PAMELA BRADLEY

A visit to an Egyptian psychic

 

It all began on a cheerless winter’s day in 1972, when I climbed the stairs to the second floor of an old building in the Sydney suburb of Paddington and knocked on the door of number seven. It was tucked away in a corner at the end of a narrow hall. The door creaked open to reveal a man I gauged to be somewhere around sixty, a man who, in a woollen cardigan and faded red slippers, could have been anyone’s kindly grandfather.

     ‘You are surprised,’ he said, his voice heavily accented.

     Surprised was an understatement. Naïvely, I’d expected a psychic to be a woman, someone a bit eccentric, flamboyantly dressed, covered in symbolic jewellery. After all, it had been a woman’s voice on the end of the phone when I rang to enquire about an appointment.

     The business card I’d found left on a table in a North Shore café that led me to this location had no personal name on it, just an intriguing labyrinthine symbol with ‘Psychic Readings’, an address and phone number.

     The labyrinth is a potent, mystical and sacred pattern found in most cultures and religions, some going back over 5000 years. In its earliest form it was associated with a symbolic death and rebirth ritual, but to me, on the day I discovered the card, it represented the mystery that lies at the centre of each of our lives. That’s the thing about symbols: they affect each person differently.

     The elderly man ushered me into a room with a welcoming fire and the lingering odour of apple tobacco. It was dimly lit with a few scattered lamps, and cluttered with books. A blue enamelled and glass Arabic water pipe stood in one corner, but there was no sign of the paraphernalia I usually associated with psychics: a table for readings, candles, tarot cards and crystals.

      He pointed to two overstuffed lounge chairs beside the fire. Above the mantlepiece were several black and white prints of ancient Alexandria. A Coptic Egyptian perhaps.

      ‘Sit,’ he ordered and settled opposite. With no chatty preamble, he pressed the on-button of a recorder. But, for what seemed like an age, he said nothing, asked nothing, just stared intently at me—his penetrating ebony gaze unsettling. It occurred to me that he might have been smoking more than just tobacco in that sheesha of his. The silence continued while the tape whirred on and the ticking of a clock somewhere in the flat counted down my expensive session.

      I wondered if I should get up and leave.

      He raised his hand. ‘No!’ My gut clenched.

      Then in a voice that seemed to belie his age and appearance, he announced ‘You are a seeker.’

      ‘Well … yes, I guess.’

      I thought about my recent decision to return to full-time high school teaching despite having three little sons under five. I suppose I was looking for some confirmation about my decision and some insight into the issues I might face.

      ‘All will be well,’ he said as if tapping into my thoughts.

       A log on the fire cracked … fell … flared.

       ‘It is a necessary pathway.’ A pause. Then, ‘Trust yourself. The answer to everything is within you.’ He lapsed into an extended silence. This is bloody ridiculous, I thought. A complete waste of money.

         I focussed on the fire and waited. Despite the warmth of the room there was a vague odour of dampness and mould. A wind had come up and seemed to be throwing a tantrum as it dashed itself against the front window and growled down the chimney.

       Finally, ‘You are a Seeker,’ he reiterated with emphasis.

      ‘But, isn’t everyone searching for something?’ He didn’t answer.

       In the long silence that followed, an image of the slow slip of grains of sand in an ancient hour glass came into my mind’s eye.

       Then, ‘Searching is your highest purpose.’ 

       ‘What does that mean exactly?’

       ‘You have a constant and intense curiosity to know or discover things on an outer and inner level … about the world, about ideas and about yourself.’

       Good guess! I thought.

       ‘Your curiosity has helped you grow. It will continue to lead you down many paths, it will open endless doors, present many challenges, until you achieve the wisdom and truth you are seeking.’

       ‘But what kind of wisdom and truth am I supposed to be seeking?’ my tone slightly brusque.

        His eyes remained closed. I waited. Had he dozed off or was he travelling somewhere beyond the room? It had started to rain and I was not looking forward to the long trek home by public transport.

        Eventually, his eyelids fluttered. His voice seemed to come from somewhere far away. ‘You are an explorer.’ Another pause. ‘You have been this way before … in many other guises. But this time you must share what you learn with others. Be a messenger… become a teller of stories. Stories must be told before they wilt and die.’

        Hoping he had something more to offer, I remained where I was as the fire burnt down.

        Finally he roused himself. ‘You are on your own path, travelling at your own pace.’

        Then he turned off the recorder. What the hell! My time was obviously up. All of about 20 bloody minutes.

         He handed me the disc but waved away my money. ‘No need.’ Maybe he sensed my disappointment at the brevity and cryptic nature of his message. At the door, he offered one last piece of advice: ‘You cannot be other than what you came into this world to be. And, remember, the answers you seek, have always been within you.’

 

 

A book that fell at my feet in a metaphysical bookstore

 

It was while I was browsing the shelves of an incense-filled metaphysical bookshop in Clarence Street Sydney at the turn of the millennium, that my strange encounter with the Egyptian psychic twenty-eight years before, took on a new significance.

