March 2002

My mother is now in a nursing home. She was transferred there from the hospital after another lung infection. I talk to her in the emergency room and she tells me they are sending her to the nursing home because she needs around the clock care until they get her back problem fixed. I ask her how she and my brother are doing. She says that when she first got to the emergency room she fell asleep and then woke up to find my brother holding her hand in one of his hands. He was patting it gently with his other hand while quietly saying, "Mama, Mama."

I get a lump in my throat. My brother has been so angry with our mother that he had been calling her by her first name as a way of distancing himself from her. I tell her it sounds like they are getting along better. She agrees and says it is because his attitude has changed. I smile because my brother had told me that she was the one whose attitude had changed. I am relieved to hear they are closer.

I finally send the film from my walk out to get developed and have picked up the prints. When I look at them I am surprised by how looking at each one puts me right back on the Camino I can remember where and when each picture was taken. Seeing them also has me asking myself, "Isn't this where......?" Although there is still a lot I do not remember, these pictures help bring back some memories. Maybe my trip is not totally gone.

On the weekend before St. Patrick's Day I drive into Denver and go to the Psychic Fair with my sister. There I sign up for another reading with her spiritual counselor. After I sit down LL looks at me for about ten seconds and then carefully asks me how I am doing. I stare back at her for another ten seconds before answering and then blurt out, "I walked the Camino."

She is impressed by this and asks how it was. I'm not sure how to answer and I fumble around before saying it was a dream. She smiles and says this dream feeling is called "Brigadoon" and that doing the walk was a dream for me, a spiritual dream. She says that I am no longer the same person I was before I made the walk and then asks me how I would like to integrate this spiritual dream into my Post-Camino life. I say I don't know; I only know that I want to stop feeling like I have been ripped in two. She says that in some way the walk had exploded me into spirituality and I am trying to fit myself into my old life and that this I can no longer do. She says that by going to Spain I had stepped out of my life and into another world and this had changed me.

She then asks if I took any pictures during my walk and I say yes. Did I bring them? Yes. As she goes through them I tell her stories about them. When we get to the picture of the Virgin Mary I tell her how the statute was struck by lightning. She looks at me and says she was struck by lightning once. My life is full of coincidences. Why should another one surprise me? We look at the rest of the pictures and then she goes back to the picture of the Virgin Mary. She examines it and then asks if I touched the statute. I am stunned. I forgot until this moment. I did touch it. I answer, "Yes! How did you know?"
She looks at me with a twinkle in her eye and say, "I'm psychic."
I laugh, "Oh yea, I forgot."

She looks at the picture one more time and then puts it down and look at me. She starts talking again. She says that, for me, the walk was easier that I thought it was going to be. Not physically but emotionally. She says that I am to watch birds and to watch the eagles. That the old me did the first half of the walk and the new me did the second half. That my aura shows that I went through a near death experience during the second half of the walk. The suffering of my body and my feet caused part of my brain to check out at that point because it was the only way I could do the last partof the walk. That I should write about the trip from the time I left home until I returned. That I am more empathic than I realize. Someone who is empathic can pick up other people's feelings. That I went into this experience naive and wide open psychically and, without realizing it, when I touched the statue I was hit by spiritual lightning. Then later when I touched the Tree of Jesse it wasn't just me touching the marble but me touching thousands and thousands of other people. And when I touched those people I also touched on their illness. That I could also become ill myself. That she was going to help show me how to heal my aura. That I went to "the highest of the highest of the high." That I touched "the highest of the highest of the high." That she has a vision of me standing by the statute, touching it and then having the spiritual lightning hit me. That this is what caused me to have my "near life experience." She then smiles and says that was a Freudian slip, she meant to say near death experience. That I am going to be given and known by another name. The last thing LL tells me is how to do the ritual that will help heal my aura.

I listen to every word with a growing sense of wonder. By the end I feel the same way I did as a child seeing my first lighted Christmas tree. What she says comforts me and frightens me at the same time. Later, when I leave the fair, I feel overwhelmed. My perceptions about myself and where I belong in the world have been shattered. What am I suppose to do now?