2005-07-30 - 10:37 p.m.
I just got back from my much-anticipated trip to Lily Dale, NY. Lily Dale is a �spiritualist community�. The entire town is owned by the founding Lily Dale Assembly; when you buy a house, you own the structure but they retain title to the land. (Being a real estate dork, I�m actually fascinated by this unbundling and separation of property rights.)
It was established in 1879 by some Unitarian splinter group. I think they expected spiritualism to take off like wildfire, which obviously didn�t happen. (Upstate New York seems to have been quite a hotbed for extremism during this period � cf. the birth of Mormonism at Hill Cumorah, the seminal early conference on women�s rights at Seneca Falls, etc.) Today, Lily Dale is a beautiful example of Victorian town layouts and the assembly is a good reminder that, long before there were hippie communes or New Age crystal nonsense, people still had very strongly held, tripped out ideas about religion and sacredness.
I think I did the Dale, so to speak. Some of course have spent a lifetime there, but in my few days in town I took advantage of quite a few �alternative� spiritualist opportunities. I got read by a medium, had healing hands laid on me, was guided through a reading of Jungian MARI cards, had my aura read and past/future drawn out by another medium, and got pins stuck in me for an acupuncture treatment. (Perhaps more importantly, I met N.�s family, but I think I�ll write about that later.)
The first evening I was there, there was a huge hurricane that we largely evaded by ducking into an auditorium where they were having a daily religious ceremony. All the lights had gone out and, despite the fact that carrying around candles must surely be mandated in a spiritualist community established in the nineteenth-century, the service was held in the dark. Several mediums (media?) were there to �serve spirit� and publicly tell attendees� auras and spiritual guides.
I found it a somewhat inauspicious beginning. After a few others were �read�, a visiting medium from Cleveland got up in front and said that she felt there was a male present facing a business decision. Although I thought this seemed a pretty vague attempt to seem insightful, when no one specified that was them after a bit, I thought of my nonspecific anxiousness about starting my business (yeah, I know I should really write about that at some point) and tepidly said that maybe it was me.
The medium announced that I should trust my instincts and that I was being guided from the other side by my grandfather. She said he worked a lot with tools and was often confounded by picking the right one. Well, actually my grandfather was an elementary school principal and singularly unhandy, but I didn�t have the heart to cut her short. She was saying such nice and encouraging things, even if they weren�t at all the case.
The next morning I went to a service in the �healing temple�. I sat for several minutes while a healer laid on hands. It felt surprisingly good, like I�d been sent into a Zen trance or something. It�s not like it �cured� my MS or anything, but I did find it pretty therapeutic. It seems a shame that the practice of laying on hands didn�t take off more. I suspect that this is partly the fact that in our culture, an unremarkable reaction would be �hey buddy, stop touching me!� Perhaps the inviolable distinction between my space/your space is part of what makes us tick, but it�s a shame we can�t let down our guard more easily in certain situations.
N.�s aunt did a MARI card reading for me. This was developed by a Jungian psychologist (psychology pioneer Carl Jung gets kind of a bad rap these days for being too mystical, but Max�s mom was a Jungian shrink so it has a somewhat resonant history with me) as a non-verbal method of assessing one�s state of mind and life options. There�s a pack of clear cards with symbolic shapes on them and you pick several, along with colors to back them, that appeal to you visually and a couple you don�t like. Then you pick a few to guide you in a current situation you�re facing. Then they�re all laid out on a table for assessment.
I�m pretty into readings that involve a strong visual component. Even if you don�t buy into the supposed metaphysical machinations behind it (�your future is in the Cards!�), you can riff on the images and get a lot of insight about what they mean to you personally. I was pretty into Tarot in high school because of this. Not that I believed that drawing the Hanged Man meant death on the way, but ascribing personal meaning to a random bunch of cards can guide a good deal of introspection. (I believe I constructed a whole personal cosmology in which Staff/Sword and Cup/Coin represented positive/negative male and female energies. N. herself was represented by a card and I forget now whether it was the Queen of Staves or Swords.)
It was a very useful session and I drew a lot of insight from it (N. was surprised that it went on for over an hour). As one of the cards I didn�t like, I picked a shape and color that represent a diffuse spiritual knowledge seeping in. That�s about right. I don�t have time for nonspecific feelings anymore. That�s not guidance, it�s just clutter. When I was much younger, I felt things intensely in unfocused ways I couldn�t even articulate. But now, there�s just no room for scattered emotions unless I can think them through. (This journal is quite helpful for that, as I�ve mentioned.)
Apparently I picked two unusual center-field cards for my problem guidance selections. She said these indicated a strong self, very in tune with spiritual knowledge and well able to meet the challenges ahead. I found this pretty flattering, but yeah, I�m not really a traditional learning kind of guy these days. I do always want my intuitions to be supported by traditional �book-learning� (hence my taking business and market research classes), but she said I should trust my gut impressions more. Maybe.
I got a one-on-one aura reading one day from a fifth-generation Lily Dale resident and medium. N.�s mom asked her to come to the house because I was disabled. She asked N.�s sister to come into the session later to help explain to me the picture she would draw. Huh? N.�s sister was confused. Well, she said, I�m told he can�t write and I�m not sure how good I�d be at explaining things to the mentally challenged. N.�s sister sighed and told her I just had a hard time physically writing; I was physically, not mentally, disabled. Much amusement ensued from N. and her sister imitating caring for a mentally challenged me. �See the pretty picture, Geoffy? Don�t get excited! Did you have sugar? Do you need your helmet?�
It was a good reading. She said spirits were guiding her drawing, but toned down the talking to them directly when she saw I wasn�t into it. But she did say I was being guided by (among others) a great-grandfather who she referred to as �the Lover�. This is a good name for my Grandpa Vito, who had a secret woman on the side with whom he apparently had a daughter (so I have half-cousins somewhere). She laid out my last few years and next few.
She was pretty good about getting what I�d been doing, down to the dates. In late 2002, you started learning. (Yes, I went back to college.) April 2004 started a period of intense passion and challenge. (Yes, I got more seriously disabled, became single, and had a very hard time coping.) She drew a large rock in the center and said it meant I was probably starting a business. (Wow.)
Then, after a soon-upcoming period of dealing with issues of domesticity (I am indeed moving to a new city and starting a new relationship), there was a long period of design energy. She guessed I was going to work with a mechanical designer and produce physical items. (Double wow � I really should explain my business plan more.) I also wanted to help heal people through this. (Yup.) She felt that getting things started would take about two years and saw children, probably daughters, in four. Shoot.
I also got acupuncture from N.�s cousin, who�s a doctor of Chinese medicine (and, although half-Japanese, looks astonishingly like my own 100% Italian cousin). I�m a big fan of acupuncture. Centuries of track record and it helped treat my uncle�s heroin addiction. You really can�t argue with that. And as he noted, no one ever says they �don�t believe� in Western medicine the way they sometimes do of Eastern medicine.
I found acupuncture actually kind of fun. I had to stifle giggles about the fact that I had needles sticking out of me. It cleared my head wonderfully and was effective on the immediate problem we discussed (no need to go into it here; it was a bit embarrassing). I think I�ll go for it regularly when I get to Chicago.
So the spirits are guiding you to Lily Dale. You will visit soon. It�s in the Cards.
� 2005 Geoff Gladstone
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