t dead at all.  It was a particularly satisfying painting for me.  I related it to the time in my youth when I had escaped a very unfortunate situation by pretending I wasn’t there.  Pretending that I was drowned at the bottom of a swimming pool.  In a way this painting was like making my hidden self visible again.  Perhaps in doing so, I was releasing a great deal of pent up energy, because not long after I finished the painting, the vibrations began.

When the vibrations came the first time, a few years earlier, I only felt them in my legs.  A friend had taken me to the beach one night.  It was winter, and freezing cold.  We stared out over the waves, the black water, the white caps rolling in, the star-filled sky above.  All we did was stare at the sea and talk about how cold it was, and the next day I had the funny feeling in my legs.  A feeling of movement, as if the sea had somehow entered my bloodstream.  I asked my friend if he knew what it was, and all he could come up with was that I was probably drinking too much caffeine.  But I knew that wasn’t it.  I thought it had something to do with going to the ocean that night, and with a man named Sendar.  His name was Sendar.  It sounded like Send Her.  Because later on I would fantasize that I had been sent here.  How could I not when that channeler told me I was here on sabbatical?  I’d asked the channeler why I wasn’t more like other people?  Why couldn’t I get excited about things they got excited about?  “Because you’re only here on sabbatical,” he said.

I didn’t know what to do with that information, so I put it aside.  I kept it in the place I kept other interesting information that I didn’t know what to do with, like my mother telling me I was conceived in revenge for World War II.  Sabbaticals and revenge scenarios are all very well, but you still have to live your day-to-day life.

The vibrations in my legs went away after a while, and I forgot about them.  Yet now they were back, taking over my whole body.  The swirls always started in my solar plexus, and only when I was lying down.  The sensation was pleasant, relaxing even, as I gave into it.  I had to give into it.  There was no use fighting something I had no control over.  Swirling, spiraling up to my heart area, then my forehead.  Probably in my legs, too. They made me feel very awake, very alive.  I hardly needed to sleep or eat, and spent a great deal of time looking words up in the dictionary and writing down their meanings in a notebook where I would then make what seemed profound connections at the time.  Everything seemed important, and all with layers and layers of hidden meanings.  It can be like that sometimes.  You’re breaking out from one reality to another, and you don’t know where you are.  I look at those notebooks today and they make little sense.  I was like someone who is stoned and thinks they’re having brilliant revelations.

Oh yes, I thought I was being very brilliant at the time, discovering hidden codes that would at last make sense of my life.  But, I was having a breakthrough.  Or rather, I wanted to have a breakthrough.  Break through to the other side of the mirror.  The other side of something. There had to be more than this! I thought of smashing one of my mirrors, but that might bring bad luck, so I took a hammer and smashed the glass of a picture frame.  It was a bit of performance art.  Of course nothing happened other than having a mess of broken glass I now had to clean up.  But maybe intention is all that matters, because the next morning I woke up feeling unbearably hot.  New York is always hot in July, but this heat seemed to be coming from inside, like my body was on fire, smoldering from within.  I immediately turned on the fan and sat a few feet away, but nothing changed.  I wondered if the fan might be fanning the flames?  The heat was so strong that I stared at my bare white arm, half expecting the skin to turn black like charred wood.  The thought sent me scurrying into the bathroom to douse myself with cold water.

First I only sat on the edge of the tub with my feet in cold water, wondering if steam was going to rise up like when you run water over a hot frying pan in the sink. There was no steam, but there was no cooling off either, even though my feet turned red with cold.  I remember padding back into the studio with my wet feet and just standing there on the wood floor, trying to relax with my arms at my sides, consciously willing the heat to pass through me and into the floor boards, as if I was trying to ground an electrical cord.  But then I thought it would be better to stand on cold porcelain, so I headed back to the bathroom and got in the shower.  The water was a great distraction.  As long as I was under cool running water I didn’t feel how hot I was.

