diane's ghosts

okay...

i have this dear friend, diane. she lives just outside of philadelphia and is a licensed hypnotherapist and life coach. and a really wonderful person! her intuition, insight, and remarkable compassion make her, not only good at her job, but a great friend as well. she's a lot like our joann in the perhapanauts too; part den mother, part calming force, seeing the inner beauty in everybody.

and she's got ghosts.


now i've had this argument (or, let's call it a discussion) many times with people, that if there are ghosts and ufos and bigfoots and stuff all around, how come more people don't see them. and why, especially, aren't these spirits, entities, whatever, being seen by skeptics, more reliable witnesses, ie; pragmatists. my argument is that we--those of us who WANT to believe--are wired differently. we are open to the possibilities of there being more there than what we see. we don't dismiss things as fantasy simply 'cause we cannot touch or feel or verify them. a bump in the night is just the house settling to a scully. but it's a world of possibility to the mulder.

so diane has lived in this house for years. she says that she has always felt the presence of others. a man and a woman.
and a cat. she's seen the cat. many times. at the end of a hallway, out of the corner of her eye, shooting across the room.

"My dog and I always hear someone walking up my stone driveway, only to look and find no one there. My daughter has seen the man in my driveway. My cousin asked to sit in another chair in my kitchen, because she could see someone walking out on my deck."

"Someone tells my dog to sit and stay. She won't move and sometimes I have to say, release her, and walk up to her and tell her it's ok and to come."

diane told me that, when she first moved in, she would often smell smoke and drive herself crazy walking all around the house trying to find it. at one point, her friend, linda, announced to the house to stop with the smoke because it was frightening diane. she hasn't smelled it since then.

we've chatted a lot about this--as well as a ton of other things--but the subject came around to the ghosts again and she told me this.

"My most frightening experience was when I was on vacation, my husband and I were staying in an old cabin and I was reading one night in bed. As I read, I felt someone get into bed with me. At first I thought it was my husband, but was confused because I was facing the door and he hadn't come in, and the other side of the bed was by the window. I jumped out of bed because I thought someone had gotten in from the window. There was no one in the room. and the window was locked."

spooky. and it made my other friend, liz's, hair stand up on the back of her neck.


so here's the thing. some people would say that diane is seeing things due to an overactive imagination. they would scoff and bluster and write it all off as nonsense. they would say that she makes herself see these things because she WANTS to believe.
i think that's part true.

i think she sees them 'cause she's open to it. part of it is her natural sensitivity, she is gifted with better eyes for this. she can sense their energy. pragmatists can't do this. they either don't have the tools or they do but just won't take the time to develop them.
the other part is that diane is open to this. she makes herself open to it. yes, she wants--she wants to be open to every possibility.
we can all do that.

thanks for sharing your stories, diane!
talk to ya later!
todd