Lying here in my husband’s arms, I think about the richness of my life and wonder how it could be? How could I have been so alone for so long and now, almost to the point of being overwhelmed, I am surrounded by love and light, peace and happiness. I’ve felt pain so deeply, it seemed to crush my heart, now with all the hard work and beautiful miracles, I feel as if my heart is reaching towards the sunlight of happiness so exquisitely that it aches almost as much as the pain was deep. I feel my heart growing, stretching and accepting more and more. I feel healthier and more vibrant than ever, with hope of more love and more joy to come. I hoped and dreamed, I learned to envision a better life for myself and my family. I even learned to hold to that vision on the darkest days. It worked. Life turned out better than I dreamed. But it wasn’t easy. It was super hard. And it demanded everything.
Thanks to Etherdox Photography for these beautiful wedding photos!
Then, standing in the room of mirrors, Grandma Mae said, “Dear one, this room is a lot like all of our lives. We are always surrounded by mirrors. Whether it is the people we are attracted to or the work places we seem to randomly find or the homes we create for our family, mirrors show us what we are actually desiring on our deepest levels. If our home is perpetually messy, we have found that there are usually bigger messes on the inside of our soul. If we believe we are loved, we find that love everywhere. If we believe in faeries,” she laughed as faeries danced around the room. The faeries watched themselves as they danced from one mirror to the next to the next, “then we see signs of them everywhere.”
Do you see the cute little faerie? And the butterfly?
“Mirrors are even in nature, showing us what is often going on inside our souls. If we quiet our minds enough, we can feel and see and know what these mirrors are telling us. Some call these mirrors omens, some call them signs, and mirrors is just another way of understanding these messages from above and from within. Remember the other day when you were talking with your mother and the tiniest moth landed on the table between you? Nature was sharing one of its treasures, to let you know that your relationship with your mother is a magical treasure and you are being watched over by the faeries.”
This moth was maybe the size of my thumb nail! Cutest thing ever🦋
Grandma continued, “It’s like the eagles that fly at reckless speeds just in time to fly over your car. Do you comprehend the physics involved to get an eagle to cross paths with your car that is traveling at just 60 miles an hour in another direction than they might have been going? It is magical and a special blessing for you to know you are powerful and powerfully loved and that everything is going to be alright.”
I have loved soooo many of these magnificent birds!
“I love my eagles!” I said, “They have been with me for as long as I can remember. I often feel them before I ever see them.”
This immature bald eagle was flying right towards my daughter and I!
I could tell that Grandma Mae was building to a point that was important, but I couldn’t yet guess where she was going with it all. She continued, “It’s like the last full moon when you were dropping off your daughter at a friend’s house and the coyotes were howling at the full moon. Then, as you were driving home, you had a feeling to take another route than your normal one. What did you find?”
“I rounded a corner and the moon was shining perfectly over the winding road, so I stopped in the middle of that quiet, lonely road and took a picture.” I paused. “Yes, that moment reminded me of a dream from long ago. It wasn’t a nice dream. And still, that dream lead me back to the light and away from wolves that had turned on me. That was always one of the most difficult parts of that dream. I love wolves but in that dream, they wanted me dead. It was so scary.”
Oh, how I love the full moon!!!
Grandma Mae smiled sadly, that is what she wanted me to remember. You see, she had spent a lot of time during the last few years trying to teach me that our lives are filled with mirrors. I believe that that final image of me in the last set of mirrors along with the life that most assuredly was connected, was fulfillment of a dream given to me by my faerie angels to prepare me for my eminent and dangerous life journey that they knew I must finish years ago. They gifted it to me, before I understood fully the amount of abuse and trauma that we were actually living through. You see, many traumas were buried and took years to fully comprehend. My faeries knew that I would need this dream, to inspire me once I fully understood the darkness we had passed through, so that I would be able to fight on until I reached the goal again of peace, light and happiness in my life. It came on a night just before everything came crashing down around me and my children. Again, you’ll remember that at that time of my life, I was trying to reconnect to my faeries and to the magical world of my childhood, but I hadn’t quite gotten there.
