Twenty Years of Silence: Life as TransDimensional Mapping
When I was a little kid, my mom sent my first name to Bozo the Clown. He pulled my name out of his hat and he and scruffy Mr. Lion tuned my moniker into a caricature using a large piece of butcher’s paper and a charcoal pencil. My name. Into a bird. They didn’t know my mom called me Birdie.
I kept that drawing until I was 27, the year I left my abusive husband and fell in love with another man, a philosopher, a harpsichordist. I didn’t know I would remember that paper 31 years later, realize it was my first exposure to remote viewing, that I would soon see my first UFO. Our lives are traced on paper, in cycles lost and remembered, with color and mercy.
As I’m typing this, I glance down to see two of my granddaughter’s plastic figurines staring at me: a smiling alien and a bird. Sometimes the line from one sketch rolls over another. The day I shuttered TransDimensional Systems, I signed an agreement to sell Avon. I began walking the streets of Carlsbad, meeting neighbors I only saw from a distance while driving past them, Star Trek communicator pin fixed to my jacket, on the way to an RV training. Twelve hundred lipsticks later, I still took rollerball to paper, but swore I would never teach again.
The year I turned 40, I still sold Avon door-to-door, this time in a small New Mexican town where I began using my childhood nickname. I wrote a popular blog, Beauty Dish, and was invited to speak at blogging conferences, even to submit an article to Good Housekeeping magazine about my love of boldly going where no one had gone before. I would later publish a memoir that cheerfully omitted remote viewing and UFOs, and a tiny collection of essays, Love Letters to Star Trek. The artist points to a finished corner.
Our lives are layered, a sheet of paper is added, covering, connecting, tying memory and future. I quit Avon. I quit blogging when the influencers arrived. I taught eighth grade in an alternative learning school that focused on expeditionary learning. We spent weeks camping and hiking throughout the Sangre de Christo mountains, studying prairie dogs and bison. One night, under stars so crisp they looked as though they could cut the sky, I pulled paper and pen from backpack and broke my promise. A dozen unruly, dirty kids sat around a smoldering campfire and practiced ideograms before experiencing the burning of Zozobra.
If you were to press pen into paper today, to deep mind probe me, would you see the wide-eyed little kid staring at a tiny television, her name on artistic display? Would you feel the emptiness and rage of a young woman shoving pots and pans and children into a rusty Subaru while her unaware husband fixed an old lady’s broken fridge? Would you describe the blue eyeshadow I favored, the creepy man who wanted me to demonstrate Skin So Soft by rubbing it into my skin of my feet? Would you smell the campfire, the sweat of concentrating children and teacher? Would you hear the tap of the keyboard as I connected my lives through image and thought, as I completed a collection of essays about Las Vegas, New Mexico?
Maybe you would sense the rolling miles of high desert scrub as I delivered heavy stacks of the community magazine I started, Gallinas. I interviewed Navajo artist and motorcycle gang member, shared recipes for green chile chicken stew and posole, my hands covered in newsprint and callous. I taught guitar lessons. I took a job as the first Arts and Culture Director in the state when my town was awarded special status to help preserve its myriads of decaying Wild West buildings on the National Historic Register. That job didn’t last long; I couldn’t stomach the local politics, the faceoff between rich California newcomer and families that held the land for generations. Sometimes the pen stops, lifts from the page and starts anew.
When my two youngest reached high school age, we moved to Albuquerque. I hated it at first, missed the gentle rhythm and hum of small-town life. I stopped writing. I kept remote viewing. I went back to school, studied criminal justice, computer science, digital forensics. I started a ridiculous cryptocurrency magazine devoted to Dogecoin, interviewed developer and bag holder, and ran that until the politics of the have and have nots weighed on my mind, a constant life theme.
My mom – the picture of plant-based food and daily gym health – was diagnosed with brain cancer, and I spent six months as 24/7 caregiver, the only period since 1995 when I didn’t remote view. As she drew her last breath, sparkling lights filled her hospice room, tiny fireflies of pink and green and aquamarine. I picked up the pen two days after her funeral and found solace in a gentle civilization far from Earth.
Writing is the line that pulls my experiences together, on planet, off planet, intentional or discovered. Writing is remote viewing is writing is an exploration of metaphor and comparison, a way we tell ourselves the stories of our history, our present, our planet, our hidden dreams and desires. The best writing, remote viewing pours out of places other than simple mind; it escapes from gut, from swollen knee, from memory and pain. It spews forth in parable and analogy, in word painting that conveys layers of meaning. Everything is connected to signal, and you cannot isolate one moment from another.
I haven’t told you nearly half of the things I’ve done, and if that deep mind probe continued, you would find lovers, moments of not-so-quiet desperation, the year of hot flashes and anger as I shifted from fertile to crone. Given a photograph of me, say at a birthday party for a child fifteen years ago, you might capture my thoughts about Avon’s Glimmersticks, or see the ruffled feathers of my African Grey parrot, Ramses, primping in the unseen corner. You might give yourself a zero, a miss of the target. You would be wrong.
Our lives are transdimensional maps, paper upon paper, thin, fragile, enormous, with color and texture, with symbol and concrete object. Even a hunk of igneous rock holds memory from the primordial, a glimpse of the future when it melts into the sun’s final breath. To know even one moment of my life in its fullness would require a million reams of printer paper, a dozen cases of black pen, and it still would not convey the color and texture of my memory, my constant craving to know the unknowable. The target is always hit; it simply sometimes is hidden and needs a broader perspective, an understanding that existence is layered, connected, with shoutouts, with hushed echoes to past and future. When you are born, when you take up the pen, when you grab paper and set out on an expedition, only one thing is certain: You Get What You Get.
