God Doesn't Want You To Know This One Trick About !!MAGICK!!
A Memoir of Gardens, Ghosts, and God
I was born enveloped by questions. A week before I was born, a baby girl died from getting the umbilical cord wrapped around her head and suffocating. Many doctors sat down together to discuss what they would do if it ever happened again. Exactly a week later, it happened again to me, and the doctor on call (not my mom's doctor who was supposed to have been there for delivery), was a doctor that had sat down at the meeting and knew how to handle it.
The doctor made his final check on my mom and me; my heartbeat was strong. He told her that he had a few other stops to make before going on home and then he would check on her again in the morning.
After dinner, a nurse was trying to attach the monitor that had fallen off my mom's belly, but she couldn't find the heartbeat. In walks the doctor who was supposed to have gone home. He takes over, informs the nurse that there's no heartbeat; they must operate immediately. That Monday night, on June 29th, 1987 at 7:28pm in a small town named Santa Cruz in the state of California, I was born.
Did an angel whisper in his ear in that moment? Whatever it was, he listened. He filled my mom with water, as they had discussed at last week's meeting. They untangled the cord, filled my lungs with precious air, and got my heart beating again.
"A voice told me to come back and check on her again," he said. "I did not question it. I did as I was instructed."
—Isaiah 43:2
Third man syndrome refers to a mysterious presence, often a voice or sensation, that appears in life-threatening situations, offering guidance or comfort. Reported by mountaineers, disaster survivors, and those near death, the presence is usually calm, helpful, and sometimes gives life-saving instructions.
We won't get into the theories behind this right now, but this is something I experienced first hand.
I was 10 years old or around there somewhere. It was summer, and I was going with my dad to do a landscaping job. I whined about boredom to my dad until he let me go down to the beach without him. This was right before the sun was setting, and I'm not sure if you know what the waves get like when it starts toward evening, but I remember watching them in awe for a little while. My dad made me promise that I would stay away from the water. I didn't listen. I eventually got bored enough to walk out into the ocean, with clothes on, until the water reached my waist. The rest of this memory is fuzzy, but from what I remember, I was caught in several waves and the tide pushed me beyond them. The water was very rocky, waves kept pulling me beneath the surface, I could barely keep my head above water.
I heard a voice calmly speaking into my ear. Clear, loud, "Jessica, stay calm. Close your eyes. Let your body float to the top." In the midst of panic, I did as I was told. I closed my eyes, I felt my body floating to the top of the water. "Keep your eyes closed. Stay calm," the voice kept speaking to me. I felt my body gently grabbed by what I thought was my dad's hands. I felt myself leave the water, was I floating in the air?, and then, I felt myself being placed on the ground. I opened my eyes expecting my dad's furious face. No one. I sat up, clothes heavy with water, I looked around. No one. No one in any direction. Had the waves carried me back to shore? Did they hear from some higher authority that they weren't allowed to take me tonight? I didn't understand what just happened. For a long time I didn't understand or think about what happened, until I heard someone first talk about "third man syndrome" and then perfectly describe the voice and sensations I had experienced. Is this the brain's built-in protection system? My higher self saving me from death? I don't know.
“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”
People that have come to really know me, know that I have a lot of resentment toward religion, and indirectly, toward God. No one has asked me why.
It all started when my neighbor, Ruth, caught me watching
her from up in an apple tree. There was a tall wooden fence that separated our
yards, and when I climbed up the tree closest to that fence, what I saw on the
other side of it blew my mind. A beautiful jungle of a garden. A maze of wild
green that adventurous kids like me would love to lose themselves in. A pathway
of flat stones weaved through a lush mix of trees, tall bushes, and the most
vibrant flowers I had ever seen.
I don’t know how many days I spent watching her yard,
wishing I could explore it on ground level, before she started talking to me.
She would come out to trim bushes or pull weeds every day, lovingly tend to her
garden, and smiling to herself. One day she asks, “what’s it like up there?”
For all the people watching I’ve done in trees, I am always very surprised when
I get caught. It’s a rare thing to observe the observer. We had a few
conversations that spanned days, until one day she asked where I lived so that
she could talk to my parents.
Ruth invited my mom and I over for snacks and juice. I still
remember the smile on her face when she sat down in front of us, and asked, “do
you know about God?” That question changed my life forever.
