I’m at the departure gate for the first leg of my journey to Charlotte, en route to a conference up in the Blue Ridge Mountains where, inter alia, I’ll lead a workshop on “Dreaming with the Departed.” The cover of the book the man sitting next to me is reading catches my eye. Above the image of a skeleton wearing what may be either the high white crown of Upper Egypt or a dunce’s cap is the title The Book of the Dead. I ask my neighbor if I may look at his book. It’s not some new version of the Egyptian or Tibetan Book of the Dead, but a humorous collection of potted biographies of “the justly famous and undeservedly obscure”, heavy on sexual pecadillos, by John Mitchinson and John Lloyd. I have the deliciously shiverish sense that Death has announced his presence, wearing a smiling face.
In a game played during the conference, we all draw Tarot cards. An elderly retired minister pulls trump XIII, Death bearing a sickle. He says, with good grace, that he’s close to “kicking the bucket” and wants to know if the card is telling him that. I comment that the Death card is rarely about physical death, more often about the need for death and rebirth within a life. If it were my card, I would think about making life choices now in the awareness that Death stands at my left shoulder – which would spur me to take the creative risk and give my best to whatever project is calling me.
That night, before leading my workshop on Dreaming with the Departed, I dreamed I was escorting a large group of people on board a train that turns into a ferry and then an ocean-going vessel. We are traveling to the Other Side to get accustomed to conditions in the afterlife.
I offered this dream as a possible gateway image when I prepared a large group the next morning for a journey – powered and focused by shamanic drumming – to the Other Side with the dual intention of having timely and helpful communication with a departed person and of learning about conditions in the afterlife. The journey delivered profound experiences. I met my favorite professor from my student days (long dead) on a high cliff above a beautiful bay, and he urged me to travel across time to learn about my relations with a couple of people living in different eras, including a personality in ancient Carthage.
There was nothing morbid or funereal about our visit with the departed, The group left the lodge charged with the superabundant energy that Death can provide, when we make it our ally instead of our adversary.
On my flight home later that day, a flight attendant started talking volubly to a woman in the bulkhead row ahead of me. “I love cemeteries,” she exclaimed. She proceeded to give a detailed account of her favorite cemeteries, all over the map, and of picnics she’s she’s enjoyed there. She moved on to describing ghosts she has known. I couldn’t resist joining the conversation. She told me about the time a ghost entered her room in her mother’s house, an old woman in the clothes of an earlier era. “I told her this was my room and she needed to go. She didn’t like that. She slapped me on the cheek and it hurt and when I looked in the mirror there was a red mark on my face.”
As the plane bumped along the runway, the flight attendant added, “You know, there are also haunted planes. I’ve flown on a couple of them.”
“I don’t want to hear about that until the engine has stopped,” another passenger interjected.
Death with a smiling face was with me, coming and going, on my weekend adventures.
“XIII” by Michele Ferro
Read Previous Post
More from Beliefnet and our partners