And so the hours passed, or what felt like hours, first pretending it was just a normal shower and washing myself, then washing my hair, then rinsing.  At some point I started singing.  I even danced.  It was all bravado.  I’m not sure when the tipping point came, when I started playing with the faucets, pretending they were the controls of a space ship.  Oh yes, I was preparing to come in for a landing.  That’s why I felt the burning, I was speeding through the atmosphere.  Finally I managed to managed to make  a safe landing.  The shower felt over, but I was unsure about getting out yet, so I began to run a bath.  The water filling up the tub was red. Maybe it was minerals.  New York water can be brown sometimes, though I’d never seen it red.  Somehow it made me think of the waters of birth.  Like I was being reborn, and coming back into my physical body from somewhere else.

Then, when at last I was ready to face being dry and was toweling myself off, I said silently, “How did I do?”

“Better than expected,” said a voice.  The voice was inside my head, but it didn’t feel as if it was coming from me.  It felt like an outside someone.  There was a sound of gentle laughter in the background, like children laughing.  Or were they angels?  I was in an altered state, as if I’d been hypnotized.  It was a place of complete acceptance, with no worries or concerns.  I had done better than expected.  That was good news.  Or was it?  Had so little been expected of me?  I pondered this as I dried myself off with a towel.  Then, as I was reaching for a blanket from the cupboard to wrap myself in, the voice said, “You will have a son.”

I went into the studio and sat on the floor in my blanket.  My body still felt warm inside, but it was a nice warm and my skin felt deliciously cool and clean.  The room was cold.  I had put the air-conditioner on high before getting in the shower.  For some reason I felt as if I had died.  I was obviously still alive, but I wasn’t like I had been before.  I felt as if I was in other hands now.  I didn’t think I was in charge of myself anymore.

When I was dressed, sitting perched on a stool in the living room area, the voice spoke again.  It said, “You don’t have to paint anymore.”

“I don’t?”  Again I heard the tinkling laughter in the background.

“No, you’ve painted enough.  Now you have to write how you got here.”

#

Five years later I did have a son.  And five years after that I went back to college to learn to be a writer.  I’ve been working on the story of how I got here ever since.  It begins after the war when my mother happens to meet a Jewish man on a cross-country bus and decides to conceive a child with him “in revenge for World War II,” as she put it.  Then I write about my childhood, and as I remember all the small details as well as the big events, another story starts to emerge.  I don’t see it yet.  There are all these clues sticking out like red herrings but I’m unable to piece them together or make sense of them.  Like the time a friend took me to the British Spiritualist Society and the medium said Leslie Howard was looking after me.  It was one of those pieces of information I didn’t know what to do with, so I put it away.

And it might have stayed in the recesses of memory had there not been 9/11.  Those happen to be my numbers.  Nine is my Destiny number, eleven my Path of Destiny. But of course I wasn’t thinking of that than.  Like everyone else I was in shock.  Afterwards came the anger.  And it was this anger that allowed the resonance with my mother’s anger over World War II, opening up the valve of memory where I had stored her tale of revenge.  Bringing to the surface that other piece of incomprehensible information that Leslie Howard was looking after me.  I knew that the actor had died in World War II, but I didn’t know exactly how.  So I looked it up, and that in turn led me to find his biography (which was out-of-print, but I got a used copy which turned out to be a library book from Phoenix, Arizona).  From this book I would learn that he was killed in a plane shot down by the Nazis over the Bay of Biscay.  And that there was a little girl of eleven on board, and her name was Petra, which means rose-red.  Rose-red was the color of the dress of my little drowned girl in the painting.  The name of the plane was Ibis, which meant immortality to the ancient Egyptians.

Painting the girl under water and then feeling the vibrations and the burning, was part of my awakening to who I was, or what I was for.  In order to know this, I had to stop painting.  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but In the beginning was the word. Awakening is only the beginning.  It’s ongoing, day by day, moment by moment.  But unless we wake up, we will never have the day, or the moment.

Numbers are vibrations.  We may know intellectually that all is vibration, yet it is sometimes difficult to imagine this.  Our material world appears to be solid, yet all is in movement, there is a harmony or disharmony, and everything vibrates and ripples with life, even the most solid stationary objects like rocks. Numerology is the ancient science of numbers.

