Searching For Lydia

I am deployed in Afghanistan right now as a civilian environmentalist in western Afghanistan near Iran. This story is a lot longer, if you want to read it all, just ask me.

It's not every day that one has the opportunity to see a ghost. Or rather feel it. No amount of literature, of which there is plenty, movies, or the amount of people that claim they know all about it can prepare one for the actual experience of feeling a foreign presence in your mind. History is awash in stories where spirits inhabit people on the earth. Ancient peoples and texts abound with the idea of spirits.

Coming from a Caribbean background, my past is fairly littered with the ways that spirits are there, walk among us and even speak to us. I watched all the horror movies of evil spirits when I was a kid; I heard all of the stories told orally. The kinds of stories that kept you up at all hours, jumping at every bump in the night; yet, I am not talking about possession by evil spirits, which is what many people think when I bring up the subject of Lydia. It's a seductive, lovely, warm feeling, a total polar opposite to the Linda Blair, head-on-aswivel, demon possession of The Exorcist. Webster's defines the word of spirit as: a supernatural, incorporeal being, especially one inhabiting a place, object, etc., or having a particular character, or an angel or demon. It then goes straight into evil spirits, that place where most people confronted by an unknown entity will go. The word spirit actually means breath, from the Latin, spiritus. The main point being that the spirit resides in respiration, as in 'he breathed life into that old car'. The world of the spirits and the natural world are constantly in contact with each other, and someone who can participate in this interaction is called a medium.

Apparently, this is what I am, a medium, because I can communicate with the spirit world, or rather one spirit. It would seem that I have been channeling this female presence, this Lydia, for several years now.

I know that this sounds absolutely crazy, but since no one is going to read this, I figure I can say just about anything I want. I know one or two people are going to read this, and maybe get an immense enjoyment out of it, if only to poke some fun at the crazy guy. And I see myself this way, for real. Crazy, I mean. I seriously believe I am going to be that guy that walks around town in shabby Civil War clothes from the Goodwill and talking to myself. Only it will be Lydia I will be talking to, and this brings me to another interesting point. What if all of those "crazy" people that were muttering to themselves, that you made fun of as a kid (you know you did, I did too) are just within their own conversations with their own Lydias?

I intend to research this lady, perhaps the Scandinavian years. As I have a deep seated feeling that she is from Scandinavia, and yet there is a feeling that she has been all over the world. But that will be later. I think the Scandinavian ones would be more interesting. I was drawn to Scandinavia and in fact, just returned from a vacation there.

I am what some people would call a medium, or a channel, not really sure what it's called, but perhaps channel is what I do; as in a tunnel or conduit from the spirit world and this one.

Seriously, if someone had told me this several years ago that I would be a channel; I would have laughed and asked them if I could have some of the drugs they were taking. I have done some research and if the other channels in this world are a guide, I have a serious learning curve. There was Jane Roberts who channeled a male spirit named Seth and she wrote several books with her husband on the subject. J.Z Knight, channels a guy named Ramtha who is thirty thousand years old; Esther Hicks channeled a spirit or group of spirits called Abraham; Margaret McElroy channeled a spirit named Maitreya, which is one of the foretold incarnations of the future Buddha, which in Buddhism, I find an incredible beautiful peace. He is sometimes seen as the Budai, that happy, serene fat guy sitting in the front of some Chinese restaurants, and if you rub his expansive belly, you can get good luck. And the list goes on and on.

I am nowhere on a par with these mediums and mystics that channel these spirits. I just happen to channel Lydia, a gorgeous, black haired, green eyed beauty who I have fallen in love with. Yeah, I know how it sounds, I have said as much to my wife, who asked, why couldn't she just be married to a guy who cheated with a hot, Russian hooker on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta? I don't know, I guess it would have been so much easier to take. Where mine and Lydia's relationship differs with these famous people who channel is that they teach a beautiful and wondrous world and they love to share it with everyone else. I guess if there's a reason why she chose me, I have no idea what it is, and she isn't telling me. There really isn't any incredibly wonderful spirit knowledge that she holds for the world, because, well, because her world is me; and while that is gorgeous and flattering, I am afraid I don't get a fountain of profound wisdom from it. What I do get from it, is a profound sense of Love from her, and I suppose that this is a beautiful thing; at least to me. Yet, there is a very deep feeling of sadness, a sense of terrible loss, as if she has lost her memory, a kind of Alzheimer's. I feel she picked me because she knew I would fall in love and then I would do anything to help her find herself and get her back on a track to her journey the way it's supposed to be.

You see, love has been a very distant and illusory feeling; a tricky, indefinable and puzzling phantom. And yet there is a certain liberating feeling when you channel someone's spirit, it is a beautiful challenge. It is a series of mental gymnastics that perpetuates the story of her as she shows up on the porch step of my mind. It is a sweet and wonderful symbiosis when one is within a presence.

I guess this is how those mediums feel when they are feeling the presence of their special spirits. I have never asked a medium this, and so some may read this and call bullcrap; but this is how I see it and feel it, and since most of them are con-artists anyway, they can kiss my a**. I see her face in front of me, the long black hair, the emerald green eyes and those curves. It's not like a relationship, or a business arrangement, it's more like a love affair, only a love affair of a kiss only.

Like when I was a kid, my brother was dating a girl named Cheryl, she was older than he was and more mature, and much older than I was. She lived several doors down in the apartment complex we lived in. I knew what they were doing together, I had played doctor with a couple little girlfriends and so I had the opportunity to discover our parts and see what they looked like.

I watched him as he went to her house, so when he left, I went inside and simply asked her to kiss me, no more than that, I had never really kissed a girl, passionately, or otherwise, and frankly she was the only girl I knew that was pretty easy to kiss.

She certainly qualified as the older woman. And according to Tim, one of my brothers friends she was what most people would call easy. I couldn't ask the girl I was always hanging around with, Joney. She was a total tomboy; if I asked her to kiss me; she would have beaten the crap out of me. The only other women that kissed me was my mother and an aunt Josephina who kissed me out of guilt apparently, because she couldn't help pulling my cheeks away from my head so hard it threatened to tear my face off.

So I stood on a chair (I was quite a bit shorter than Cheryl), and puckered my lips, and she showed me how to kiss. I remember her sighing and being patient with me, she would laugh that tinkling little laugh she had and I can remember the power I felt when I realized I was the one who could make her laugh. This type of power was an incredible intoxicant to a 12-year-old, with braces on his legs, gangly limbs and thick black glasses. I was a target for bullies, not a guy accustomed to making a beautiful girl like Cheryl feel good.

This was one of the most fabulous times in my life, up to that point. One of the few times, that I had exited the strange autistic, emotionless mental area I was in at that time in my life, probably a direct result of all physical anomalies. I remember it so fondly, and this is the feeling I get when Lydia is around; it is like a Kiss; sweet and tender. Kind of scary, when you think about it but when I remember myself standing on the chair with my lips puckered, I can imagine Lydia leaning in for a kiss and the feeling is exquisite. It's not sexual; it's not really sensual, it happens to be small, innocent and a little sugary.