Ruth is one of the most lovingly kind people I have ever met in my life. A genuine person who loved life, other people, and God in equal measure. I soaked up her words of positive encouragement, messages of love, and when she got permission to take me to church multiple days of the week, the place known as Santa Cruz Community Church, became my home.
To make a long story short, I was being raised by a very loving, compassionate community of people. They spoke to parts of myself that felt like answers to the questions I had; they taught me by example to always keep our hearts and doors open to people in need; I believed the things they told me, like there was a Creator who loved me very much, no matter what I did wrong. They all accepted me, made sure I was always genuinely smiling and laughing, and then….
There was a boy named Timothy that I would sometimes play with at Ruth's house. I came to know him as her grandson. Ruth had one daughter, and that daughter had three children. There was an older girl and a younger girl, and I don't remember either of their names. I remember Timothy. I remember Timothy so vividly, that looking back on those memories makes everything other than him from that time seem blurry. Timothy was my age and a lot like me. We loved climbing trees in our bare feet. We loved coming up with adventure stories. We loved being friends with every living thing we could find around us. We loved talking about what we would do when we met God. We loved watching people and talking about what kind of people we would be when we got bigger (the kind that always picked up litter, of course). Timothy told me he wanted to be a missionary, just like his mom and dad, and spread the word of God to other parts of the world. He told me a lot of stories about why this had become a passion for him, despite the sacrifices required for this kind of life.
And thus my first series of whys were thrust into the universe. Why, God? Why did you create a need for missionaries? Why are there people starving to death? Why are these people in distant parts of the world, in dire need of saving? Every adult I asked these questions to, dismissed me with a laugh, "God has a plan".
Timothy didn't stay in my life. His family moved away, and he became one of the few souls that entered my life and made a mark when they left.
—Jeremiah 17:7–8
"Beeeeeeeeee" kind.
One of the things that led to the other kids' lack of understanding of me, was my incessant need to protect the seemingly dangerous flying creatures of lunchtime. "Oh, there goes that weirdo, begging us not to kill her friends again." Almost every lunchtime, I tried to protect them all. One day, a girl I wanted to be friends with, said that I could eat lunch next to them if I got rid of every single bee in the area. All the kids laughed as if they already decided that I couldn't do this; but it just made me even more determined. How could I get the bees to leave without hurting them? Well, had anyone ever tried asking them nicely? I remember sitting down with my eyes closed, a thing that's difficult to do in public now, and pushing my thoughts over to one of them. Or it was all of them. I said, hi, please go somewhere else. I don't want anyone to hurt you and those girls are scared of you. It worked almost instantly, several bees took flight and flew off somewhere else. I could barely sit there in disbelief because I was overcome with excitement that this might finally mean acceptance. I came over with my lunchbox and smiled. "I did it! They're gone!" The girls just laughed but no one would look at me. "Can I sit with you now?"
"Nah. You're still weird."
I only told bees what to do when I needed a reminder that kindness and magick still existed in the world. I felt like I had somehow earned their trust and didn't want to take advantage of that. Well, there was also that one time that I asked a swarm of them to leave a garbage can, just to prove to myself I could do it. I wasn't disappointed.
The more I grew, the more I realized how much my concern for small things fell on deaf ears. I remember one morning being extremely late for school and getting in serious trouble. It had just rained and snails had been out exploring the fresh, greenery of carefully tended gardens. All along the sidewalk were snails that had been thrown there. Some were smashed, others trying to glide back to safety... but there were more than I could count and they littered the path in front of me. Horror-struck, I did the only thing I could think of, I brought every living snail back to the garden.
I finally got to school and I was in big trouble. I expected them all to be proud of me, but they weren't, and they wouldn't listen to my pleas about the lives of snails. Miniscule, when taken in consideration with skipping school.
My life is full of entities, but these next two experiences have shaped my life in meaningful ways:
My first experience with an entity was when I was between the ages of four and six. I had nightmares quite frequently, and so my parents were used to the fact that I would wake up screaming for them, and wanting to sleep in their room. "No, Jessica, you must sleep in your room, door closed, lights off. Nothing is in your room." This also happens to be the first experience that I remember of not being listened to. You’re just dreaming, Jessica. You’re not really seeing anything. You’re not really feeling anything.