       I wasn’t looking for anything in particular when I inadvertently dislodged a book that fell at my feet: The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling by James Hillman, a Jungian archetypal psychologist. I almost put it back on the shelf. However, I’d learned over the years not to ignore the way many messages come to me.

        I ran my hand over the book’s smoothly laminated surface, read the advance praise on the back, then settled on a stool among the cases of crystals, with the fragrance of sandalwood in my nostrils. I skimmed a selection of chapters. It had the scent of possibility. Hillman proposed an interesting theory: that ‘we are all born with a defining or innate image/pattern, ‘a spark of uniqueness’ and ‘a sense of personal calling’ which is the essential mystery at the heart of each human life.

       This calling is decided before we are born and comes complete from the very beginning like a mighty oak already in a tiny acorn—a seed of destiny if you like. It explains many of our choices, abilities, priorities, obsessions and emotional responses, as well as the idiosyncrasies that others often judge us for, and which therapists sometimes attempt to treat. It is most often noticeable in childhood and adolescence, and at particular moments it may cause a child or youth to recognize exactly what it is he or she must do, or have.

        At other times, the calling might be heard only as an occasional murmuring in the background, a niggling, a disturbance. Or, it may be intermittently missed until a formative moment, an unexpected intervention occurs. It’s the choices we make during those times that can reveal our ‘innate character’. It is always with us, Hillman maintained, and makes its claim. It is imperative we attend to it.

        Was that what the Coptic Egyptian psychic had been alluding to when he insisted I was a Seeker? Had he been talking about my unique character and calling? And if so, would there be indications among my childhood and adolescent memories as Hillman suggested there would be? And would such a calling have marked me throughout my adult life?

        For a week after ‘discovering’ the book, I closeted myself away in my flat and began unpacking my life looking for clues to my own character and calling, but there were so many layers of life to dredge through. Where there were surviving journals—such as those written during my teenage years, and others related to travel—it was easier, but memories can be tricky things, often skimming into existence then evaporating like a fractured dream under scrutiny. They don’t come in linear fashion, just fragments that have to be deciphered, untangled and put back together. In the end, one doesn’t know if they are true or not, or just our own imaginative construct. However, there are always those, more emotionally charged, brighter fragments that jump through the cotton-wool-like barrier of time.

        Aware that if I didn’t jot down everything related to my childhood, teen and adult fascinations and obsessions then, something special might slip through my fingers. I filled a small exercise book with so-that-explains-it-moments, as well as reactions to many of my early experiences—both positive and negative—people who had been catalysts in my life. And, I tried identifying vital choice points and recurring patterns.

        Finally, emotionally exhausted, I put the scrappy notebook away. It was another 12 years before I looked at it again when it occurred to me that I could use its random jottings, as well as Hillman’s ‘acorn theory’ and the brief communication from the Egyptian psychic, as the basis of a book. But, when I ran the idea past a relatively successful writer I knew, she was less than encouraging, citing the fact that it was not the sort of book publishers at that stage would probably take on. So, I did nothing more about it, justifying my decision with the belief that it would be too hard to structure anyway.

        But, it kept niggling away at me and I was reminded that when we are meant to do something—when it never lets go—it really needs to be addressed and the way will be shown. And it was.

 

 

A visit to a patchwork studio

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I had dropped in to see a friend’s recent accommodation at the back of her daughter’s modern, but sterile, new home imagining her surrounded by white and beige, minimalist designer furniture, carefully arranged lamps and objets d’art—the whole lacking any personality. But I was pleased to see her partially-separated studio space glowing with exuberant deep ochre oranges, sunny yellows, bright blues and touches of reds in the late afternoon light.

       She was sitting at her sewing machine. ‘Won’t be a minute,’ she said over its whir. ‘Almost finished for the day. Find a space to sit.’ Easier said than done in that wonderfully cluttered room which must have been anathema to her daughter.

       The hum of the sewing machine stopped. ‘Well, what do you think?’ She held up a partially completed quilt or wall hanging, I couldn’t be sure which.

       ‘Oh my God, it’s exquisite! Nothing like the ordinary, balanced designs, the predictable patterns. It’s beautifully chaotic.’

       ‘I know, but it’s not finished yet,’ she said and draped it over the back of the lounge. ‘I’m doing this one for myself. I just let my intuition guide me. It’s a bit like a meditation really. Each piece tells its own story. I know when the patches are finally put together, the whole will be just right.’

        And at that moment, it came to me.

        Bugger about publishing! I’m going to write this book for myself, and I’m going to write it in my own way. Create a patchwork of true stories, each with its own light and dark hues and patterns; woven through with memories, dreams, fascinations and obsessions and given texture where applicable by excerpts from journals and books I love, plus personal opinions, and of course, historical connections. In each ‘patch’ the present and the past will be interwoven and the whole linked by the underlying thread: ‘As I am, so I’ve always been’.

        My hope is that those who get to read the book—eventually—might change the way they view their own lives. Perhaps, as James Hillman once suggested, ‘to imagine them with more romance and fictional flair’ or by seeing themselves as a hero on a mythic journey.