Reconnecting
A couple of years after my hospital stay I was working at a grocery store, having been given a job as a handyman by the owner. I'd gone to speak with him about a job after returning home. He was my Sunday school teacher in junior high and I had few other options at that point. I needed a place to work and to continue my recovery. Eventually I found myself working in the meat department as a butcher, something my adoptive father and his father (who had owned a grocery store) had done previously. It helped me to move forward and provided a foundation. I married a woman who was also in a recovery process, although I did not recognized it at the time. We moved to the country and set up house in a freshly remodeled and insulated 3 bedroom, 2 story farmhouse that was on 2 1/2 acres with a pole barn garage and a full size barn. Our nearest neighbor was a half a mile away. It was an awesome place for us.
Soon after we moved in, though, I had just laid down to sleep when I heard a woman's voice ask me if I could hear her. I could, so I answered her out loud. My wife asked me who the heck I was talking to, which I could only say was a woman's voice. We found out a few days later that the couple who had lived in the house previously were elderly, and the woman had developed cancer. She chose to hang herself in the chicken coup the about 6 months or so prior to our moving in. I was excited with the contact. My wife was scared. I still had my drums, having put them in the upstairs unfinished bedroom above ours. Sometimes I would here them playing at night, melodically, like the player was serenading this woman. I told my wife about it several times, only to have her scoff at it.
I had help learning to play these drums, too, only the help was from the other side as well. A friend's uncle, David Star, had owned one of the sets as a young man. He died in his early twenties, nearly 25 years before. The drums still had the original calfskin heads on them. I called to him one day in my dorm room at school, where I first had them set up, when I was having problems learning a particular pattern of rhythm. Immediately after I called, I felt a warm sensation, like flowing water, coming down through the top of my head and going completely through every area of my body. I put the music back on and the next attempt was perfect, after much frustration for over an hour prior to this. His presence had been obvious, even outside the drumming, since that time. I kept silent for the most part as most people didn't believe it anyway.
Later that next February, we'd moved in September, I received a frantic call at work. Our first child had been born and my wife was breast-feeding her on the couch in the living room. Our daughter had fallen asleep in her arms and within a few moments, she heard the drums playing... unmistakably louder than I'd heard them. She was hysterical, hardly being able to calm herself enough to speak with me on the phone. I told her to slow down, take a couple of deep breaths, and not be afraid. I relayed that he was finally showing her that this was real and that all she needed to do was speak to him directly, telling him that she was scared. He was only trying to communicate in some way to show her that I was telling the truth. She decided in that moment that she could no longer stay there and we needed to move as soon as possible. I was bummed to say the least.
The following year, after switching jobs and watching the job market dry up due to the automotive industry layoffs, I got an interesting surprise. I threw up my hands on tour porch one afternoon and asked where I needed to go. My inner frustration was very apparent I'm sure. I'd been all over several counties looking for work. In one week's time I was laid off of two jobs, meat cutting and machinist apprentice, and the band I was in broke up. I was ready to sell everything and leave. I just didn't know to where. Instantly after asking the question, the first word I heard in my head was Phoenix. So, three weeks later we were on the road. Fortunately several folks we knew had moved to the Phoenix area a few years before. We had friends to put us up for a few days and even had a job waiting for me. I didn't realize just what kind of a trip Phoenix would truly be in my path to self-discovery and fulfilling my mission.
The journey to Phoenix has special meaning to me. When I was in college a few years before, I made a lot of inquiries about many things. One of which was a question about whether or not I had a guide, ally, guardian angel or whatever. I wanted to know how to communicate with them and to know everything about them if indeed I had one. I didn't consider the Voice I'd known since childhood, nor had I had the white light experience yet, as I recall. So, one evening while in meditation, I got my answer. Simultaneously, I heard the name 'Zephyr' and saw an ancient Indian's face in my mind's eye. His gaze was both soft and warm, yet cold and piercing like he could look right through you to the very depths of your being. A couple of days later, while listening to George Harrison's 'Living in the Material World' album, I heard a voice prompting me to pick up a pen and some paper and write. So I did. I had never done this before.
When my hand stopped writing, I had three pages of what looked like a crude form of Sanskrit, as I compared it to many other writings and this was the closest. I wasn't sure what it said, although there were some definite impressions while I was in process writing it. Unfortunately, they became buried in my subconscious, waiting for their own time to come up again. I didn't connect it to Zephyr yet, although I had already asked a friend that I knew could do automatic writing if we could inquire more about Zephyr. So we did. Heck, as teenagers we really didn't know what we couldn't do yet, so we accomplished many things thought to be impossible. We agreed to get together over the weekend.
We met, began the process by offering some prayers and putting on a Tangerine Dream album. He asked Zephyr to participate with us and would he please answer some questions. I began asking and as Jim started to write, I recognized the script. It was the same as I had written before. I had not shown the pages to Jim so he couldn't have known. Regardless, neither one of us could read or understand it. So, we asked if his guide could act as a translator. He did. We found out that Zephyr had lived in what is now the southwestern United States, over 20,000 years ago. I longed to go to this region. We were in Muncie, Indiana at the time, over 2,000 miles away. Time has a way of working things out, eh?