I got into my bed, and felt a tapping on my shoulder. Terrified, I'd scream for my parents as I jumped out of the bed to turn on the light, I'd tell them what happened through a child's hysteria, beg them to check underneath the bed, in the closets. Nothing was ever found. I got back in bed, my parents leave, the tapping starts again.
It became a normal thing. I even started to gather the courage to play with it. I brought my pillow to the other side of the bed, and waited. Sure enough, a gentle tapping started on my foot.
"PLEASE STOP!" I pleaded with the unknown entity. It stopped immediately.
Curiosity burned through my fear, melting it into something like wonder. "Okay, you can tap me again." It started the gentle tap-tap-tap-tap again. "Nope! Nevermind! Stop that! Don't ever do that again! I don't like it!"
It never touched me again. Power. I had power.
This experience kindled in me the awakening that I was way more powerful than I had ever imagined. And whether they were angels, energies, or echoes of something beyond, they all taught me one thing: to listen closely. To trust what I feel, even if no one else sees it.
“For God speaks again and again, though people do not recognize it. He speaks in dreams, in visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on people as they lie in their beds.”
—Job 33:14-15
My dreams deserve their own book. I often speak with entities, myself, the universe, god, alternate timelines, alternate realities, through my dreams.
Taken from my comment on the subreddit I posted it on: (Link to Reddit)
Why can't it be both? Maybe the hallucinogenic mold can open a door way to see the things that we can't normally see?
I view everything in life as if I'm not always seeing the whole story. The point is, we don't know everything about everything. We are learning more and more about our natural world and yet there are still things we can't explain. We can't explain it because we can't see the whole story. How much more do we know now than we did a 100 years ago?
I've had a lot of strange things happen to me in childhood and adulthood. The more I get into research, the more I realize that no one else knows for sure.
I'll just tell you one of my experiences and it has to do with mold. I moved into a townhouse with my three year old daughter and a roommate. I'm a sensitive person to all sorts of things but I have not been this sensitive since I was a young child. I "felt" as if there was someone else in the house with us. It's an unmistakable feeling that you can't believe in until you feel it yourself.
Anyway, as time went by, I felt that this "entity" wanted to speak to me. Desperately. What made it worse for me is that my daughter began to see it too. She would start looking in the directions that I was "feeling" it. One night, as I lay in bed, I "felt" that something was "waving its arms in front of my face". I "felt" that this thing, whatever it was, was getting closer to revealing itself to me. It had something very important to say to me but I was not prepared to see it! It terrified me! So, I said out loud, "do NOT show yourself to me. I'm scared of you! If you have to say something, make me dream about it!" That night, I had a dream that I moved my bed to the opposite side of the room. That was it.
The next morning, I said okay. I'm gonna move the bed. Guess what I found behind my bed frame? Mold! Thick, greenish-black mold.
I cleaned the mold, but I don't think I was hallucinating what I felt. I think there was something in that house and I still felt it after. It left me alone though. It just wanted to help me.
“The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
Let’s go back to middle school. I was thirteen: enrolled at a new school, hair cut short for the first time (my dad complained every time he saw me) and I was slowly emerging from my tomboy phase into something unique. My own kind of femininity. I still hung out with the same awkward group of nerdy boys, who expected me to be the same old Jess, but it left me feeling like a stranger, with no one to notice the girl I was becoming.
Until....
“Hello, Red Shoes!”
Her voice called out across the room like a fire alarm. Alexi. Chubby-cheeked, pale-skinned, freckled, loud, and utterly unbothered by anyone’s opinion. She was a redhead with a relentless smile. I didn’t give her the introduction she deserves just now, because she didn’t ask permission to enter my life. She just showed up. She just saw me. Saw through my protective layers. Saw someone worth speaking to. Someone worth loving. She told me once that God had asked her to reach out to me, and I believe her.
She was bullied more than I was, for daring to be unapologetically herself, but that never dimmed her joy. After I got used to the discomfort of her calling attention to me, I found myself drawn to her warmth. She became my best friend, and I hers.
She called me Red Shoes. I hated those clogs though, too bright, too loud, too visible. But she was the only one who noticed them, and suddenly, I didn't hate them quite so much. I loved that, between us, the Red Shoes became a deep symbol for our friendship.
I wore red shoes the entire time I was friends with Alexi, which was roughly from seventh grade through our final year of high school. Only five years, but it felt like a lifetime. Like meeting a soul I already knew from somewhere before.
