I’ve been engrossed in another project for several months now, and my absence from the blogosphere reflects that. I have not stepped back from this work, as the steady stream of psychic readings I’ve done can attest, but my attention has definitely been divided. To my surprise and delight, while I was looking the other way, I unexpectedly reached three milestones. First, my website has a ticker that counts every time someone views a page. Last week, that ticker rolled past the 15,000 views mark. While this doesn’t constitute going viral, it is certainly a big deal to me. I haven’t done any advertising, so new readers arrive most commonly as a result of a word-of-mouth recommendation, and less frequently, as a result of an online search. To reach this many views this way is very affirming to me. I know that the ticker doesn’t discriminate, and the 15,000 could be achieved by one overly obsessed person looking at my site 15,000 times, but I am pretty certain that it didn’t happen that way.
The second milestone I reached is probably tied to the first: my site is now the #1 result when a person googles “speaking of the dead.” I can hear the resounding “duh”s from you all, but not so fast. A year after I launched my site and had been posting to my blog weekly, my site came up somewhere after page 12 in those results. I can guarantee you that nobody found my site that way at that time. So this is a big deal to me, too.
The third milestone I reached is more personal. I did my first reading for someone who found me through a cold-call Google search. No recommendation from a friend, no following my blog for two years before contacting me, no hearing about me from my kids or husband. Trust is such an important part of the work that I do and such a difficult thing to engender that I’ve wondered if this would ever happen. And now it has. The reading was for a woman with a very fractured family. She came to me with a lot of questions and concerns, and I know that the reading provided insights and answers that will help her as she moves forward. What I don’t know is if she knows how much her trust in me meant to me.
I must admit that my attention is still a bit divided, but it is Halloween for heaven’s sake, a big day for ghost activity of every sort, and a day to not let pass without posting. I celebrated the occasion by doing a ghost check on my own house, and a spirit drifted down from my attic. The spirit was that of a tall, slender guy in his 50’s, who came seeking my help. And I helped him. As I faced him, he got right to the point, without my asking anything, and confessed to beating his wife. In life, he saw it as “his way,” which I took to mean that he dealt with all of life’s challenges with his fists. He was very easy to read, and I could see that he was troubled by feelings that this was bad, that he had been wrong to treat his wife this way — something he had not been troubled by in life. He said that he spent time with his wife after his death, and saw that in her private moments, she was glad he was dead. This, too, troubled him. I gave him my standard speech about accepting the things done and un-done in life, the need for him to accept responsibility for his actions, the need for him to own the life lessons he learned, the need for him to forgive himself, the need for him to commit himself to trying harder and doing better in his next life, and most importantly, the need for him to make peace with this life and this death.
These ideas seemed to challenge him, so I left him to stew in his thoughts for a little while. When I came back to him, he announced, “Okay, I’ll go.” This surprised me. For my part, I wished that I had a way to find his widow, to make a final conversation between them possible, as I think this would be of benefit to both of them. But sometimes that just isn’t possible. He went on, “I did her wrong. I know that now. And I won’t do it again. I can’t go back and fix it, so I will go on and do better next time. And maybe I can come to her in a dream and tell her that I’m sorry.” I encouraged him to do that, as I think anyone in her situation would welcome such a visit. And up he went, ascended and finally at peace.
Doing this is helping me feel “back on the job,” happy to be posting, and I promise not to wander off for so long again. I wish you the happiest of Halloweens — enjoy the day and be in touch if your ghosts get to be too much!