God, are you there?

Chapter 3: Sea of Miracles

Happy Week, Loves.
As you set out into a brand new week, I wish you love - I wish you five days (and a weekend) of surprises that delight: bright early spring days of daffodils and green shoots and miracles. I wish you all kinds of miracles. Small ones - and, if you need them, the kind that change your life.

We are on Chapter Three of our project of re-reading my book, Sea of Miracles, together. As I said last week, the process of going back to this time in my life has been extraordinary. Connecting with the younger me who made this dream real. I continue to be more than impressed - a little bit amazed - that she was able to do this book while working a full-time job and helping two teenagers complete college applications and campus visits. She was a badass - and remembering her helps me see my present self that way, too.

And seeing myself as a person who once wrote this book - well, that’s helping me believe I’ll be able to complete the next one. :)

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Here’s Chapter 3. (If you’’re just arriving and want to start from the beginning, go here: Sea of Miracles: Chapter Index. You’ll find all of the chapters, along with my present-day reflections there.)

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Chapter Three: My Early Encounters with Angels

Introduction

Sometimes, what seems strange—or even a little ridiculous—becomes, in hindsight, the exact moment everything began to change.

This chapter captures the quiet threshold where skepticism gives way to curiosity—and curiosity becomes the opening through which the divine enters. It’s the story of the first signs I received, and the way those signs shaped the beginning of my relationship with the angels.

If you’ve ever wondered whether that feather, that phrase, that card on the sidewalk meant something… you’re not alone.

These are the moments we often dismiss too quickly. But what if they were real? What if they were the beginning of a conversation?

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Chapter Three
My Early Encounters with Angels

I was 26 when I met Joanne. With her flaming red hair and bright blue eyes set in a freckle-splattered face, Joanne was striking and outgoing. One bright sunny morning, on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building, she walked right up and introduced herself.

We shared many interests—spirituality, stories, science, and film—and we instantly struck up a friendship. But Joanne and I never did “friend” things: no lunches, no shopping, no double dates. All we did was walk around our Forest Hills neighborhood talking about God.

This was new to me.

Growing up, I’d had no formal religious training. Though my mother was raised Christian and my father was an Orthodox Jew, they had stopped practicing their traditions by the time they met.

On our rare visits to church or synagogue—for weddings, bar mitzvahs, or funerals—I didn’t understand the meaning behind the rituals. But I savored the quiet mood and the seriousness with which everyone approached even the simplest activities: opening a book, singing a prayer, striking a match to light a candle.

I grew up a natural mystic, embedded in the world of nature, deeply attuned to forest creatures, the wind, the trees.

I was driven by a quest for connection and meaning, with a built-in love of science. I asked constantly, What’s this? How does it work? Often, the answers came through vivid dreams. Every now and then, I’d brush up against something meaningful in a different way—a flash of intuition, a feeling of being guided, a buzz of recognition that would sing through me. But without the structure that organized religion brings, I was left to meet the world in my own way.

This turned out to be a gift. It trained me to find meaning in what came to me: the poems and stories my mother read aloud at night, the paintings she took us to see in New York City museums, the ancient tales my father’s family told at Passover and the High Holy Days.

Though I was bored in school, I loved learning—and what I couldn’t find in the classroom, I discovered in books. I was always reading: in my room, in the branches of a tree, or on the huge boulder beside Lake Tiorati, where we spent shimmering summers when I was a girl (my father was the camp’s director).

I was desperate to understand, to know, to experience. But my shyness and youth made me skittish about anything that seemed “strange”—especially things that might make me seem weird. I felt different enough already.

So I was skeptical that bright spring morning when Joanne reached up, plucked a fluffy white feather from my hair, and said,
“You always have angels around you.”

I thought she was nuts.
“Or holes in my pillows,” I said.

“No,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. “It’s angels.”

She really was strange, I thought. She dressed oddly, lived alone, didn’t seem to have a job or any other friends. I began to avoid her calls. We drifted apart. She moved away.

I felt guilty then—and I hoped I hadn’t hurt her. But I see it differently now. I don’t think Joanne was an actual angel (though, who knows?), but I’m certain she was sent to plant a seed—an idea I’d never considered: Angels move among us.

It was around that time that I received my first sign:
A single playing card blown across my path on a hot gust of New York City air.

I had just left my job as a systems analyst to work at the New York office of The Institute for Human Evolution. In the five-week course we offered—DMA: Technologies for Creating—I’d learned to “tune in” to someone I’d never met and somehow receive useful, meaningful information about their life. I was amazed that I could do this—and equally amazed that strangers could tune into me.

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God, Are you there?

At DMA, I learned to ask questions of “The Universe,” a vaguely vast everything that, I was assured, would respond. There were many things I wanted to know, but looking back, I see that every question distilled down to the same essential inquiry: God, are you there?

One day, as I was climbing the stairs of the subway station at 14th Street and Broadway, I received an answer - from a single playing card.

Even now, 30 years later, that memory has a particular shimmer to it: the way the card spun in the air, catching my eye before landing directly in my path… the energy it carried—electric, charged, other. My senses went on high alert.

I picked up the card.
The Two of Hearts.

If this was a message, I had no idea what it meant. I carried it up to the office where everyone took a turn guessing.

For the next few weeks, I kept the card in my pocket like a talisman. I’d reach for it often, rubbing its smooth surface between my fingers. Each time, that same curious electricity would charge up my spine. It fascinated and frustrated me.

Then I found another card.

It was lying on the floor of a crowded subway car, right beside my foot: another Two of Hearts.

What the . . . ? I picked it up, my senses on high alert. It was clear that something important was happening. What it was? I couldn’t say.

That night, I placed both cards in the top drawer of my dresser. They’d become too precious to carry.

A few weeks later, on a breezy spring day, I was sitting on my bed sorting socks when a playing card came soaring in through the open window of our third-floor apartment and landed on the duvet right in front of me.

Another Two of Hearts.

Yes, really.

I picked up my third card, my whole body prickling with excitement. And all at once, the enormous, infinite Universe cracked open before me and grinned.

And just like that, I was pulled across the invisible line between reason and faith—between talking about the divine and having it fly through the window.

So began my playful, personal relationship with God—and the angels.

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Prompts for Your Own Reflection

• Has someone ever said something to you that seemed strange in the moment, but in hindsight feels like it planted a seed?

• What were the first signs that made you wonder if you were being guided?

• What’s your version of the Two of Hearts? An object that you found and knew what it meant. And maybe knew who it was from.

You might begin a list. Start small.

• Items that appeared unexpectedly.

• Words or dreams that seemed to carry meaning.

• People who came into your life for no obvious reason—then left just as mysteriously.

Choose one and write the full story of it.
Let the memory unfold.
See where it takes you.

Consider: What if those weren’t just stories? What if they were just the beginning?

Photo by lilartsy on Unsplash