Alexi was Christian, well, still is, I’m sure. Maybe to her, I looked like a soul that needed saving. But she never treated me like a project. She loved me with an openness that never asked me to be anything other than myself. She invited me to church, and one day, I said yes.
I kind of, sort of, loved it. It reminded me of the joy I used to feel at my neighbor Ruth’s church, back when community felt like a safe and peaceful thing. With Alexi, I started to remember that version of myself, the girl who danced with trees and talked to bees, who laughed without worry about what she looked like while laughing. While everyone else was trying to grow up too fast, we stayed in the sandbox, building sandcastles. Always finding a child-like joy in our present moment.
There was one night during a sleepover that she asked if I was ready to accept Jesus into my heart. She’d never pushed, never pressured me before this. By then, we were in high school, and I was already speaking to entities in my dreams, shuffling tarot cards, and having conversations I never dared tell her about. I didn’t think Jesus would want someone like me.
She spoke to Jesus, and I spoke to the trees.
But that night, something in me said: Why not? I let her guide me through the prayer. She called it asking Jesus into my heart. I called it calling in an entity, like I’d always done. And something did come.
But it wasn’t Jesus, not exactly. It was an energy, an essence. It told me it came to her in that form because that’s the form she could understand. It had been guiding her, protecting her. Maybe it was even the one that told her to speak to me. I didn’t ask. I wasn’t afraid. While searching it, I found no deception. Only a genuinely peaceful and helpful presence for my beloved friend Alexi.
Another time, at a birthday party, we were playing hide and seek in the dark with flashlights. It was someone’s backyard, overgrown with trees. I wanted to let them in on my secret, that I could talk to the trees. Of course, no one believed me.
So I said, “I’ll prove it. I’ll find you without my flashlight. I’ll ask the trees to help.”
After giving them time to hide, I put away my flashlight into my pocket, placed my hand against a tree trunk, and closed my eyes.
Alexi first, I whispered in my thoughts.
And then, images flashed in my mind. Movement. Memory. Direction. The trees responded. This way. That way. Here. They led me like old friends playing a game. I followed their nudges through the darkness, and when I reached out, my hand landed on Alexi’s shoulder. Her flashlight clicked on. It lit up my red shoes.
She looked at me in disbelief. And something else, too. Not fear, not exactly.
Something closer to awe. Or maybe... concern.“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”
I don't fit in here. I don't fit in there.
I did something I almost never did, I spoke to God directly. Throwing my question into the sky.
If you even exist, God, what do you want from me?!
I was laying down on Alexi’s living room couch, eyes staring up at the ceiling like it might blink back at me. I didn’t expect an answer. I just wanted to stop feeling like I was some mistake with no place in this story called Life.
Alexi and her mom wandered in, mid-conversation, laughing about something. One of them reached over and turned on the radio. It was background noise to them.
But not to me.
A song began to play, one I’d never heard before.
“I love you more than the sun
And the stars that I taught how to shine...”
The lyrics hit me like a lightning bolt.
No, God was speaking to me through them.
My breath caught. Chills crawled up my spine. I listened, stunned, as the words poured straight into my chest like they were bypassing my ears entirely. Maybe they were.
This is for me, I thought.
I didn’t understand how I knew. I just knew.
I’d asked.
And something, someone, had answered.
The song was More by Matthew West. A love letter I hadn’t known I needed.
But there it was:
You are not a mistake. You are mine.
More by Matthew West
“Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”
Heal the World by Michael Jackson
I didn’t care about the rumors or the controversy, I never believed them anyway. I couldn’t. Not when I saw how he cared for children, how he spoke about them, how he gave so much of himself to make their lives brighter. He wasn’t like any other person I knew of, especially one so famous. He carried something fragile and beautiful in his heart, and the world wasn’t always kind to that.
Heal the World was the anthem of my childhood. It felt like he touched upon a very simple truth of the universe. Michael made me believe that art could change things, that love could be powerful, and that even someone like me could help heal something broken.
When he died, it hit me like a punch to the stomach. I didn’t understand how someone who had poured so much love into the world could just be gone. Forgotten. His beautiful message, cast aside and collecting dust, amongst a million other useless messages by equally as useless people.
He was misunderstood, maybe even by himself, but he taught me that gentleness is a kind of strength, and that healing begins with the courage to care.
