Strange Loving Visitations and other stuff

Hmmm, well, I was just sitting around and I thought:<p>

"I don't know, I guess I've written a lot of pretty decent Spiritual stuff and thats ok but maybe it would be good if I shared something of myself with people a little more directly and reveal my personal heart more...."<p>

So this whole thing came to mind that happened to me about seven years ago when I first moved down to Florida from New Jersey. I was pretty much just walking around in a dream at that time for a lot of different reasons, and though it was sometimes a painful dream and a lonely dream, it was still my dream and it was a magical and beautiful dreamworld that I created or was created around me. I don't know quite how to explain the exact circumstances of that time without going into farther past stuff that was really really hard but lets just say life threw me one too many zingers, and I was out of it.<p>

I was at that time living with my parents in a little apartment complex as we were waiting to have our house built. Bradenton then wasn't much, Lakewood Ranch hadn't sprawled out into the bustling multi Starbucks thing it is today. There was one Publix and a couple of other things and that was about it. The nature was still mostly intact, dense jungle-like woods and vast fields under the great Florida sky, in the afternoon so hot but the breeze so gentle and the smell of smoke would come to you out of nowhere, and from pond to pond was just a little walk, crocodiles, boars, snakes, the beautiful hawks...<p>

I didn't have a driver's liscence then or a job, had been recieving disability for a couple of years which I was terribley embarrassed about-I still basically couldn't do anything that people considered valuable like working, and my life wasn't "going" anywhere, lol.  But here I was in this beautiful place, receiving 10 dollars a day, and of course I had free room and board.  So you know I would keep notebooks about my thoughts on nature and general impressions and so on, and philisophical stuff, and would mainly go out in the afternoon swimming sometimes or to excercise at the gym or just on these monster walks or bike-rides out into the beautiful and strange natural world, and spend my days that way, friendless and alone for all practical purposes, but really multidimensionally activated and engaged. (At one point my little four year old nephew(he was four at that time) stared up at me and looked into my eyes and called me "window-head")).  So I guess you could say that I was the happiest/most tortured 30 year old on the block.  Certainly the extremes between bliss and letting go really difficult pain were an earmark of that time, in particular.<p>

Anyway, there was this sense, I was aware, of this deep and pervasive magical beauty in myself but not just in myself alone because it was always in some way tied to nature, as though it expanded from me into nature or from nature into me, or that nature and me, in the way it simply was, the quality in the air, the way shadows lay, some aspect of it, were just inextricably tied together into one mysterious beautiful thing, which sometimes seemed to press to the other side of the sky, to the other side of dark starry space, where I imagined say this immense Nirvanna-like city which was home to all the Angels and Saints who I felt around me each day and honored in my prayers each night.  I sensed and knew for real the reality of that heavenly city.  And thus I lived at that time.<p>

At such a time, many things will happen simultaneously, and its impossible to go back and draw it all out unless you really have an ambition to make something out of it.  So I just want to focus on one event, which is a cute little event, you know.  At one point in my year long stay at this apartment complex, it was evening time, and I was just sitting outside the front-door to the apartment where I lived, smoking a cigarette.  And then once more I had the feeling of my grandma's energy around me.  She had died thirteen years or so before that.  I called her my white gram when I was a little kid, because one of my grandma's had black hair, and she, the one Spiritually and energetically visiting me outside my front door, had white hair, so she was my white gram, who had died of Emphysema when I was about sixteen.  So there I was communicating with her telepathically, while smoking of course,(she didn't like that, obviously), but she was really full of love and good humor and just beautiful kindness.  Many of my memories of her was from when she had gotten chronically sick and was so unhappy, but I remembered her before that too, and how much she loved her family, and would look out for them, and try to protect them-and she was so beautifully practical in her ways, but gracefully so, a master of thrift.  So anyway, that night, and one night after, we had our little secret communications out in front of my front door.<p>

At that time in my life, this funny thing would happen.  Everytime I did something that I felt in my own conscience was wrong, and I was outside, a snake would go whizzing past me.  Every time.  It was just one of those things.  I kept it to myself, you know.  So, after the second night of talking to my white gram's invisible energy/Spirit, the next day I was taking a walk around the grounds of the apartment complex, as I would do, and I approached a vacant mini-playground which had a bench and I guess I was thinking about sitting down and taking a rest.  But then there walks up this elderly lady wearing a long black dress and walking a little dog.  She looked vaguely familiar but not exactly familiar, and she just looked at me and smiled and asked me:<p>

"Did you see any snakes today?"<p>

And I just looked at her and said,"Well, no."<p>

And then she smiled at me again and said,"Good".  And then she walked away.  I walked away too.  I was crossing the path of a pretty big crocodile eyeing me from a distant pond by the time it occured to me that nobody knew about my thing with the snakes, except me.  Then of course it occured to me that it was my white Gram come to say that she loves me, in her always oh so clever thrifty graceful and mysterious way....We never said it, we never had to.  It Is.~