Fortunately, my faerie angels never gave up on me and lead me back home, one painful step at a time. One of the gifts of the faeries is to spin our dreams to direct us on our path, their dreams are mirrors, omens, signs, helps along our road to who we really are supposed to be. These dreams can be whimsical, full of beautiful creatures and friendly faces, they can be full of gorgeous vistas to fly over at harrying speeds, they can be memories of the past that bring comfort and healing, and they can be dreams full of warning and ways to prepare for darkness that they know is ahead. This was one of those warning dreams. It was dark, as dark as my life had become, and it was frightening but there was hope of light and peace and happiness at the end, and my faeries knew that that would be enough to help me to never give up.
This is one of my early spring faerie friends. He rides the wind and it messes up his hair.
I this dream, I found myself in a tall, dark forest surrounded by snarling, drooling wolves and they were closing in. I love wolves almost as much as I love bald eagles and so as frightened as I was, I was also very sad. I got backed into a corner with a cement patio behind me attached to a cement building.
Stock photo colored by me.
For some reason, I was then more scared of the cement building than the wolves. But there was nowhere else to go; either get torn up by the wolves or go into the building. I frantically scrambled to get into the building and barely slammed the door before the wolves rammed their heads into it, pushing it towards me with great force. I was barely able to slide a bar across the back of the door to keep them out, just in time.
Stock photo colored by me.
But while I tried to catch my breath, I realized I was now inside the building that scared me more than the wolves, and I had no way of going back the way I came. When I gained enough courage, I slowly and with great anxiety, turned around to find myself in a long cement hallway. To the right was a dead end that threatened murderously and to the left was a dark tunnel that led to tenement housing, with dirty, cramped living spaces, sick children and dead and dying people. All my options were horrible. I almost wished I could face the wolves again. But in the end my only real option was to head through the tunnel towards tenement housing, dirt, pain and sorrow.
Stock photo colored by me.
Stock photo colored by me.
I moved in the direction of the tenement housing and was disgusted with the smells, the filthy children, the angry mothers and almost no fathers, the broken-down housing and beds and lives. The people, though alive, stared at me with dead or threatening looks in their eyes, but the look of hopelessness was the one thing they all had in common. I hated everything about the place I was moving into. It was depressing and suffocating and I wanted out. As I surveyed the eyes of suffering all around me, I felt trapped, frantic and began wildly searching for an escape of any kind, when my eyes caught a golden light above the dust and pain.
It seemed like a world away and impossible to get to but there was over the dust and dirt and putrid smells and depressing hopelessness, a green mountainside glittering with waterfalls that looked like crystal slits down the sides of the mountain amongst meadows of soft green. I longed to go there with every part of my soul. All I wanted was to be there, but I was here, trapped in the tenement housing. And then I woke up.
This is me, worn down and tired from facing so much darkness.
As terrible as was my dream, so was my life. It was a nightmare with no simple or easy way out. My children and I were dying, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. We were alone and lost. We were sick and in pain. Facing where we had been and all that had happened to us was depressing and dark. I would often remember the sparkling mountainside and longed to be there. My faerie angels would remind me where I was headed and I fought to believe them, dared to dream, and with all my soul tried to hold onto that beautiful place.
As we worked to heal from the darkness, we had many golden mountain experiences that helped give us hope. Every time, I thought we had made it. It it wasn’t until last summer, on a short trip to Utah, I had a complete confirmation that we had made it. I was traveling over one of my most favorite little, old, quaint townships called Virginia Dale. I was thinking deep thoughts and expressing gratitude to my faerie angels and the heavens for my many blessings, when the sun burst through low lying clouds and shone with intense brightness on the mountains surrounding Virginia Dale. Gratitude is a powerful tool for healing, staying close to the faeries and receiving more blessings. I was stunned and at that moment, I knew I finally found my sparkling, peaceful, mountainside. Somehow, I had found my way through the tenement housing, the sickness, the darkness and pain and I was living my dreams, that at times seemed impossible to find, let alone to claim.
Grandma Mae smiled and hugged me.