And you always start by looking at yourself first.
Being part of the youth group at church meant being called to offer a hand whenever possible. I liked that. I liked feeling useful, like I was doing something good, like I could make a real positive impact. Volunteering at the homeless shelter in my hometown felt like a way to live that out.
But it wasn’t what I expected.
It was eye-opening and heartbreaking.
I saw so many people, not just down on their luck, but seemingly living a whole different reality. Some passed through night after night, not looking for a way out, but simply surviving. Some still smiled. Some still prayed. And some would lock eyes with me, squeeze my hand, and say with complete sincerity:
“May God bless you.”
Me?
I wanted to cry.
What about you?
You’re the one who needs blessing.
Their words haunted me. Not because they were untrue, but because I didn’t understand how they could still believe. I didn't understand how they could trust in a God who hadn’t lifted them out of this.
That’s when the questions began to grow louder.
What was the point of all this?
We weren’t helping them get better.
We weren’t changing their lives.
Where was God in this shelter?
Why wasn’t He lifting them up into the light, like He promised He would?
And still something called out to me, something wild, chaotic, and green. And it stood firmly at odds with Christianity. It whispered to me, "you don't know the full story, not yet."
I made up my own rituals for everything. If I needed to do well on a test, I’d place two fingers to my temple, and two to the cactus I was growing in the backyard. The cactus, I believed, was a highly intelligent being, far wiser than any human mathematician on the entire planet. I buried three flower petals in front of it: one yellow, one red, one purple. Then a tiny prick of my finger against its thorn, offering my blood, meant the link was complete. I would channel its brilliance during the exam.
I did a lot of things like that. Strange, silly things.
Only, they never felt silly at the time.
They felt sacred.
Eventually, I tried to grow up. I tried to be like other people. I told myself it was childish, delusional, meaningless.
Years passed. Then one day, I stumbled across a podcast called The Higherside Chats, hosted by Greg Carlwood. That particular episode featured an archdruid named John Michael Greer. The moment he began to speak, something deep in me stirred. His words reached all the way back to those days with the cactus, the petals, the heartbeat of a world I thought I’d left behind.
I felt compelled to write him and tell him my story.
To my surprise, he wrote back. We had a very long conversation. He listened. He understood. He told me what no one else had ever said:
Yes, your rituals were real.
Yes, you are a druid.
No, you’re not alone.
He brought me back to the girl I had buried beneath years of shame and doubt.
I walked down the street with a good friend from my youth group, David. I was about 14 or so, and I saw one of my favorite secondhand book stores, so I ushered him inside. We spent some time browsing the bookshelves, and I somehow knew, this moment was about to be very special for me. Something was... calling me. My eyes darted from cover to cover, I moved from shelf to shelf, I walked down the stairs. I would know it when I saw it, then yes... I did see it.
The box you see above, it called to me. Colorful and mysterious.
I picked it up, never having heard of Tarot before. But I just knew this was meant for me.
David took one look at the box in my hands and recoiled. "You’ve got to put that back right now," he said sharply to me. "Do you know that’s Satanic?"
"What? How?" I asked, staring at the artwork on the cards. They didn’t look evil. They looked… beautiful.
He launched into a lecture. I shrugged, and paid for it anyway. That was typical Jess, always teetering on the edge of being a Very Good Christian Girl, but the clothes never quite fit.
Over the next few days, I couldn’t stop touching the cards. Shuffling them. Listening.
I learned quickly that this wasn’t about fortune-telling, it was about tuning in. Feeling something deeper than logic. My intuition began to hum with a vibrant life.
I pulled away from youth group bit by bit. Not with bitterness, but with curiosity. I began reading for other friends, acquaintances, quiet, secretive readings in between classes or after school.
I remember one in particular.
A boy named Eric watched me read for someone else, eyes wide. We’d barely spoken before that, but when I finished, he stepped forward quietly. “Could you read for me next?”
I told him to hold a question in his mind. I closed my eyes, held the deck between my palms, and while shuffling, I imagined his thoughts and my thoughts combining into the cards. Please help me hear what he needs to know. Thank you.
I don’t remember the cards. But I remember the vision.
Eric walking down the street with a girl, long dark hair, pretty, aloof. He was trying to get her attention, she didn't care. “She doesn’t feel the way you do,” I told him. “She said yes to dating you, but she’s already looking for the exit. You’ll get your heart broken.”
