Paul Klee
One of the attributes of writing is how it demands that you become an archeologist of your own life. Excavate, unearth, go deeper into the layers of who you are, were, and may become. In this sense, memory is a writer’s greatest asset and no telling what may boot it up – a casual remark or action, a particular scent or taste.
This evening, I went into Rob’s office to answer a question he had about one of my chapters in the new book. While I was leaning over his shoulder, looking at the section in the chapter, he asked if I could rub his neck. He remarked that he would be really happy to sit around all day and have someone massage his neck.
“Then your next wife should be Asian,” I said, and went off to find some cream for the massage.
I wondered why I’d said what I had and suddenly recalled Dr. Stowens, a pathologist I had worked for during my freshman or sophomore year in college. He was the lead pathologist in the hospital across the street from my college, and had hired me to develop and print photos of DNA, chromosomes and other microscopic stuff that was harvested during autopsies. My darkroom, in fact, was in the basement of the hospital, right alongside the morgue.
Many days when I walked into the morgue, a body would be on the table, awaiting autopsy. Sometimes it was covered, most of the time it was not. It invariably freaked me out to walk into that room and see someone on the table, a man or woman whose life had reached the end and whose body would now be carved up in the name of science. It wasn’t the physical body that disturbed me – the bloating, the strange pastiness of the skin, the total lack of expression, animation, life – but that the spirit had no home now. So one afternoon when I was in the darkroom and only a door stood between me and a body awaiting its autopsy, I silently asked the spirit of the body in the other room to communicate with me.
This was in the years way before digital photography, the Internet, home computers. It meant negatives, an enlarger, and certain types of high contrast photography paper, three or four trays filled with various chemicals, crucial timing for a piece of paper in each tray. The dark room was sealed against light leaks. The only lights were safe lights that didn’t register on the paper. Dr. Stowens’ morgue and dark room were impeccable. The dark room was well sealed, the high contrast paper and chemical were new. So as I proceeded developing the negatives, I kept thinking about the soul of the body in the other room and made my enlargements and placed them into the appropriate trays.
First sheet, first tray. I remember being bored and hungry and grateful that I had a part-time job. When I glanced at the paper in the first tray, I thought something was wrong with it. The paper was black except in the middle, where the word HI leaped out in pale, foggy letters. I removed the sheet from the tray, held it up to the safe light, recall being totally freaked out and dropping it into the solution that stopped the image from developing any further. From here, it went into the fix solution that stabilized the image.
When I removed it from that solution, when I turned on the overhead light, I just stood there staring at a print with the word HI scrawled across the center of it. I left the dark room and drove to a photo store and bought new chemicals, new photo paper, and went through the same process with the same negative. The results were the same. HI.
I went to Dr. Stowens with my silly proof of spirit communication. He was an interesting guy, this Stowens, who employed several of us from the college. If memory serves, he studied my multiple images. I sensed that his medical training battled his intuitive knowledge as a healer, a pathologist and as a man who dealt daily with the dead. “It’s a light leak,” he said.
“C’mon,” I said. “Since when do light leaks spell words?”
He just looked at me then with his wide, dark eyes. “Go back to work, Trish. Get me some good prints of those hose chromosomes.”
We both knew what was what. But he took the stance that he did because in those days, physicians who ventured into woo-woo land ended up unemployed.
Many years later, I was in town and found Dr. Stowens in the phone book and called him. He had retired, his wife had passed on, he had remarried. I thanked him for hiring me when I really needed a job. I could feel that HI incident between us, a third presence. But we talked around it. He asked what I was doing – I was working on my first novel then- and I asked about his second wife.
“She’s wonderful,” he said. “She’s Asian. She massages my neck and you know what? At this point in my life, I love it when my neck is massaged.”
I left it at that. We never spoke again. The photographic images of HI were lost in my numerous moves. But if I am pressed to name a mentor, it’s Dr. Stowens, the guy who got it but couldn’t admit it because of the times in which he lived. His offering me that job launched my search for what happens when we die and everything else that surrounds that question.
Thanks, Ray! That sure was a lot of years ago 🙂
Off to check out that weird ditty at the end of your post!
Beautiful story and so was that first novel. I was hooked from then on.
Ray
WV: wrinalt from Google description of link to Mind Map of ali_ira
…wrin alt= A portal to another mind map.
This same thing happened on my younger daughter's computer – a word typed while she was sleeping. I think it was the word "huh……?" The same night she heard a glass of water move and then heard her dog drink. The next morning the word was on the computer, and the glass was back next to the bed. (It might be noted that her dog was always thirsty…)
The title got me! My little dog was excited by my excitment to come look….Then the post, whoa. I vaguely remember you saying something about this before Trish. The Hi see the 11 with a bridge and an i for me or the other guys eye. Jimi knew as well as the Hopis; Rainbow Bridge. Even the characters of written thought tell the story. The Rainbow Bridge at Lake Powell is where Jimi and the Hopis had a concert when he first came to US…If you go there to look you will feel all the power where the the 2 sides of hard red rock meet, in the cemter over the water below. (One reason I beleve in the 528MgHz frequency, which is the frequency of the center of the spectrum or Rainbow!) Concluded the Pot'o Gold is the linking of the heart, and mind (the mind minds the heart), and the will being the cornicopia chakra, in the throat is where to find the treasure. Our words direct us to fulfillment towards Love, when the mind and heart; compassion and wisdom are balanced.
Then of course the i . A bridge between the spirit world by one who says I am. Must have been a nice person in material world.
Genes again are shown, that allow us to exist in this world.
