Echo

edison is incredibly smart. i’ve been around a lot of smart kids, but he’s a different kind of smart. it’s almost like he’s had more life experience than just the 5 years he’s spent on earth, so he has a kind of wisdom. it’s almost creepy, like being around a really perceptive, tiny adult, but amazing as well. the other day, his mom was at our house watching the taiwanese version of american idol, and she kept wanting to stay a few more minutes to catch the next singer. finally, he walked up to her and said, “everything in life has an ending. you have to choose when you want that ending to be.” i wasn’t there, but when i heard the story, it started me thinking about something i’ve been pondering a lot lately.

since i was a child, i’ve always felt “watched.”  there were moments where i could be in a room alone, and then suddenly feel a presence. or walk into an empty room and feel like there are people there who suddenly stopped talking when i walked in. when i was young, i had problems with sleepwalking because my dreams were so real that my body would go through the motions of the me in my dream because it couldn’t tell the difference. i distinctly remember one time when i dreamt i was giving a tour of the white house, and when i opened the door to show the group “lincoln’s bedroom,” the door in real life banged against another door and i woke up in the guest room’s bathroom. often i would try to go outside…to be close to the moon, i assume. but the worst times, i would be talking to someone in my dream and would slowly wake up to realize i was sitting on the couch in the living room, talking to thin air, yet feel like someone was there. waking up in these moments to a dark empty-but-not-empty room was terrifying. in high school, i would have these occurrences where i would wake up in the middle of the night with my body paralyzed, but what felt like moonlight shining onto my face while what sounded like electronic machine sounds whispering inside my head. except the blinds were closed so there couldn’t be moonlight shining on me, and i was sure it was aliens talking to me in a language that i couldn’t intellectually understand. i was terrified i was being programmed. this only happened maybe 5 or 6 times, but i remember the episodes vividly. i told someone at school once and they reacted with such contempt, i didn’t bring it up again. but there were nights when i had to sleep with the lights on because i was scared. going away to college was really helpful because i had roommates so i rarely slept alone, or there were always people around. i think that’s why i prefer living in a condo/apartment to a house. there’s a safety being around other people.

one explanation is that our town used to be populated by native americans and you hear lots of indian burial ground type ghost stories. so maybe fremont’s just a little more haunted. but the truth is, i’ve always been different. i’m always picking up on things i shouldn’t logically perceive or know.

this morning, my mom was watching a chinese talk show and they were talking about other life forms. about how in world war II, there would be electro-magnetic disturbances between american and japanese fighter jets, but they each thought it was the other side’s technology, but they now believe it was some other unexplainable force that had come between them. i couldn’t understand everything they were saying, but one thing i caught was one guy who said that there are other life forms but they are more advanced than us so we haven’t communicated with them because we don’t have the means yet. and that back in the day, scientists thought we could use radio signals to communicate, when really, it will come down to psychic/mental forces, how we learn to channel our electro-magnetic fields. and that other beings don’t have malevolent intentions.

my heart jumped with hope when i heard this. this reminded me of the story of columbus’s boats which i’d been thinking about, how the indians couldn’t recognize them. maybe the problem isn’t us finding other life forms. maybe we just don’t recognize them yet. you can’t see what you don’t recognize. i turned to my mom and said, i really think that we’re so busy looking out there when there are already different kinds of humans that live amongst us. 

i’m not willing to put it all into words yet, but when they found evidence of water on the moon, it was comforting to me. intuitively, i feel we’re getting closer to a widening in what is accepted as our collective reality. there are people in this world who have greater electro-magnetic fields. and i always associate electro-magnetic influence with the moon. i’m not saying that there are people here who came from the moon. but there might be an intelligence here that is descendent from it. 

