Between

On my walk this morning before dawn, my shoes marking my cadence on the gravel, the deer in the distance alerted by the measured stride of a two-legged creature, I was exactly between two heavenly bodies. At the country cemetery, I looked west and saw the moon hanging high above the kingdom she ruled during last night’s dark hours. And then I turned and went to the fence and looked east, and I saw the pockets of mist in the distant hollows of this chain of mountains, mist lit by the light crawling up from behind those peaks, and then in an instant the day had begun and the regal knot of flame lifted above it all, usurping the queen of the night and taking to his own saddle, ready to ride across the sky and to throw heat down upon the lands beneath his hooves.

William Blake said that when he was a boy, he saw a vision of angels in a tree. I have never seen angels, but sometimes when I am alone, I do sense the presence of other — what? Beings? Lives? Souls? — things around me, as if touching my elbows with spider-web fingers or whispering in my ears at a frequency that I can never quite pick up. I have had a handful of truly supernatural experiences in my lifetime, events that no amount of cool scientific explanation by earnest, analytical minds can ever convince me were anything other than supernatural. These experiences came unsought and unbidden, and each one altered my course just a bit, and any sailor will tell you that even a slight tack of the sails will completely change your destination. I try not to overthink them because I have at points in the past obsessed about them, and this did me no good. They have given me a sensitivity to and an appreciation of the veil or veils that hang between me and…something else. Someplace else.

A coworker’s aunt died recently, and my coworker told me about her visit on the day of her aunt’s death. A few family members were there keeping watch. The aunt was largely unresponsive and had been failing for some time; she was under hospice care in her own home. As evening was coming on, the aunt sat up in bed and looked across the room to a corner where a dresser stood.

“Well, look. There they are,” she said to the gathered family. “There’s that baby. And who are those two men? Hey, sister.”

The family exchanged looks and one of them said to her, “Who are you talking to, Samantha?”

She looked around the room, made eye contact with each person there, and gestured to the corner. “Well, there’s [her sister, dead several years], and that baby, and those two men. Who are they?” She waved at the corner, and her face opened in a large smile. “Hey, baby! Hey, sister!”

My coworker’s aunt kept waving and smiling and remarking on “that baby” for a few minutes, and then she stopped smiling and looked up towards the ceiling. Her eyes grew wide and she said, “Shhh! Do you hear that?” She looked at my coworker, who was sitting next to the bed. “Do you hear that? Oh!” She lifted her hands towards the ceiling and stared, wide eyed. “That’s the prettiest music!”

The aunt stayed like this for several minutes, then looked around the room again at each family member, her eyes clear. My coworker asked her what she was seeing, what she was hearing, but she gave no answer. After a while, she laid back on her pillow and continued staring into the corner, still smiling. In a bit, she looked up at the ceiling again and muttered something unintelligible, and then put her hand over her eyes. Her hand fell away from her face and she died.

When my coworker told me about this, she asked several times, “Do you think she saw somebody? Do you think she heard music?” I asked her what she thought. I also asked her if she knew who “the baby” was (she did not). Her conclusion was that her aunt might have seen something, but that her mind might have been playing tricks on her.

When we bought this little farm, we were advised by the realtor that a tragic death had occurred at this place. A toddler had drowned in an above-ground swimming pool many years before. It wasn’t until some years later that we learned that the child had been the young son of our neighbors, a family beset by suffering and tragedy on a level that I hope my family never sees.

About a year after we came here, my beloved dog came to live with us. She was sprawled at my feet one night in the converted garage that we call the office, resting while I was looking at some websites. In the silence of the room, I heard very distinctly a child’s tinkling laughter just outside the door that opens to the side of the house. My dog heard it too, and was on her feet in an instant. Her muzzle was pointed directly at the corner of the room next to the door. Her hackles were standing up like a barb-wire fence along her spine, and the deep, terrifying drone of a growl was coming from her like a bow drawn across the low string of an upright bass. I had gotten to my feet and every hair on my body seemed to be standing up as well. After about a minute, my dog began to bark, a frantic warning bark. My heart was knocking against my ribs like a boxer’s jab and my wife called from the next room, “What’s going on?” At that instant, my dog stopped barking and the tension in the air broke.

I went outside and looked around in the dark with a flashlight. I found nothing. The corner at which my dog was growling and barking points directly outside to the section of the side yard where the above-ground swimming pool once stood, the pool where the little three year-old boy drowned. And I tell you in earnest that in all weathers, when we walk through that patch of ground, the temperature will sometimes drop as if we’re moving through a refrigerator. It’s most noticeable in the summertime, but can be sensed in freezing weather as well.

What does this mean? What is its importance for me? I ask my self — and God — these questions because I believe nothing is accidental, nothing is random, nothing is a coincidence. It all means something, and it is all for me, here, for my learning and my growth. So what does this mean? I do not yet know.

Nor do I know the meaning of the truly supernatural incidents that have happened to me, the incidents I mentioned earlier, the incidents of which I will not speak nor write, except obliquely. They were all quite real, quite immediate, and quite important. I no longer dissect them regularly as I once did, but they are ever with me, like books on a shelf that I have read but not yet grasped, books at which I glance every day in passing.

I know that the world around me is completely alive, that it is completely aware, to varying degrees, and that I walk within its boundaries for reasons that only He Who sent me here knows at this time. And I do not find the presence of the other realities beyond those veils to be frightening. More and more, they comfort me.

This morning I stood in the early chill of that gray graveled road, faced north, and extended my arms out to my sides, pointing. I looked left to the moon, then right to the sun. Between these two objects that have commanded and beguiled tongues and pens and knees for all these cycles of their comings and goings. I was aware in that moment of how I stand, of how I stand between.

~ S.K. Orr