Two women are going through my boxes and David Letterman asks, "What are you?" and I go to the movies with my Kabbalah teacher and a man asks me, "What is a Soul Caller?"
Also, I figure out how prayer works. Maybe. I think so.
For almost two weeks (and this was a while back) I felt like I’d fallen into a hole. Then, I started dreaming.
I am walking through my work-flat with ‘the new woman’, showing her around when we come upon two other women who’ve been working for me for quite a long time.
I feel (slightly) embarrassed that I’ve completely forgotten about these women, whom I hired years ago to help me but also, wow! They’re still here, working in the storage room because, “You never tell us what to do.”
Rather than sitting idle, they have been opening all of my boxes, in which years of unpublished work was tucked away. One of my notebooks is splayed open between them. I feel exposed but also excited by this. I wake up.
My mother, interrupting one conversation to start another, once told me, “I’m interested in genius.”
We’d been talking about something else— what to have for dinner or which pill to take or would she like some tea? But since the heart surgery, it wasn’t unusual for her to blurt out a random thought as if picking up a conversation that one part of her was having with another. I won’t say that I’d gotten used to it. I will say that this blurt, for some reason, felt important enough to write down in the small black notebook that I kept in my travel bag - wherever I went. Capturing- what was happening around me helped organize what was happening on the interior.
Now, looking back, it helps me to remember.
That year, after the surgery, it often felt as if my mother was dissolving. As if she was dismembering, pieces of her personality, so familiar to me, falling away like shards of china doll. As those parts slipped away, other things loosened. That day, with this blurt about genius, it was as a slippery thread of her deepest biography, normally hidden, had gotten free.
“What do you mean you’re interested in genius?” I asked, my pen hovering over the page.
“I study it,” she said and though I made no note of what happened next, I’m pretty sure she shifted - asked for a second cup of tea or help getting to the bathroom.
Lately, I’ve been thinking (and dreaming) about how these creative dry spells (like the one I’m in now) are so often depth soundings and how, even when we aren’t producing anything visible, threads of genius are floating around us like seaweed.
This post is an experiment: What might happen if I burst to the surface, wet, streaming with kelp and salt water and just let my thoughts blurt willy-nilly onto the page?
What’s it like to be me? To be you? To be half-genius, the other half flesh and bone. Hurting, Mermaid, Swimming, Out of breath.
This is something I’ve been working on and stashing into storage boxes for a while.
It’s time now, the dream women are telling me, to unpack the work.
Last year, at the end of December, in the small weekly circle I’ve been leading for two years, we journeyed to a new world. A world that supports and nourishes, loves and welcomes us just as we are.
We sat, stacked in our Zoom squares, alone in our living rooms and home offices. Together and apart, in New York and Chicago, Toronto and Miami, Italy and L.A. we imagined what it might be like, what it might feel like to be completely accepted.
Nothing to fix or change, nothing to heal or release. Nothing to live up to or make amends for. Just as we are. Just as it is. We let our hearts be flooded with welcome and nourishment. We filled with quiet peace.
We do this sort of exercise in my illuminated journey work because . . . well, because all of us need to remember that this is possible. We do it to retrain ourselves to the openhearted, open-minded awareness that can see and feel and sense things in the imaginal — vividly, in full color. We do it to remember that when we make something real in the awakened dream state something changes inside of us. It also, and this is the magic part, changes around us. We see doors where before there were only brick walls. We notice invitations we’d otherwise have missed.
We feel better.
When I first started my spiritual counseling practice, the thing that surprised (and frustrated) me most was that often, after an hour and a half of deep conversation and soul excavation, the only feedback I’d receive is, “I feel better.”
Often, people couldn’t recall what we’d talked about or even describe the breakthroughs they’d experienced. They just . . . felt better. Now I understand that this is everything. When we feel better, we stabilize. When we feel better, we are stronger, smarter, ready for what comes. When we feel better we can heal, become whole and allow ourselves to be real.
That day in December, on that Zoom call, we imagined a door and we stepped through it. Then, we opened our eyes. The call ended. We went back to our everyday lives until the following Wednesday, when we met again and I asked participants, “So, has anything changed?”
Out poured the stories - a strong lead for a new career, an out-of-the-blue invitation to a social event, the arrival of a delayed inheritance (which paid off all existing debts). As each person shared, others realized: Oh, wait. This amazing thing did happen. Like the invitation to the zoo — and the surprise marriage proposal! A cascade of openings and invitations.
In my own home that very week, an actual new door was installed, opening what had been a dark mostly storage (and clutter) area into a bright foyer. Behind that door, a brand new staircase now leads to the second floor! (In a future post, I’ll tell you about another dream, another staircase which, in a very real way got me started on my personal path. It made me believe in mystery. It made me want to return there. Ultimately, it let my own particular genius out of the box.)