edison has more wisdom and perception than is logical for a 5 year-old. he is also being groomed for a mathematical mind. i secretly believe he will be someone who will be integral in bridging the communication of a future evolution with those born of the past. of every child i’ve ever met, i feel a special kinship with him, that we’re a different kind of human, one more sensitive to energies and energy fields, one that uses the mind to interact with reality in a different way. my whole life i’ve been met with hostility and jealousy when i’ve never had malevolent intent, yet was treated in a way that showed that some people (usually those who were fearful beings in the first place) feared me. but in recent years, people have been more open and accepting. i don’t attribute that to just my own growth into who i am and what that means, but also to other people having a wider understanding of the change in the world that is about to take place. 

later today, i brought up again that the fact that both edison and i are sensitive to things that other people can’t see and precocious in certain ways could mean that we’re more consciously connected to something beyond us. my mom panicked and said it was past life stuff that we picked up on and that she didn’t believe in other life forms. but then she paused and quietly said, “but i remember that email you sent when we were about to sell the company, and that made a difference for me.” her eyes welled up with tears and she reaches over and patted my hand. “thank you for that.”

a few years ago, i’d gone to sleep and woke up to find a man standing by my bed. he asked me to get up and write my mother an email because she needed me. i tried to shake it off because i was sleepy and figuring it was a dream, but he was really insistent. finally i said i would and slowly began to wake up, realizing that it had been a “dream,” yet i was sitting up in bed and looking in the direction of where he’d been standing. it was like those moments as a kid of waking up from dreaming of talking to someone to find myself in the living room talking to a person who wasn’t there, but whose presence i could still feel. so i got up and groggily wrote an email to my mom, totally stream of consciousness about how everything was going to be okay and that sometimes life gives you challenges so that you can find out who and what you really are as
well as what’s important to you, but that i loved her and was thinking about her. i hadn’t talked to her in a while and had no idea why then or why i wrote exactly that, but she called me in tears the next day asking, “how did you know?” (i didn’t).  to this day she thinks an angel spoke to her through me. 

sometimes, i think that we can be used as a tool for greater forces if we’re willing to trust them. sometimes, i don’t think we have a choice, but i notice that when i trust what’s happening and do things with the cleanest of intentions, my life is more fortunate. sometimes i think that people are like cells of the body, and we just work for different systems. maybe we are those cells that create that elusive entity which is the soul. i don’t know. all i know is that there is something not logical about how edison is operating beyond his human years of life experience, and why i pick up on the things i pick up.

like this:

how does something like that not instantly kill a person?

and this monstrosity, inspired by the Saturday Night Live Taco-Town Taco:

where’s the commemorative tote bag?

baby portabello mushrooms stuffed with crab

sweet green-chile cornbread

roast turkey

garlic-parmesan mashed potatoes

white wine gravy

cornbread stuffing w/basil-garlic sausage

green bean casserole

three cheese and truffle oil mac and cheese

bacon and white cheddar mac and cheese

candied yams

ginger-orange cranberry sauce

pumpkin pie & pecan pie from costco (didn’t want to deal with desserts this year)

not making the desserts from scratch this year made a huge difference, making it one day of cooking instead of 2. the key to a tender turkey is longer cooking time at a lower heat (i go with 325 for 5-6 hours, basting with drippings and homemade broth every 20 minutes). usually i “healthify” all the recipes, making healthier substitutions where i can, but this year i splurged a little with 2% instead of whole milk, and heavy cream and real butter in a few of the recipes. i don’t really feel there was a big difference since i’m pretty good at making substitutions that still maintain the integrity of the dish, though the three-cheese mac and cheese was probably the sluttiest thing i’ve ever made…

it took me from about noon until 8 to get everything ready, and it went smoothly because my aunt came over to help with the chopping and dish rotation, which was huge. after dinner, i was playing with my cousin jonathan and rie’s baby, and i kept finding my butt gravitating towards any seating apparatus or the ground. i thought, now you’ve done it…you’ve gotten so fat you can’t even support your own body. but then my mom pointed out that she hadn’t seen me sit down at all since noon, and the only break i took was to take a shower which was also standing up, so i must be exhausted. i suddenly realized i was incredibly exhausted. sometimes i get so task-oriented that i can’t read my own internal signals. it was a huge relief to know that standing all day was the reason i kept feeling this urge to sit or lay down, not that i’m on my way to becoming one of those women who stays in bed for 30 years because they’re too heavy to get out.

