Can We Really Believe the Invisibles?
by Dana Gerhardt

I awoke on the last full moon at three in the morning.  I had a panicky realization:  “I need to get disability insurance NOW!”  Over the past few months I’ve discovered in myself a new alertness to stories of car accidents, how sudden, surprising, life-changing injuries can come from them.  I’ve strung them into a private necklace of worry beads.  Why shouldn’t I wake on a first-house full moon with insomnia, feeling vulnerable and scared? 

At the full moon one might swell with confusion or clarity.  A friend once told me the smartest resolve she ever made was never to listen to panicky thoughts in the middle of the night.  “Things always look better in the morning,” she counseled.  Next morning the sun was shining.  I pressed my worries into a mental scrapbook of deluded thoughts and moved on.  Five days later I got a strange call.  It was from Robert’s ex-wife, who had gotten two emails from her at times psychic ex-boyfriend, Jim:  about me!

“I don’t want to alarm you,” she said.  “Jim was feeling a little embarrassed and uncomfortable about telling you.  In fact he emailed me last night not to say anything until he checked in again this morning.  But this morning he said to go ahead and advise you to be careful around cars for the next three days.  It may be nothing, just a fender bender in a parking lot.  But just be cautious.”

Jim and I met only once and he wasn’t in the habit of thinking about me.  That he had the courage and compassion to share his intuition with a near stranger is remarkable.  How could he know whether what he was sensing was true?  He couldn’t!   That’s the trouble with intuition.  It suffers the fate of all the “invisibles”:  instinct, inspiration, intuition, imagination, the busy image-maker in our dreams.  Even when they startle and bless us with their messages, we can still wonder, is this really real?  The same can be said of astrology or moon-work:  do I sense something genuine or is it just wishful thinking?

I don’t know if my worry over accidents and disability was authentic premonition or sheer anxiety.  But if some benevolent angel had cared enough to whisper a warning to Jim, and he had cared enough to listen and pass it along, I decided it was important to honor it.  As it was, I had few plans to drive over the next three days anyway.  There was just that yoga class on Thursday… I could give that up.

Thursday I was walking through the orchard, about the time I would have been driving home from yoga, when it suddenly began snowing.  Really snowing!  Visibility was poor, a strong wind was whipping my coat.  It was hard enough to walk through it; I couldn’t imagine driving.  At home I checked the astrology of the time -- my Pluto was on the Ascendant, Mars was squaring my Moon and opposing Saturn -- the kind of configuration that might inspire, after some trauma had occurred, an “Of course, that was an accident waiting to happen!”

It might be a better story if an accident had happened and proven the invisibles right.  But I’ve heard such stories before and still kept my doubts intact, wondering whether in this particular case what instinct, intuition, or the moon or astrology is saying is really true.  And so what I take from my non-accident is a different lesson than what an accident would have taught me. (That would have been a familiar teaching:  “Slow down, ground in your body, pay attention to the moment.”)  In some ways this lesson is more difficult.  Yet it is appropriate for the current Pisces season.  It says: “Believe.  Believe in the benevolence of the world.  Believe in the reality of invisible things.”

For months I’ve been working with a marvelous healer, Alicia Eisenstadt, whose work is about strengthening trust in our divine nature and its benevolence.  She tells a story about driving with her daughter down a mountain road.  Her car hit a patch of black ice and spun out of control.  Time slowed as she surveyed her options.  If she steered left, they would hit an oncoming vehicle.  If she steered right, they would plunge down the mountain.  Then she became aware of one tree in particular; it was like it suddenly lit up.  Knowing it was useless to try driving towards it, she asked the tree instead to draw them to itself.  The next thing she knew, the car was smashed against the tree, technically totalled.  But Alicia and her daughter walked away without a scratch.  The tree lost a small patch of bark. 

As the poet Denise Duhamel writes “…the fairies,/ the world’s kindness, flit through landscapes/ trying to make things right.”  There is much to believe in.  Celebrate miracles this Pisces season.  Strengthen your faith in what you know but can’t always see.