Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree Tilt.
After the girls left for Canada this morning, I spent a little time in meditation. I did a little “house-wandering,” which I sometimes do without expecting to. I can’t control yet where I go. It just happens—and it often feels like I’m called there rather than aiming to go there. These are really physical-seeming structures but I recognize that they’re not. These are the last two of my wanderings this morning….
I am in another house…one where the girls are wandering about looking at things and we are looking at furniture, etc. In the Ether, I know it is a house that my ex lived in and the furniture and precious possessions of long ago are still there but abandoned or kept tightly closed up. This place is huge and there are so many rooms! Most of them are dark and cluttered, too, but in an organized way.
This is a place that my ex never comes to when I’m there but I’ve been in this house before…in the Ether and only in the Ether… As far as I know, it’s not a real house as in “real” on the physical plane.
From the road, it looks like a 4-story mansion with a10-acre yard, sculpted gardens, fountains. Inside, it is complete elegance. Rich, rich, rich, and open for visitors. In the back of the house is where people live, and it’s closed to the public. It’s the back of the house where we are now entering and wandering about.
I am looking at the cabinetry knobs in one bedroom (something the girls and I are re-working in our current physical house.) In some of the rooms, the knobs are really fancy and then I accidentally walk into the wrong room and see that the knobs are cheap and shoddy, but it is a room for kids or teens, not for the grownups. The girls have walked ahead of me, looking into the rooms and chattering about what they see. Every time I’ve been in this house before, it’s been like this huge hidden house behind the main house that everybody else sees. It’s very much a private area, the inner bedrooms and the forgotten possessions.
As I turn to walk out of the kids’ room with the cheap cabinets, I run into my ex-mom-in-law coming down the steps and into the room, which is lower than the other rooms. She is wearing a thin blue denim dress and an apron or something—very much like she always did at family functions. She blocks the door and stares me down. She doesn’t think I belong there, and I’m not too happy being there myself, but I am feeling rather curious about why I’m in this place. I tell her simply and curtly, “Please excuse me,” in that fake-y polite tone that she uses and is so very important to her regardless of what she says behind the back of a supposed friend, neighbor, sister-in-law, whomever. She glares at me but moves aside and goes wandering about the house herself, but this time avoiding me. That’s fine..the house is definitely big enough for both of us—and a few dozen more.
I see her in the very back of the house. The girls have gone ahead of her and are visiting with relatives or acquaintances at a patio in the very back, one that’s set up like a beach or picnic area that the back door opens into and it’s like sunlight streams in when the girls open the door. This place, this whole place, is full of the past and isolation and a sense of not being allowed to touch anything.
But before I can follow the girls out the door, I’m drawn to a huge, heavy, dark bedroom to the right and I walk in as his mom is walking out of it. There are a few things there that are mine, in the far back, things I’ve for- gotten or left behind with the marriage. Ornate dolls and oriental things for a dresser table. Things I almost reach out to touch but don’t. My basic impression is “Oh, I re- member that.” I have no inclination to take anything with me—at all.
I walk out onto the patio area and I’m vaguely aware of where the girls are, and I’m looking for the baby (?), which I find playing in the grass and sand with some other people who are very friendly to me but I don’t know them. The girls are comfortable with them, too, and are pointing out to me that there huge posters of me and of me with them. The posters are on the lawn area nearby, between the girls and the back wall of the house. They’re like giant blurry Polaroid’s—poor quality prints made with an inkjet printer, I think—of someone else’s memories of me over the years. I’ve never seen these pictures of myself before. They’re like snapshots of the mind. I recognize the scene in only one of them, and it is of me, wearing a turquoise casual shirt of my ex’s because I was pregnant and it was big and comfortable on me.
(I haven’t thought of that shirt in years.)
But I realize I’m now out of that huge dark backend of the house that was double the area of the house seen from the outside and all so closed off and private. The kids and I are standing in the sunshine outside and we’re smiling and happy.
Then the scene shifts and I’m in another house…this one’s related to a friend and it feels like it’s got that energy of his to it. I’m not sure of the location, but it’s definitely not around my current home. It’s small and cozy but somewhat cluttered in places with all sorts of modern and old-fashioned things mixed together, science and pop culture and music and scholarly books. It’s not heavy on image or some sort of rich elegance like the last house. It’s peaceful and homey. There’s a strong mother sense here, but not at all like with my ex-mom-in-law.
I’ve been in this house before in the Ether, too, and there’s a part of it, near the entrance, that’s actually a reception area that leads into his office—all very bright and happy and clean. Lots of people coming and going and a good buzz of energy all around. People leave with some- thing of his energy, with something given them on a soul- level.
I’ve seen him in this area before, looking very much like the figure on the Magician card, almost with an infinity symbol of ideas over his head. This is the first part of the house that’s seen, and his work—and its effects—is the foremost thing that’s seen when one walks through his doors.
But I don’t come past the reception area this time. I come in through a side door and wander around, looking through the rooms. There’s plenty here— people and activity. I find a quiet bedroom/sitting room in the back. It’s away from the activity, still very open and light, and for some reason, I’m drawn here to its inner quiet.
I begin looking at knick-knacks everywhere, all kinds of little things on shelves, collections of things. Some- thing on the bottom shelf of a glass bookcase draws my attention and I get down on my knees for a closer look. It’s a dish of food—a salad unlike any I’ve seen before. I
look up through the open glass and his mother is on the other side, rearranging his shelves for him and tending to the smaller details. She tells me the health advantages of this particular food and shares it with me, and it’s delicious. Later, she comes out from behind the glass shelf where she was working and sits in a comfy chair next to me while I curl up on the edge of the bed in this room, and we talk about all sorts of unimportant things. His energy is so strong here that I expect to see him walk through the door at any moment.
People come and go. This is an active place!
Then she asks if I’ve heard from him recently and chatters away about this new place he’s at and that he’s just arrived there—in the Ether at least. He and his partners are very excited about it, she says, and it takes quite a while before the woman realizes I don’t know what she’s talking about. She gives me the specific name of a town or community or place…or shopping center (?).
“So he doesn’t live here?” I ask.
She explains that it’s still daylight and he’s still at work but he’ll be checking in in another hour or two and I’m welcome to wait. She’s surprised that I don’t about his new job. They’ve had a recent conversation about people from Donalsonville (my hometown) and that he knows people from Donalsonville and wonders if they know he arrived safely, if they know he got there okay, and if they know he’s going to be “down that way” soon. I want to stop her and explain that he never knew I was from Donalsonville, that he knew me only as being from Niceville, and I don’t understand. I’m still in Niceville, and he never knew where I was really from. Did he?
There are other things I’d like to know, but I can’t get her attention to ask and she just keeps talking about how excited he is about his new venture and that he wonders if I know.
Then two more people come in and sit to chat with her and she gets distracted and the thread of conversation is lost and I keep thinking I’ll talk to her more when the others are gone or if I hang around, I’ll talk to him my- self, but then I open my eyes and the meditation is done.
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