“Numbers are man’s oldest symbols.  They are fundamental to the abstraction of ideas and to measurement. Numerology uses the metaphysical aspect of numerical symbology to analyze and the scientific aspect of numerical measurement to measure and predict.”  The Secrets of Numbers by Vera Scott Johnson and Thomas Wommack.

Numbers as vibrations can be useful and enlightening as they reveal the level of our vibratory note according to the day month and year we arrived on the planet. Each letter of your name also carries a vibration, as does the name of everything else.  Even the number of the house you live in has import if you chose to see it that way.

For me personally, numbers have been a gateway to further self-knowledge and understanding of my journey here.  When I joined the Gold Ring last year and was asked for a user name I immediately came up with Nanineko as it perfectly expressed numerically part of my given name along with my Destiny number.  Nan – the first syllable of my name, and nine – my Destiny number – and ko – together, spell Nanineko, which to me means she who is one with her Destiny.

Never have I felt more at one with my Destiny than now, at the present time, especially as I turn  60 on a #6 day.  And since in numerology we don’t count the zeros, I am, in effect, turning 6 on a #6 day.  12/01/2009 = 6 (in numerology you add all the numbers up together).

After I figured this out, I then realized that every year, not only this one, my age becomes the number which equals the day of my birthday.  Last year I turned 59 on 12/01/2008, which equals 5, and 59 also equals 5 because 5+9=14 and 1+4=5. The year before that I turned 58, which equals 4, (5+8=13 and 1+3=4)  and 12/01/2007 when added up together = 4.  Every single year I grow to a new number, I am always at one with myself.  But this year, this 2009 year, is very special in another way.  For in realizing that I am turning 60 on a #6 day, I began to count the ways the 6 seems to be overall an extraordinary number where I am concerned.

Before I tell you why that is, let’s just look at what the 6 means.  The symbolism is legend. With Venus as its ruler, Six represents harmony, balance, sincerity, love, (in the Tarot it is the card of the Lovers) and truth.  The spiritual meaning of number Six also deals with enlightenment; specifically “lighting” our path in areas we require spiritual and mental balance.  For me it represents Union.  Two halves of a whole coming together like Twin Flames or the Lovers.  Or for an individual, the Personality and the Soul forming a Divine Union.  The six can also be seen as the Trinity doubled, or a higher vibration than the 3.

But the 6 is also a reflection the 9, my Destiny number, if it were seen upside down in a mirror.  And I am often quirky enough to see many things upside down and backwards. Let us say then that the 6 is Union, and I become equal to it with my 9 when I see it upside down and backwards – when I see it the mirror world, in other words.

Okay.  Now to my personal, deeper relationship with the 6.  To begin, I was conceived when my mother spent 6 weeks in Nevada.

On the first day of the 6^th month (June 1943) 6 years before my birth, a little girl of eleven was killed during WWII.  (Oh yes, and that date, 06/01/1943 happens to be a #6 day.)

So, on a #6 day, 6 years and 6 months before my birth, a little girl of eleven was killed in WWII.  The girl’s name was Petra. Oh, and the word Petra happens to equal a 6 in numerology.

How this plays itself out for me in the coming year remains to be seen.  My sense is that I will be feeling more strength of purpose and certainty of achieving my goals than I ever have before.

Age may be “just a number,” but the number can mean so much more than “just our age.”

Knowledge is power, and the more we know about what we are vibrating with, the more we can put ourselves in alignment with that particular energy and milk it for all its worth.

Cosmic Portraits  

The idea for this kind of portrait came to me early last spring right after my Spirit Fire Ceremony on the Gold Ring, which was a journey, a process, and an opportunity to be in deeper contact with my higher self and my creativity.  I was calling them Galactic Portraits then.  I hadn’t actually done any yet, but when I thought of doing them, I pictured a physical likeness, and maybe two different shots of the same person on the canvas, one in the present, and one in the past.  I was looking for something that would represent the whole person rather than a snapshot in time.  The higher self along with the physical self.  That part of us that is connected in Oneness with the Universe and with universal energies.

