I’ll break this introduction roughly into the three parts – three categories of experience that have long been the best way I could figure to begin wrapping my head around the overwhelming complexity and weirdness of it all.  The three categories have been: Spirit, “alien” (a terribly deficient word), and mind control.

In this Part I of this essay, I’ll talk about my spiritual life.

As a child, like many children, I believe, I had a rich awareness of the LIfe in all things.  I felt for plants and animals.  One time, I sat for a long while with a plant that had been trampled by kids playing and encouraged it to live, and it did – maybe as it would have anyway, or maybe because of my communication.  The point is that I felt very certain that we were communicating.

At night, I sometimes experienced a vibrational “wonderfulness,” accompanied by something like a portal where I would experience the smallness of an atom and the grandness of the cosmos, in rapidly pulsating alternations.  These events were accompanied by tremendous feelings of warm love, family, a return home, and rightness.  I would often long for them and wish they would return.  I don’t recall what happened when I was gone, but I always wanted to go back.

I also recall the time when I got a message that I wouldn’t be taken back again for a long time, and I was terribly shocked, hurt, and afraid, but was told that I would be looked over, and I’d never be forgotten, even though I wouldn’t have these connections in the same way for a very long time.

I’m not sure whether the next experiences were before or after that last “cut off” event, but I also had a relationship with a little girl who could appear to me but not be seen by my parents or anyone else.  She would come unexpectedly and give me advice.  I loved her and was always happy when she appeared and terrifically sad when she went away.

I had other experiences with plants, particularly a fig tree at my grandmother’s house, which I felt loved me in a very special way.  We also had a weeping willow tree, whose branches were sometimes used as switches for whipping us, and I knew the tree felt very badly about that.

The family dog and cats were especially important to me too.  I still have a photo of my dog on my alter, whereas there are no pictures of my family anywhere in the house.

I “grew up” and forgot all those connections, as culture encourages us to do.  I tried out religion, and immediately had a powerful experience of Jesus Christ as someone I “knew” in some infinite capacity.  Afraid to be too mystical for my friends, I never talked about this and tried to contain my spiritual experiences within the boundaries talked about in church, even though I would frequently have experiences well beyond those boundaries.  Sometimes I would get powerful messages, sometimes experience dramatic healing.  Eventually, I experienced too much hypocrisy in church, including violence against me, and against my relationship with my children, and I abandoned “Christianity,” unfortunately ignoring all those things that had been wonderful in my private world.

After a few years, having gotten over the shock and hurt of having had the church help my ex take my children from me for a few years, I softened toward spirituality again and expressed my openness to believing in some sort of Spiritual reality – but I refused to read any books or consider any doctrine; Spirit had to come to me personally.

Sure enough, Spirit eventually did.  In lots of little ways, and big ways, which I describe in my memoir.

One happened when I was walking through a forest and wondered whether “tree-huggers” actually hugged trees, and a voice, seemingly from the trees themselves, said, “Why don’t you try it?”  I about tripped over my feet.  It was quite an effort to talk myself into trying it – I was very afraid of being caught – but when I did try it, I had the most amazing experience beyond my imagination, and something impossible to have imagined:  I felt as though a cascade of beautiful light had flowed like a waterfall through my body from the top of my head down into the earth, and with that, if felt as though a radio, which had been tuned to static inside me all of my life had suddenly been turned blessedly off.  The crystalline silence inside was beautiful.

Dumbfounded, shocked, saddened for years of having denied such possibility, humbled to be so blessed as an almost non-believer, I walked away grateful, but still in shock.

I didn’t know what to do about it.  I didn’t want to suddenly take up any religion or practice.  I distrusted that sort of person as being too trusting of others’ guidance.  This experience would remain my private mystery, and I’d wait further for Spiritual guidance, but I wouldn’t pray and I wouldn’t meditate – unless Spirit told me to, and I never heard that sort of message.  So I began to call myself a pantheist, and continued to wait for more.

When my son was diagnosed with cancer, my second husband and I divorced, and I went into a deep spiritual crisis I called a “nervous breakdown.”  When my son was well again, and he and his sister were of age to be on their own, I moved out to the desert alone for a spiritual hermitage that I expected to be for the rest of my life.

