Ethereal Expressions

There are defining events in everyone’s life that do more than simply outline the calendar of existence.  These occasions are rare and often more spiritual than temporal, helping the inner man to listen more closely to the ethereal realm forgoing the five basic senses, forcing us all to rethink our solitary life, helping us to believe in a greater dimension than the corporeal, finite time defined from birth to death.

Experiencing the unexplained, the vision of the unbelievable or the simple feeling of pure love as a granddaughter recognizes your face after months of separation.  The human mind is not enough to grasp the understanding of why, leaving only the possibility that a greater force is at work in creating these overwhelming feelings.  

Like a ghost wisping by, their tell-tale signs of eerie, waif-like impressions coalesce at the corners of our sight, just beyond clarity but just within our consciousness, they appear and then quickly disappear, back into the dream world of uncertainty.   Unexplained visions of beauty, the scary realization of dread or even the clairvoyant understanding of things to come, not yet realized they are all real to some extent, at some level the truth of the unknown is known to all of us.

As a child I lived in a large home of Mediterranean design, it was a Spanish Stucco built around the 1920’s and was originally the center of an orange grove empire.  As a small child the house was an amazing playground and I in precociousness explored and discovered every inch of this great home.  From basement to attic I knew each hiding place, every cubby-hole and spying view and relentlessly pursued my efforts to find that secret passage and the lost chest of treasure that I was sure was hidden deep within its secret walls.

The home breathed and exhaled, especially when the weather changed. It moved and danced as the lights changed and in its walls lived a variety of ghouls and demons fairies and spirits, creatures of all kinds that were nothing more than figments of my overactive imagination or projections of a recently read sci-fi story, but as a child they were real, not frighteningly so but mildly fearful, just enough to keep my eyes wide late at night while watching Bella Lugosi hypnotize a young maiden with his venturous eyes and fanged teeth.  The 10” black and white TV hidden under my covers, flickering its lights in warning, telling me in some psychic manner that my mother was coming but I never listened, I couldn’t listen the show was too good.

Perhaps it was these experiences that softened my skepticism and opened my mind to the possibilities of life beyond life, existence beyond understanding or the feelings far beyond what our mindset can comprehend.  It’s these feelings that we all get from time to time that really do define who we are.  If we try to remember, try not to forget, these memories will return and with each remembering perhaps the visions of what cannot be explained will reveal a momentary glimpse of the uncertain reality that should never be but most assuredly is.

The intuition of a mother saving the life of her child, the feelings of doubt regarding a decision to be made or even the connection of two strangers meeting for the first time, each knowing of a prior relationship with no possibility of past association.  The combined prayers or thoughts for the benefit of a single purpose coalesced for good, the hope of a father worried over the safe return of a child.  These and millions more surround our lives, envelope our souls and encompass the deep recesses of our minds and hearts like a hidden truth an alternate reality, giving us the hope of goodness and the possibility that if we try hard enough, think long enough or pray fervently we will be rewarded with the desires of our hearts.

I have never seen a ghost, but I have seen the evidence of others visions.  I have never been prophesied of great events to come but I have been inspired to choose correctly.  I have never been given a direct apparition but I have had those fleeting, ghostly like feelings that someone was there, someone was watching.

What does it all mean?  It means to me that there is more to life than life itself.  More to life than science or temporal understanding, more than what we can see, hear, touch or even feel, there is an unexplained, often hidden level of existence that we all share, revealed enough to let us all believe, let us all suspect, keeping us searching, hoping and praying for more.  So next time your long dead uncle bill or aunt ruby comes to visit, see what they have to say, it might be what you need to hear…