I paused.
“But someone else is coming. Someone better. Not long now. Just wait.”
Eric stared at me. “I don’t believe in this,” he said slowly, “but… you just answered my question.”
A few days later, he found me again, beaming. “You’re psychic or something! I canceled the date with Mallory… and yesterday, I met the most amazing girl.”
After a while, I stopped reading for others. Not because I didn’t believe in it, but because I came to understand what the cards really were.
They weren’t magic in the way people warned me about. They were just a mirror. A conversation with my own soul.
I believe everyone is psychic, but not everyone develops that power as easily (or at all). For me, it usually shows up in dreams. Sometimes they come true, and sometimes they just feel true. Then later, I’ll walk through a moment in real life and feel that strange flicker of, I’ve seen this before. A whisper of the Universe saying, pay attention.
There are too many mysteries to unravel, too many stories written in places we can’t always see.
I went to a psychic fair the year I graduated high school. A woman read for me and said, “Never stop praying. And never stop writing.” It’s kind of funny to look back on that now. How she knew those two threads would be the ones I’d follow again and again. Even when I doubted, even when I wandered, I always found myself pulled back to prayer.... and to the written word.
There was a time when I thought I had to choose between faith and reason. I even tried on atheism for a while, wore it like someone else's oversized coat. I needed to not believe in anything, just to see what stayed with me anyway. And what stayed was the sense that something was listening. That I wasn’t making it all up. That the voice behind me wasn’t just imagination, it was intuition. It was truth. It was love.
There is no simple answers or tidy dogma. I just believe in a presence of something greater than myself, that nudges us forward, and the quiet certainty that when we listen, like, really, really listen, we will find the way.
—Jeremiah 31:3
I had my first daughter in the middle of loathing myself. I remember seeing her tiny fingers clutching mine, and her hands looked exactly like my hands. The feeling made me burst into tears with love and fear. How can something that looks like me be so beautiful?!
My children deserve their own book as well, but I will say this:
My daughters have both been mirrors for me, reflecting back the parts of myself I once so severely rejected, misunderstood, or tried to hide. They’ve shown me that the things I thought made me broken were, in fact, what made me whole. That softness isn’t weakness, that being “too much” just means I’m alive.
Watching them grow has been like watching two flowers unfold in the seasons they are meant to. Similar in origin, but uniquely stunning in color and fragrance. Their laughter, their questions, their fierce sense of fairness, their sadness when something doesn’t make sense in the world, all of it reminds me why I keep showing up, day after day, to be the best mother I can be.
When I forget who I am, they remind me.
When I try to be small, they look up and ask me to be big again.
They don’t need me to be perfect, they need me to be real. So they can be real.
So I try, every day, to be the kind of woman I would want them to become.
Because they are watching.
Because they are listening.
Because they are already becoming.
And in loving them, I’ve learned to love myself.
My middle name is Pearl, named after my mother’s mother. She died when I was only two, so I don’t have many stories about her, just fragments of her that my mom shared with me. What my mom told me later, is this: my grandmother Pearl had a plant sanctuary. It was her refuge from an alcoholic, abusive husband. Her way of creating beauty in the middle of sorrow.
When I was in the thick of separating from my own husband, I had a vivid, but simple dream. In my dream, I went out to buy myself a plant for my birthday. Just one. A small gesture of self-love. But when the day came, I didn’t stop at one. I came home with over twenty.
That wasn’t like me. Not then. I had always loved plants, but this was different. It felt like something ancient had awakened in me. What began as a birthday treat turned into a full-blown sanctuary. My own living, breathing haven of green life. I learned their moods, their subtle changes. I spoke to them, and they listened.
Years later, my mother came to visit me for the first time in a long while. She stepped into my home, looked around at the plants trailing from shelves, every corner filled with leafy life, and stopped, amazed. Her eyes welled up.
“This feels like my mother’s house,” she whispered. “You’ve brought her back.”
Without knowing it, I had chosen many of the same plants my grandmother Pearl once nurtured. I had recreated her sanctuary, not by memory, but by inheritance of her spirit (my mom believes). And in doing so, I had created one for myself, too.
Caring for those plant, watching them bloom, recover, and move toward the light, brought me peace. They didn’t ask me to be anything other than alive, with them. They just wanted water, warmth, and time. Maybe that’s all I needed, too.
