About a week before I was due to leave on another adventure back to Europe, my friend and past work colleague, Vanessa, invited me to visit her home and to spend some non-work time with her. Although I had so much to do before I left Sydney, and I had been knocking back requests to meet people, I felt compelled to visit her.
It had been a long day that had started out with a yoga class with my mother and my favourite yoga teacher, a visit to my grandmother of 94 to say good-bye, knowing that i may never see her again, followed by the drive from the northern beaches of Sydney to the upper north shore, where my friend lived.
When I arrived, Vanessa showed me her home, offered me a cup of tea and then told me we were going to her friend’s house around the corner where we could have time alone without the rest of her family. Plus, her home was being painted so the furniture was all over the place.
Her house, her friend’s house - it didn’t really matter. I liked Vanessa. She was a good woman and I enjoyed her company.
I drove us to a home at the bottom of a steep drive-way, built into the side of a gully, where the living room on the second level opened out to a large balcony that seemed to merge with the trees of the gully. It was as if I was in a huge tree house, surrounded by silver trees with blackness through and beyond.
I was shown to my room for the night and we had a tour of the ‘House that Jack Built’ as Vanessa called it - a quirky home with lots of rooms, built by her friends and who were currently overseas.
Vanessa offered me a glass of wine, cheese and a homemade date paste that the mistress of the house had made. This was the beginning of a very interesting evening on the tree house balcony.
We talked and drank and learned more about each other, parts of us that we normally do not show in the realm of work - our childhoods, past relationships, our dreams. I was treated to delicious Thai takeaway and more wine. Sometime during the course of the night I thought I saw something move in the corner of my eye - inside the glass windows of the living room. Vanessa noticed me turn my head and asked what was wrong. I told her I thought I’d seen something. She said not to worry, that it was nothing.
Our conversation naturally turned to work and we commiserated over the goings on of the circus that had been my workplace and still was for her. But that is another story. I don’t remember the sequence now but Vanessa said that she is looking forward to when she can leave this Earth. I asked her why. She didn’t appear suicidal to me. She told me it was pretty awful down here on Earth. To which I agreed, but I told her that we would have to come back so what was the benefit of leaving? Upon which she vehemently disagreed with me and I with her. So, curious, I asked her what she believed happened to us when our time was up.
Knowingly, she told me that only a part of us returns - the part that still needs to learn any unresolved lessons and the rest of us doesn’t have to come back. She then proceeded to tell me that she had psychic abilities and that she can see things but that she tries not to go there because she doesn’t always see pleasant images. I was intrigued. I asked her if she could see anything now. She told me it doesn’t work that way, she can only see things if they want to make themselves seen. And they, specifically, referred to dead people. She then went on to say that when I had earlier seen something in my peripheral vision, she had thought I had seen the ‘wa wa’ Indian (as she gestured like an American Indian making a war cry - as opposed to an Indian like Ghandi). And next unfolded a fascinating tale of her seeing this Indian one night when she was on this same balcony sharing an evening with her friends. That story is not mine to tell, but needless to say, this Indian apparently makes his appearance every now and then in this home.
Suddenly, she said to me that there was a short Asian man standing behind me, wearing a white robe, with something gold around his neck, and a wooden, gnarled staff in one hand and what appeared to be a drum and beater in the other. She asked me if I knew him.
I told her unfortunately, I didn’t, as I wracked my brain thinking of who it might be.....what dead person did I know that matched the description of what sounded like a Buddhist monk? I asked her what he wanted and she said that he knew me and he couldn’t say until I recognised who he was.
Here was someone coming to see me from the other side and I couldn’t recognise him! Vanessa then said that there was now a woman standing next to him in a red dress.She described her some more but again I couldn’t work out what dead person would come and see me in a red dress. She told me that the woman had something in her hair and that her hair line had a slight V in the front. As I tried to find out some more about her appearance, the pair of them both disappeared. Vanessa reassured me that they would be back. This was so interesting. As we continued to talk about what was happening, Vanessa told me that they had returned. I turned around, and not surprisingly, I couldn’t see anyone.
I then thought that the only person that remotely matched the description of the woman was my grandmother but she didn’t wear red dresses. I asked Vanessa if it was a Western dress or whether it was some other kind of dress and her description seemed to indicate that it was actually a kimono. So I asked her if it was my grandmother, to which Vanessa told me that the woman was nodding in agreement. So we had worked out who she was. I still didn’t know who he was. The only men I could think of that were significant to me in some way, who were Japanese and known to me and who were dead were my grandfather and my cousin. And neither of them had been Buddhist monks.
Vanessa then told me that they were saying something but she couldn’t understand them. I asked her to repeat back what she had heard them say, but alas, it was all gibberish. Her psychic abilities clearly did not include speaking Japanese.
As we continued to work out the man’s identity, Vanessa next informed me that the American Indian had also appeared and that my grandmother was smiling at him. Of course she would. She had been larger than life and had had conversations with anyone including an intruder that had once broken into her home, so why wouldn’t she be smiling at an American Indian?
Vanessa then told me that she had a feeling that the man was my grandmother’s father. I knew very little about him and from memory I had thought he had been some sort of merchant.
So I asked her now that we had some idea of who these people were, why had they appeared? Throughout this entire conversation, it was clear from her body language and facial expressions, that she was somehow seeing something and trying to communicate with something or somebody.
After some time of communing with our visitors, she told me that they wanted me to know that they were looking after me as I set out on my next adventure, that if I handed over my angst and my concerns, they would look after them, that I could talk to them and ask them for guidance. She told me that she saw me travelling with a group of people - at which point, I saw in my mind’s idea, something akin to a caravanserai but without the caravan, travelling on foot as a group - and that these two were part of that group.
What an amazing evening with Vanessa, my grandmother, my great-grandfather and an American Indian! By 1 am, I had had way too much red wine and had a splitting head-ache and I told my dear friend that although I would have loved to have continued our conversations, I needed to go to bed. And strangely, I had a warm and homey sensation, that we had been graced by a loving presence as I tumbled into an unfamiliar but comfortable bed surrounded by projectors, speakers, and hundreds of DVDs, a home cinema known as the Roxy.
So, as I write this on a flight to Dublin via Abu Dhabi, I am aware of the presence of my two guides and companions. I hope they are comfortable on this long journey.
*names have been changed
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