For now though, I want to stay on topic. Which is this: We are all born with the ability to create imaginal possibilities and make them into reality. This is just how we’re made—in the image of the big whomever that created us. Though we have all been systematically conditioned to forget this natural almost magical ability, people like me and, I suspect, you, believe that it’s important to remember.
The night after the dream about the boxes, I dreamed that I was being interviewed by David Letterman. He was sitting at his desk and I was sitting on the guest couch. He asked:
“You say you’re a Soul Caller. What exactly is that?”
“I call people back to themselves.”
“Back from where?” he asked.
“Back from the spell of our hurried, worried culture.”
“I like that.” He chuckled. “Hurried and worried. That’s true, isn’t it?
I looked at him and i nodded in a shy but wise way.
“So this is woo woo stuff.” he said.
“It’s part woo,” I conceded. “Part science, part poetry . . .”
“And where do you find these lost souls?” he asked. And I wanted to say, but didn’t, “They are everywhere.” Instead, I looked straight into the camera. “They are hidden in secret stashes along the path, invisible pockets in the heart . . . ”
“I see . . . ,” he said but I wondered, Does he see? Can he see?
I felt myself starting to wake up then and I fought to stay in the dream. I had something important to tell him. Something I needed to make clear. “I call people back to the body,” I said. “Back to the heart - and to the natural creator state . . .”
My own voice echoes in my ears. I am speaking to Letterman and to myself. I am speaking to the audience, which suddenly buzzes with realization.
Letterman leans in. “I like that. I want it. How might I get some?”
I am explaining what a soul is when the dream ends.
I open my eyes.
“You have the most remarkable dream recall,” my therapist tells me.
”I do,” I say, because I do.
I also remember waking experience this way - vividly, holographically, like full-sensory snapshots including scent, color, texture, temperature, emotion, music and other sounds.
“It’s eidetic memory,” I tell her, a part of ‘the gift’ that I inherited from my mother’s side of the family. My mother called it ‘photographic memory,’ but it’s more (and less) than that.
I don’t remember every word that I read. Sometimes, I forget people’s names. The gift has weird qualities - like I used to be able to name all the actors in a film and tell you what the film was about, even if I’d never seen it. To me, this wasn’t a big deal. I’d worked for two years at Cable TV Magazine where I was responsible for writing movie blurbs. But actually, if I let myself blurt out the truth, I could always do things like this.
My daughter, who also has the gift, used to recite entire pages from the Harry Potter books. In high school my son memorized the name of every bone in the human body.
I find myself thinking about genius again and how it gives and also demands so much of us. What does one do with such a gift?
Last winter, at the movie theater, my friend Judith (who is also my Kabbalah teacher) introduced me to a man she hadn’t seen in a long time. “This is Amy,” she told him. “She’s a Soul Caller.”
Her friend raised an eyebrow. “What’s a Soul Caller?” he asked.
Before I could answer, the lights went out.
In the dark, we watched Maestro, a film about Leonard Bernstein, an actual genius who was able, it seemed to me, to become music. It was a film about art and love and the demands that infinite appetite and extraordinary ability make upon poor mortals.
In this interview about working with Bernstein on “West Side Story”, Stephen Sondheim remembered that Bernstein often worked in the empty airshaft (stairwell?) outside his suite of offices because he found it distracting to be around furniture when he was doing creative work. He also needed, according to Sondheim, to be with other people as he worked, to be witnessed as the music worked through him. Remembering this, Sondheim smiled. “I figured he wanted company.”
Genius is quirky. Awkward. Unusual. Genius requires focus, collaboration. Genius wants witnesses.
When the lights at the movie theater came on, it was raining. We drove to a cafe and gushed about the cinematography, the music, the characters. We forgot that a question had been asked and left unanswered. Writing this just now, I remembered.
So, what IS a soul caller?
Well, it’s a name that I invented when I realized I was doing something that didn’t have a name. Something ancient and brand new, something which had ‘just come’ to me, emerging from the root of who I was. It had always been there and doing its thing, even before it had a name.
It was me and also, not me. It was me, allowing something to do something through me.
This wasn’t channeling or shamanism. It wasn’t psychoanalysis or mediumship or medical intuition or energy healing. Though my ‘gift’ shares resonance with all of these, none of these was its name.
When I named myself “Soul Caller” I was just beginning to notice the green fronds floating in the water around me. I was being guided by dreams and visions, receiving signs and concrete evidence that my thoughts were responded to.
This was during the period of my life when I was working at the magazine and reading, every day for ten years, letters from people who were also having this experience, witnessing miracles in infinite variations. There were hundreds of letters - and then thousands.
The letters were the hard evidence. The voice came soon after.
But I knew - I already knew.
We think that we’re awake but we’re always dreaming. Part of being a Soul Caller is explaining this to people.
A soul caller is a person who:
notices correspondences between one thing and another. Symbolic resonances, patterns, meaningful signs.
can read the architecture of story, can map the patterns of a life, comb through tangles of a conflict. A person who can find new doors.
is having a two-way conversation with an invisible, benevolent presence that speaks in glimmer language and sparkles
sees the world as alive and animated by a conscious, benevolent being. That being is nature. That being also made nature. I can’t quite explain this part yet but actually, who can?