“No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”
—1 John 4:12
My story isn’t finished yet, but a very important chapter has closed.
I found my soulmate, through finding myself.
The way we met felt like something just outside the edges of coincidence, like the Universe was quietly working behind the scenes to bring us together at just the right moment. I won’t go into all the details. Some things are too special to explain, and I like that it keeps a little mystery alive. But I will say that everything that came before him, every heartbreak, every lesson, every moment of silence or longing, it all led to him.
Being with him feels like coming home to a place I didn’t know I was missing. He sees me in a way that makes me want to keep becoming. And with him, I can be soft, and strong, and honest, all at once.
I’m excited to see how the rest of this story unfolds. I’m excited to walk through life with someone like him. He's the Capricorn to my Cancer, in every way. The yin to my yang.
The Garden Again
I’m barefoot.
The stones beneath me are smooth and warm, like the sun has
been shining on them all day. I’m walking through a garden I first discovered
through the branches of an apple tree, and here I am again. Ground level. This
isn’t just any garden, this is Ruth’s Garden, or some kind of weird
dream-version of it. The stones are maybe smoother than I remember. The plants
are taller. Even the flowers are blooming in impossible colors, like
someone had turned up the saturation on reality. Bees and birds are humming and
singing in a symphony. It smells like dirt and jasmine and ancient roots.
The pathway beckons to me, and I walk. I don’t just see the familiar things, like the old shed where Ruth once sent me for tools. I see IT, my first tree friend, standing tall and proud. My old friend, it’s good to see you. I see the parrot that spoke to me in a pet shop, begging me for freedom. She’s perched high with beautiful, bright feathers; she's free now. I see Red Shoes tucked lovingly under a hedge; what they meant, not forgotten.
Another bend in the path, and I see flashes of fabrics from
when my children were young. Favorite clothing, the ones they wore so much they
ceased to exist. Beloved blankets that held many nights of hugs and safe
keeping. Here they were all woven in a tapestry of cherished memories.
As I turn one more bend, He’s there. Sitting on an old
wooden bench beneath a tree that looks like it’s made of starlight and oak
bark.
God.
He looks… familiar. Not like a bearded man in the sky, but
like a composite of everyone who ever made me feel safe and seen. He’s wearing
ripped jeans, He’s barefoot too, and I can’t help the smile, He’s wearing a dark
blue UFH hat.
I stop in front of Him.
My heart is pounding, not with fear, but with everything.
All the years and all the questions.
Before I can speak, He chuckles. That kind of deep
belly-laugh that makes the birds take off from the branches. Maybe he really
was related to Santa Claus.
GOD: "You’re mad at Me, huh?"
I nod. My eyes start to brim with tears that I didn’t expect
to cry.
ME: "I just want to know why."
My voice catches on the lump in my throat, somewhere between
anger and despair.
He pats the bench beside Him. I sit. Together we look out
into the garden.
GOD: "You’ve been asking that question since you
were born."
ME: "I almost didn’t make it."
GOD (smiling): "But you did."
A long pause. The wind moves through the trees like a
lullaby. I close my eyes, letting the tears fall, just like my questions.
ME: "Why existence? Why pain? Why loss? Why me? Why?"
He doesn't answer right away. Instead, he takes something
out of his pocket, and hands it to me with both hands as if it’s sacred. It’s a mirror, weathered
with time.
I look into it.
And I see everything.
And in my reflection, I see every version of myself; the
little girl always in a tree, the curious soul watching from above, the one who
clutched her questions like treasure, the small girl with hands closed in
prayer (equal parts hoping and doubting), the snail savior, the crying one, the strong one, the
fierce mother, the one who picked herself up and kept going.
And then; I see the people I’ve loved, the strangers I’ve helped, the lives I’ve touched. I see my children. I see the hands I’ve held, hands untouched by comfort until mine, and the people I’ve stood next to in defiance of the world. I see light, I see my light.
GOD: "That’s why."
And in that moment, I understand. Not everything, but
enough.
I set the mirror down, and we both sit in silence for a
while, watching the sun set across the trees.
He smiles at me, and there’s so much love in his face that I almost
can’t breathe.
GOD: "You did good. I hope you enjoyed the
ride."
With a casual tip of his UFH hat, he winks.
Until we meet again.
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