*****

the day before when we were in the supermarket shopping, i noticed a lot of people, men and women, would look at me. nothing i can read one way or another, but just really long looks. and it wasn’t checking me out or anything–i was just wearing an old sweatshirt over gym clothes since i’d come from the gym. i told my mom to watch for it…how in the last year, it’s been really noticeable. there was an old lady…i saw her and i got the feeling she was sick…a long illness. later, i was waiting outside, and she walked up to me and i smiled at her, so she approached me and talked to me. something about the wheels of the carts. a joke. it was a small conversation, i actually didn’t understand what she was saying but i think what was more important was some kind of warm human connection. there was another guy who was near the door when i walked in–i smiled at a woman with two young children, and he walked by me and said, “hello, nice person.” i said hello back. later, i was leaving and he caught up to me and said, “thank you, nice person.” i told my mom that i think that the greatest human fear is that of disappearing, and that sometimes people just want to feel like they are seen and that they exist. i think sometimes they just want to connect, even with a stranger, even if for a fleeting moment, because it somehow makes them feel more real…more here.

one weekday, i was walking around old seattle, and there was a woman with a copper colored mullet holding a laptop with attached webcam, pointing it at the sidewalk. she looked like she was doing a geological study. i was really curious about what she was doing, but i tend to be non-intrusive about approaching people, so i watched her from a few feet away. a black homeless guy in his 50’s walked up to her and asked her what she was doing, so i got closer to hear her explanation.

she said she was making a documentary about the street cracks, about how the sidewalks were scored and that people were coming out to break up the sidewalks. she said that there was something going on, that there were people living underground, because at nights, if you looked through the grates, you could see lights from the tunnels. i remember walking home one rainy night, and there was a red light emanating from one of them, and i figured it was city workers or something. i asked her if it was just the city and she said no, because they don’t do work at night. she said there was a whole underground city. i asked her if maybe it was homeless people camped down there, and she said she’s been homeless 3 times in seattle, but there’s no way to get down there…she’d tried. she said that years ago, there were a lot of people on the street, lots of birds, but that’s gotten scarce. that she thinks they’re planning to move obama and the cabinet to downtown seattle in case anything goes down, because the only way to access that area is through some canadian pass. she talked about 3 years ago, in 2006, the police suddenly raided the whole area, took all the homeless people away, and no one knows why or where, that we’re closer to a police state than most people think.

the guy and i listened to her attentively, because she seemed articulate enough, she seemed intelligent, but the things she was saying were pretty out there. she said that there were entire underground cities in san francisco, los angeles, philadelphia, new york. that there was some major stuff about to go down in the world. but when she said that the reason there weren’t as many birds was because the government took them all and threw them in the ocean to cause tsunamis, that’s when the guy and i looked at each other like, oooh-kay.

she said she had to run to a meeting but gave me her website to check out (sadly, i lost that slip of paper in my wanderings that day). she hurried away, but then stopped and turned around, saying, “thank you for listening.” it was really sincere and surprising. that’s when i realized that one of our deepest fears is of disappearing.

*****

i stopped near this park where people were loitering. some of the people wandering through were clearly crackheads from their gait and eyes. i was just standing there writing what the woman had said in her notebook when the guy who had also been listening walked up.

do you believe all that stuff she was saying?, he asked me. he had intelligent eyes behind wire-framed glasses.

well…i think what was most interesting was her level of conviction. whether or not it’s true, what seemed to matter was that she believed it, i said.

what are you?, he asked. are you a student?

i’m just traveling through, i said.

so you’re a tourist, he said. have you been up to vancouver and those parts?

i was there a couple of months ago, i said. but i didn’t really get a chance to explore it. i’m saving it for later.

he looks me deep in the eyes, sizing me up.

are you really rich or something? so you can just travel the world?

i choose my words carefully. in my spirituality, i have been very lucky, i tell him.

he nods. i can respect that, he says. he asks me how long i’m going to be in seattle.