That being - the God/God/dess Creator Spirit Lord is a special kind of genius who made (and keeps making) this world - every moment of every day.
If there’s a reason for this making and unmaking, I believe that it’s love, expressed through creative acts: as art, as poetry, as music and dance - a force of love that made a world where there is food and medicine, shelter and warmth, water to drink and air to breathe. A world of color and companionship and snails and butterflies.
This is the God I believe in. The kind of being who can be listening and responding to everything, everywhere, all at once. A special kind of genius.
This soul caller is an animyst, a mystic, a dreamer, a noticer. Like the genius who made her, this soul caller is a listening, connecting being.
At the beginning of all of this, I said that I’d fallen into a hole.
I guess I should tell you how I climbed out.
It was so simple. I stayed in the hole until I was able . . .
to (finally) stop arguing with the hole.
to look around, noticing what else was in the hole.
Above and below me. Before me and beside me.to notice what the hole revealed - and what all things eventually reveal. That everything - including the hole — is an invitation to play with Love.
As I emerged from the hole, dripping wet and covered in green, I let the seaweed speak first.
I seem to be writing two separate posts here. One is about me - on identity and knowing and claiming what we are. The other is about God and angels and prayer. These things braid together in me. They’re hard to tease apart.
Our experience of reality is changing. Right now. Before our eyes. A new world is emerging, right in the middle of the old one. This is not some new age woo claptrap. This is real.
Aliens, as it’s turning out, are real. So are crop circles. And many of the things that we thought were ‘just our imagination’ aren’t. And those things that wouldn’t go away so we made them into books about wizards and vampires and TV shows about X-files and Mediums and there was always that scene where a weird but lovable auntie read our Tarot cards and set us back onto the path — these things, too, are turning out to be real.
We are going to have to learn how to deal with this. We are going to have to surface now, unpacking our boxes of wisdom. Letting our own interior spell caster(s) speak.
We are going to have to begin balancing the equation of how the real genius of our world made it possible to answer every single prayer. If we continue to insist that we are praying to a man on a throne in the sky the math will never work. Too many emails. Not enough time.
Because . . . I keep wondering . . . the more that I see magic becoming visible . . What do we do now? What do we make of a reality where we can SEE our prayers being answered?
One day, I just asked: How does this work?
And the answer came . . . and came . . . and came . . . (and yes, I am seeing that this ‘answer’ is looking rather like an ejaculation of answering and that is so weird and so cool because actually . . . when I asked, I received . . .
Gushes of information. Words and images, diagrams and maps - all jumbled together, like being tumble-tossed in a wave of broken shells and stones.
At first, all you can do is try to keep breathing.
And then, after a while, you learn how to sift.
The wave becomes your teacher. Illuminating certain threads, sweeping all the rest away. You keep playing, not noticing that, hey! I am breathing underwater!
During my years inside of this tumble-toss wave, I came to know it as a language. the rushing, gushing ‘answering’ of a benevolent presence with eyes and ears hidden everywhere.
In every hospital room and office cubicle, every car stuck in traffic, every bedroom and bathroom stall.
It listens and watches because it loves us.
It listens so it can respond to us.
And give us everything we ask for.
What artfulness, what a beautiful creation.
What a freaking genius.
Mostly right now, I’m working on being brave enough to say what I see. Right now, this new project: saying what I am.
I get started. I stop. I start again.
I tell my therapist. “It feels like an inflation - as if I’m saying I’m special.
”What if you are special?” She asks.
So I’ll ask you the same: What if you’re already inside of the answer to your prayer? what if you already know the bright gift you came to give? What if all you had to do was name it?
What if you are special, too?
Upcoming Offerings
New! I’m moving all my workshopping over here to Becoming Real. Everything I used to teach in other places - coming here. Seasonal workshops for paid subscribers. No enrollment or registration. No big workshop fee. Open to all paid subscribers. For just $8 a month, you get all the seaweed, all the magic. We begin May 9th with a six week workshop on Illuminated Experience. More to come on that.
New! I’m doing all my Zooming over at School of Magic CIRCLES.
We have a monthly call there where we illuminate what we do here.
First Sunday of each month. $28 a month. Sit in a circle with soul friends. Meet the genius of your own unfolding. Dream yourself a door.
Oh how I appreciate this Amy waterfall in my inbox this morning! 🧜🏼♀️
Dream myself a door.... lately my dreams are filled with violence and I'm trapped. Maybe this is how I feel about my body and lack of proper medical care. Losing my business as a result.
This is a kind of violence isn't it? So I need to Dream myself a door. Hmmmm. I've done this before. I used to do it all the time, so what's changed? Much for me to process I think 😊. Thank you for opening THAT door.
I love how you write. Your use of language and imagery. I've restacked this post. ❤️