My first subject was to be my dear friend Mariette Bermowitz, a woman I have known for many years and share a birthday with.  I took photographs of her with the portrait in mind. Then other projects came up, and I never seemed to get around to the Galactic Portrait I had planned of Mariette, even though I had bought a canvas specifically for it.

I wasn’t ready.

Yet these things have a strange way of working themselves out.  It seems that my first Galactic Portrait wasn’t to be of Mariette but of MissMagikal, a singer-songwriter and musician I know on the Gold Ring and have never met in person.  For some reason, I can’t remember why, I suddenly told her I wanted to paint her portrait and asked her to send me a picture to work from.  This she did.  And still nothing happened.

I know myself well enough by now to know that I have to be ready to work on something. It’s one thing to have the idea, another thing to actually be ready to carry it out on the physical plane.  I know the value of waiting.  But not waiting too long.  Just being ready.  It’s like being a hunter who waits and waits in the bushes.  He waits in readiness.  He never loses his focus.  And when his prey appears, he is ready to strike.

That’s what I’m like.  One day a few weeks ago I was suddenly ready to paint MissMagikal.  The painting went very quickly.  It almost shocked me how easy it was to paint her.  I worked with watercolor and colored pencils.  The only problem was that the photo she sent me was cropped, showing only part of her hair and nothing of her shoulders.  She was with another woman in the photo, and by the time I cut the other woman out, there was very little left of MissMagikal except for her face and neck and one side of her hair.

I decided not to let this stand in my way.  I thought I’d play with her hair, her little yellow cap, and make something of it.  What evolved and developed was an elaborate kind of head-dress that resembled a crown or a halo, which led me to further explore in color the empty side of the paper where there was no hair or anything else of her to go on.  Why not just go with color, I thought?  So I did.  And what emerged was a picture of energy streams moving out from her head, suggesting the aura.
Do I see auras?  Yes, from time to time.  Did I see MissMagikal’s aura?  No, not consciously.  But I’m sure I felt it.  I know that I picked it up subconsciously.  Because there was a singular lack of doubt while I was painting, as if the colors just painted themselves.  I know enough to let my hand go, letting the brush do what it wants.  I trust the brush.  The brush has a mind of its own.  It tends to move very quickly.  It knows what it wants, knows what it’s going for.  I remain the bystander, the observer, watching what it does.

The portrait went so well that I was now prepared to tackle Mariette’s.  By now I was calling them Cosmic Portraits, after hearing Magenta Pixie use that term on Face Book where the portrait was now posted.  Cosmic.  I liked that much better than Galactic somehow.  It suggested something smaller, less grandiose than Galactic.  It was a concept, a term that made painting these portraits easier and simpler.

When I paint a portrait, whether it is from life or from a photograph (and they have all been from photographs in recent years – all except for when I first started painting really),  I pick up the person’s energy.  I feel them.  Sensing them in ways I’m usually not aware of in ordinary life, though I certainly am feeling people all the time.  Painting a portrait is an intimate act.  It’s a step into a person’s psyche, into their emotional body, along with studying the planes of their face, the hairline and length of nose, etc.

I loved this photograph of Mariette.  She looks into the future calmly, bravely.  She looks like a survivor, above all else, and this she is.  Mariette lived through the Holocaust.  She was one of the Hidden Children, as they are known to be called.  She was in Belgium, taken in first by the nuns, and then by the sisters of one of the nuns when the convent proved too dangerous.  Mariette spent the war in the countryside, and was witness to the Battle of the Bulge towards the end of the war.  Her mother and four siblings were sent to the camps where they perished, but she survived, along with her father.  She has written a beautiful memoir about her life called “Looking For La Vie En Rose,” which I hope will be published next year.

Mariette has often spoken to me about her Guardian Angels and the Beings who have looked after her, not only on the physical plane but on the inner planes.

It felt right to give her these bursts of color around her head, these circles of protection.  As you see, she wears a leopard print scarf around her neck, which was perfect I think, as she is very connected to the physical world and her instinctual self, as well as to her higher self.

I am currently working on a portrait of her companion these past ten years, Wolfgang, who recently suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and remains hospitalized.  I want it to be a healing portrait.  That is my intention.