There, I began to experience so many things, it was overwhelming.  First, camping, to set the stakes for my new home’s foundation, I said a very naive prayer one night:  Hey, Spirits, I’m ready to learn some lessons.  Immediately, there was in the tent with me a terrifying blue-white light, A-shaped or star-shaped, hissing menacingly like an acetylene torch.  Scared out of my mind, I immediately blurted out Jesus! – not a prayer, but a simple epithet, made a habit during my atheist days – or that’s how I remembered it.  As soon as those words left my lips, I was equally surprised to feel the presence of a being who I seemed to know as Jesus!  There was no reason to know Him, as I’d ignored all the events I’d had earlier in my life as if they had been imagined.  But here he was, so very very familiar to me, as though I’d always known him, far beyond this life on Earth.  I saw nothing, only felt him on my right side, loving me, someone I knew very well – and I recalled the first time I’d had that feeling of recognition.  I asked, “You haven’t forgotten me?”  I thought he should have, since I’d certainly forgotten or ignored him for long enough.  He seemed to smile as if this was funny and said, No, he’d never forget me.  Deeply ashamed for my years of stubbornness, I expressed my gratitude and asked for protection during the night, and I slept peacefully.

You’d think I would become a Jesus follower again, but no.  I didn’t like the image of Jesus followers.  I remembered him, but was never comfortable with that name that TV preachers use so obnoxiously, so I usually called him Yeshua when I wanted his help, but I didn’t make it a daily or even weekly or less frequent practice.  I just couldn’t tolerate memories of Christianity and all their hypocrisy.  I thought that Yeshua had a place in the Pantheon, but I wasn’t sure if he was who I was supposed to “bother” on a daily basis, and so I didn’t.

I was afraid to bother my spirit Helpers.  And sometimes when these events came too close together, overwhelming me, I didn’t know that I could simply ask them to not overwhelm me so much, to consider what I could handle.  So I went through years of Spiritual elation and spiritual overwhelm.  I also didn’t understand that when one “opens to spirit” that that world is filled with benevolent intelligences as well as un-evolved spirits like ghosts trapped near the earth, and one must learn to discern and protect oneself from the energies that are not helpful.

I made many mistakes that reminded me of Mickey as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia.  I survived, but with years lost to terror and confusion that might have been better learning experiences.  I prayed for a mentor, then missed my opportunities.

In November 1999, I was camping with friends in the Cabeza Prieta wilderness.  Chatting with a new friend one evening, another friend encouraged me to look through his binoculars to see the Pleiades.  I wasn’t interested and told him so.  He was insistent to the point that I thought he was downright rude, but he wouldn’t let up.  He had so thoroughly interrupted our conversation, that I took the binoculars, intending to look briefly and then tell him exactly what I saw, expecting to say something like, “Oh nice, little points of light, just as I thought.”  Instead, when I saw the stars, I was overcome with a mix of emotions that made me want to cry; stunned to feel emotions like home (no home I knew on Earth had this meaning), loss, hurt, and longing, I lowered the binoculars and stammered, “I think I’m from there,” and then put my hand over my mouth, in shame that this was the sort of thing I’d have hated to hear someone else say, and waited until the awkward silence slowly turned to conversation again.  I never spoke of it again for three years, and then only once for another long while.  It was too “out there,” too associated with “weirdos,” “kooks,” and I didn’t want to be one of them.  But it felt so real, and the sense of loss seemed to explain why I’ve never approved, since a very young age in childhood, of how we run this planet.  What was I comparing Earth to, at such an age?  I set aside the Pleiades experience and waited for my Helpers to spell it out more clearly, give me more to go on, but they seemed to want me to be satisfied with little bits like this.

More of my experiences seemed to sit on the edge of Spirit and “alien.”  For instance, one night in April 2000, sitting on my roof at dusk, watching a rare celestial phenomenon of a crescent moon followed by four planets, a small group of bats swirled in a cluster in front of my face between a foot and three feet away.  I had recently begun to study a book about animal totems and was delighted by the meaning that this might have.  Next thing I knew, I saw the moon and planets in the sky not as five shapes against a darkening blue background, but as three-dimensional elements each in orbit around the sun or the Earth, all of us in a marvelous and colorful spiral moving though the galaxy, so beautiful, so wondrous, and all of it clear to me!