Did you hear about the container of heads found at Love field this past Spring? @12 from Arkansas(red flag) on their way to Minnesota(red flag) research facility? People were wondering…
Near that same post somewhere on my FB page is another post by a medical examiner society. It told of (always my point) mucus in the human body these days being out of balance, and they were learning to deal with it by having to use chain saws for autopsy of the brain…
Aspartame (has many different names to hide it) chemically changes to formaldehide in our body. GMO Round Up resistant crops (is in everything we eat, if not organic good old Earth food) have been shown to start w/enzymes from the plant to make our gut a pesticide factory. The body will create mucus to protect from this…The mortcians said that the Mucus turned the brain rock hard.
Zombies are us, who must learn from our simple clues what the H^%@
is going on.
Cargot…Target (get your kid out of that group of friends)
facalme…Vassal or vessel me…the cup of Love
Thanks for the great wake-up Good Morning message…Happy Day to All.
hey, we're all weird. We're seekers. Seekers rarely fit into any box.
too much, trish!!! 😉
From Gypsy
>>both of us and our asian past lives – as trish pointed out, perhaps that's where we first met???
I've got nothing to add, except this wv: mazingsy
amazing gypsy – lol
Great post, Trish!I really enjoyed reading about your life. What a fantastic opportunity and experience.
CJ, What a lovely thing to happen, I am glad that your dad consoled you.
yep,cj, both of us and our asian past lives – as trish pointed out, perhaps that's where we first met??? when i saw the message of "cargot" my first thought also having met their demise in a car – cj, you just never leave my thoughts alone, do you! 🙂 i love lauren's big deal story! how neat was that –
oh, and cj, did i mention that my phone call with the bank on my atm drama today was at those magic numbers again 11:11am –
butternut – last time i used my ouija board, i had large red pillar candles exploding all over the room – you may remember that story – i've not tempted it since – i also wasn't aware of the issue of having used red candles with it, either – but we learn as we go! 😉
Musing – these wvs really seem like mini trickster synchros!
Lauren – eerie story. But it sounds like the older woman had a sense of humor!
Great story!
I have a friend, Wendy, who is a professional medium, and she and several other friends who are spiritualists have been collecting audio tapes of spirit voices for years… they all travel with digital voice recorders and leave them on often; the result is pretty amazing. Wendy's favorite occurred at a conference on the paranormal the three women went to in 2007 – sitting together drinking some wine in a hotel room, you can hear Wendy talking very seriously about an emotional issue she had. There is a pause, and then as clear as can be, a gruff older woman's voice, with a thick New York accent, says "Big deal." Wendy laughed her head off when she heard that in the tape later……….but she seems to be used to such phenomena. I found it disturbing, to think that people whose energy one might not much like can be hanging around……….
Wonderful stories from both Trish and CJ; I'll be relating both to my friend later.
wv: facalme (?)
Fa call me?
Fa calm?
Fake all me?
I just love these wv(s) we all get!
cj – car got….hmmm. Interesting.
Another thought about the "cargot" message on the Ouija. Maybe it was a spook who met his or her demise in a car….thus, "car got". cj
Or "cargo" as in a package being delivered, maybe? cj
I DID say hi back, then got out of there to buy new chemicals and paper!
Cargot: it sounds like escargot?!
Loved that geisha dream, gypsy!
Hi!
Did you say hi back?
The kids in my neighborhood are all very excited about Ouija boards these days. My boys have been coming home from their friends houses with all sorts of messages from their guardian angels, and someone named, Cargot. There is always a lot of squealing before they ask the next question.
This is a great story, Trish.
And Gyps, what was our email last night about the Asian lifetimes, both your and mine?? Yep. Briefly on a different subject, Mercury Retro here we go again: on our FL island this morning the chill factor is 17. The pump on our central heating system just went out! Bbbrrrrr. Guess this will be a day to huddle in my comfy armchair under my warm snuggie and wait for the heating folks to arrive! We have no fireplace, so I'll have to "create" one in my imagination and put myself beside it! Darn Mercury retro! WV: "womul" warm you all? giggle. cj
what an absolutely moving/beautiful story, trish! just incredibly beautiful – and how wonderful to have such experiences to guide us into our life – and odd the asian woman, as i just posted at dreamweavers my own asian woman dream! a great post – so glad you shared with us –
and cj – another beautifully moving story, too –
wv = gases – hmmmmmm….
P.S. Please overlook typos on previous message. Tremors today. cj
I absolutely love love lOVE this story! I do have a synchronicity to share here. During my appt last week, my cardiologist requested a copy of my dad's autopsy report because at the time Dad died, his case was aritten up in several medical journal. His was the first case ever reported where an intracranial malignancy had metastasized to the interior of the heart. So, late yesterday I got Dad's autopsy report (thirteen pages) out of the file and separated the relevant pages to mail to my cardiologist. As I read my dad's sutopsy report (for the umpteenth time), i cried yet again, unable to reconcile the detached notes in that clinical essay dictated by the pathologist, with the beautiful soul who was my Dad. My mind visualized Dad's physical body on that cold table…I even mentioned this in my cover letter to my heart specialist…and I remain unable to imagine that it was my Dad being written about in the notes.
As I prepared the portions to send to my doctor, through my tears, I felt an invisible hand on my shoulder and smelled my Dad's Old Spice shaving lotion, and knew he was with me. As a research RN early on, I had to attend autopties, and they weren't fun. But it's quite an experience when a person finally comprehends that the fleshly corpse on that table is just a disposable heap of organic rags, and that the Spirit animating it has been long gone, and continues to live. Your Spirit answering your request to speak to you by saying "HI" on the photograhy paper is a glorious demonstration of that, just as my Dad's visit yesterday was a validation of his on-going life and presence. cj
What a great post, it's always good to read personal stories. It's interesting what can conjure up images and memories from the past. I find that there is usually a 'message' or a reason for whatever comes to mind. Maybe it was a reminder of 'Hi to your search' and all you have found or are about to discover.