Every October, with its falling leaves and brilliant colors, I’m reminded of my father’s death: October 30 the night before Halloween. My mother had died three years earlier, leaving our father, stroke-ridden, in our house.  What was curious, whenever I visited Daddy, I could feel my mother in the house. Her spirit was so strong that it was all I could do to keep from calling out to her as I opened the door. I felt as if  her spirit was waiting for him, hovering in the house, concerned for him and for his care by nurses, not wanting to “go over” until he, her lifelong partner, was ready to go with her too. It’s a great love story. And yet, when Daddy died, they were both immediately gone! You felt it. The house felt empty. This was so apparent that I remember asking my brother— “Did you call the limousine for the wedding–I mean the funeral?”

But that wasn’t what I wanted to tell you. I wanted to tell about his death.  At the time I had a writer’s grant to live for three months at the Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico, and I remember that on that morning of October 30 I experienced a very clear “knowing” that I should call my father at 9:00 that night. Continue reading →

My friend Janine who runs http://www.faithscapes.com is running a series on monthly gemstones. The stone for September is sapphire, who knows why? (For that matter who made up the order of any of the 12 monthly gemstones, or put another way—to whose financial benefit? ) Well, I’m not even going to go there. I want to talk about the color blue and then to tell about a miracle, a true miracle, though the miracle, like the color blue itself, might lie in the eye of the beholder.  (Miracle: from Latin miraculum ‘object of wonder’, from mirari ‘to wonder’, from mirus ‘wonderful’.)  

     Blue is a playful, shape-shifting color. “I’m blue,” we say, when we feel low, or “happy as a bluebird,” for up. We speak of the “blue skies” of good fortune, and “flying into the blue” when we feel utterly ecstatic. And yet there are only a few shades of blue in nature—unlike green which has so many hues that you’d think, when walking in the woods, that God would have run out of paints for the palette.

   Hold off on the miracle. We’ll come to that. First, I want to talk about blue.  All of us who love the Greek classics, The Iliad and the Odyssey, notice the curious lack of color. So strange is this that some scholars wonder if the people of 1000 or 1200 BCE were color blind. The poet speaks of “the color of iron,” or “black blood” and “the wine-dark sea” — and this is so pervasive that when I went to Greece I searched that clear turquoise water in puzzlement, expecting the Aegean to be a stormy wine-red dark. True, the Iliad refers Continue reading →

Perhaps because of my name and its derivation, wisdom (philo-sophy: the love of wisdom), I have a special relationship with wisdom.  I remember when I was a teenager that my prayer — with heart-yearning anguish — was “To Understand.”

“Understand what?” someone might have asked, had I opened the secret tablets of my heart.

“All of it!” I would have cried dramatically, “Who am I?”  “What is this Universe–and Why is it here, not there?” And these were only the simple questions. “Why do plants grow petals in odd numbers?” “What if something is faster than light?” And always, Einstein’s question:  “Is the Universe a friendly place?” And then one day, sometime in my middle years, I realized with a burst of joy that Continue reading →

Not long ago I gave a Psychic or Angel Reading to a woman who was grieving the death of her cat six months earlier. “Can you bring him back to talk to me?” she asked. I said I didn’t know. Sometimes a spirit of a loved one appears — but not always. Sometimes an angel appears — but not always.

Actually, I was afraid. I have on other occasions managed to “speak” to an animal (or rather have it speak to me), but in every case the animal was still alive.

Nonetheless, the spirit-cat, Bisou (it means “kiss” in French) appeared immediately. We could both “see” him slinking under the furniture furtively, cautious as only a cat can be, although you must understand that you are seeing with the heart, or with your spiritual eyes, a shape, an energy field. It’s like a shadow built of light, and if you try to probe it with the physical eye, the shadow disappears. And then came a conversation that left me in awe

His owner was in tears, her cat plainly visible to her —

“Why did you leave me?” she wept.  “Why did you go?” Continue reading →

I remember my beloved mother-in-law telling me once–and I think she was in her seventies– that where she used to believe she understood things, held strong opinions of what was good and what was bad, the older she got, the less certain she became.