Next thing I knew, I was sitting, facing north, under a very black sky with a vast number of stars, all of them seeming to be paired with another, like eyes, benevolent, and I was babbling gratitude and laughing at myself for trying to express gratitude so far beyond what my words were capable of, but continuing anyway because I had to release my emotion.  Then two owls came and flew around me for an extended period of time, which I again was excited to learn what they portended after I’d get down off the roof.  When I looked them up, I was humbled and excited to read that bats often represent shamanic knowledge, and owls sometimes represent astral travel.  I was living without clocks, so it was years later, reading my old journals, that I suddenly realized I’d had some hours of missing time between the dusk with all the planets in the sky and the pitch dark night!

Missing time is a classic phenomenon in alien abductions; but I learned eventually that all the elements, including alien contact, are quite classic to shamanic initiation as well.  I didn’t know what to do about it.

I felt unworthy and ashamed to speak the idea of shamanic initiation to anyone, as they might judge me as unworthy also.  I kept it private and tried to manage my own shamanic practice.  I bought books, and tried to practice the discipline of working with my Teachers, but had so many frightening experiences that I quit – quit “trying” to practice any discipline and decided, instead, to just let my Helpers take the lead, as those events always seemed to go well, whereas my efforts often led to events like caricatures of my Helpers falling dead from the sky or appearing crippled, lurching toward me, injured.  It was terrifying, and I really didn’t know what to do.

I prayed for help in the form of a teacher.  An occasional friend I might confide in warned me about teachers and said it was for me to figure out alone, and so I stalled, grateful when spiritual events continued and didn’t terrify me, anxious and afraid when they did.

Many, many experiences filled me with confidence and encouragement that it was right that I remain a hermit and pursue this avocation.  Twice I received messages when friends died – and I was the only one, I assumed because I was one of the few people among their friends who spent every evening watching the sunset, every day without clocks and busyness to distract their attentions from spiritual realities.  A few times I knew of people who needed healing, but I didn’t just pray; I waited for Spirit to channel a prayer through me; and impressive cures were reported.

I wasn’t as terribly resistant a shamanic initiate as I confess to.  Many of my experiences were like those I’d imagined when I moved out to the desert to be alone – akin to those attributed to St. Francis.  I experienced amazing connections with everything from bears and rattlesnakes to phoebes, lizards, bees, and more.  I lay in fields of flowers.  I watched the stars and moon, and felt protected by them.  I created art and did occasional consulting via the Internet to pay my bills.

One day, I had another experience, which bridged my decades of environmental activism with Spirit.   I was walking to the sink for a glass of water, when I suddenly felt the jolting presence of a woman I’d known crash into me!  I knew immediately who she was – Judi Bar, whom I’d admired from afar and had interviewed once for three hours on the phone, and who had died years earlier after having survived for seven years a car-bomb assassination attempt on her life for courageously confronting multi-national corporations cutting down the redwoods in California.  I’d always felt very insignificant compared to her.  But I hadn’t really known her, and  hadn’t thought of her in who-knows-how-long.  Suddenly she was there inside me, with a jolt, and I felt filled with a number of ideas all at once:  She told me I wasn’t insignificant, and my caution was something she could have benefitted from in her work on Earth.  She was mellower now on the next plane and saw clearly her errors and had forgiven herself and wanted me to know that I shouldn’t discount myself so much.  And then she was gone.  I was stunned, as always by events like these, still feeling unworthy.

A few days or weeks later, her former boyfriend, whom I’d known but hadn’t talked to in years, called me up and asked me to do media work for the trial finally going to court twelve years after her bombing.  I took Judi’s message as a sign that I should do this, and I did.  The trial was against the FBI, not for the bombing per se, but for numerous crimes related to the “investigation,” slandering her after the bombing, violating her First Amendment right to free speech, etc.  I would sit in court regularly and send out media releases around the world almost daily for six weeks; and Judi was vindicated as the FBI agents were found guilty on all charges.

It was a frightening time though.  Those men in expensive suits glared at us when we passed in the hallways, and I worried that when I went home to my isolated hermitage in the desert that they might retaliate against me for all my words against them.

I hoped I could continue to be strong, all alone out there in the desert.

To be continued:  aliens and mind control