At the time it puzzled me. But I have noticed that often what I think a blessing produces such thorns I can hardly grasp it, while what I view as terrible turns out to wear a crown.  I’m thinking about this as I view with horror another Black child killed by police bullets, or migrant children pulled from parents, locked in cages, the anguish of parents searching for children who were forcibly stolen by Faceless Government — my government,  “by the people, for the people;” removed by elected officials, not some vengeful 14th century ruler (I’m thinking of one duke who took pleasure in sitting on the locked trunk in which his enemy pounded and screamed, as he starved to death).

In Medieval times every star and every month, every tree and day of the week, was governed by an angel. Continue reading →

A new friend, William Fisher, just wrote with this story of his black angel. In my experience, it is unusual for an angel to speak, but this one did, and I particularly note William’s final thoughts about this fact:

My black Angel came in late summer 2012, a year after my ugly divorce was final. My heart was dark due to the ex blocking all contact with the two stepchildren I had helped raise since birth and the personal financial disaster caused by the economy, the ex and the divorce. I believed in God, but just didn’t understand how this situation was God’s will of good for me and our four children.
Suddenly things changed, and the ex allowed my 14 year old stepdaughter Sarah to spend the weekend with me and the two children from our marriage. Sarah and my youngest daughter, (8 yr.) Victoria, spent the weekend doing whatever they wanted. For Sarah that meant a surfing lesson even though there was no surf that day.
Sarah’s questions, however, revived good memories, and a couple of weeks later I was sitting in a hot courtroom, when the breeze from an open window struck me in an overwhelming full-body rush whispering me that the surf was up and to go get my board. I drove out to the beach and found my intuition was right. Huge waves. Continue reading →

When a stranger asked me as a medium and psychic to contact her beloved cat who had died, I said I didn’t know if I could.  I’ve given hundreds of readings, and sometimes (but not always) an angel appears and sometimes (but not always) the spirit of someone who has died — but I’d never attempted such a thing with an animal, and especially with a cat, independent and self-reliant as they are. I was amazed and shocked at what happened, and what the cat had to say. Continue reading →

I’ve deliberately been off the grid (so to speak) for the last months, but today I had a call inviting me to fly to Los Angeles to be part of a TV show on Angels and the Afterlife for the Travel Channel. THAT will be FUN!

They are actively looking for videos or photos of orbs, angels, and spirits. So, here I am sending out the word: Contact Thomasrexquinn@gmail.com if you have any photos or videos to share on TV. I’m sure you get credit.

Let me know if you sent any. I’d like to know.

Good luck, or as the wolves say in Kipling’s Jungle Books, “Good Hunting.”

Yesterday I woke up, turned on the radio, as usual, to hear to the news as I dressed, and was thrown into a pit of despair: the President wants to put guns into schools to prevent gun shootings; our statesmen are incapable of banning semi-automatic military weapons designed to slaughter as many people as possible in the fastest time; the truce in Syria fails; climate change, young Dreamers (DACA) without a country or home; diplomats absent or pushed aside in favor of threatened war with North Korea. . . .

It’s always been this way: arrogance, stupidity, greed, fear, violence, vengeance, loneliness– entire populations living on the brink of lost. I felt the energy sucked out of my body as I tried to remind myself that others held different points of view about guns, war, suffering – I could be wrong – my heart breaking for the children of Parkland Florida, or the shootings in Las Vegas, or Columbine, or Sandy Hook, or—or– or– because only the most dramatic shootings are reported, not the 96 living breathing people killed every day by a gun. The horror! Horror!

And then I began to pray. “ Oh God, help us, help this little world. Show us what to do.” (Write my Congressman? I don’t even HAVE one, living as I do unfranchised in the District of Columbia.) And then the doubts flew like bats beating at my brain: IS there a God? Where? Continue reading →

It has been nearly a year since I posted anything, for sometimes silence in the face of all the clatter and clamor of our lives seems to be the greatest gift that anyone can give. But not long ago a letter arrived from a friend in Europe, struggling with tough times (like all of us), and what she wrote is so clear and calm that I marvel: Is this the meaning of Enlightenment? . . .

Dear Sophy,

“I’ve not been feeling great today, and praying a lot. At a certain point when the kids were playing, I sat knitting in the kitchen.  And it struck me that I am really missing a very important point: the divinity that is part of all of us.

The deepest mystery is right there inside us. We don’t have to search for it.  We just have to listen. There is nothing to push. Just be quiet, and it’s right there. Continue reading →