Ghosts

I don't know whether there can be ghosts of living people. This concept leads to the questions I can't know the answers to. Is all time simultaneous? Is all space present? Is all history and future in our minds in the present moment? I have felt occasionally that someone very far away was visiting me and was communicating with me. I have certainly had experiences that feel like past life experiences. I have had visits from dear friends and relatives who have passed on. But once in a while I feel a presence around which is not familiar, not really communicating with me, perhaps related to the place not me.

Last night, three or four times, I felt something in my room. Each time, I was a little startled. I have a very small room and I was reading with the lights on, so it wasn't a dream. It was not threatening nor was there any emotion attached to the experience. It just was.

For a few months last year in Nicaragua I lived in a house which was not right. Some of the rooms and the garden were lovely. It was at a great location, but it was never right. It was a sad stressed out house. I found, through brutal experience that the woman I was renting from was not only crazy and an addict, but it seems that there is a real possibility that she didn't even have any legal relationship to the house. No wonder all she talked about was triple locking the doors and keeping people out. But when my friend Tucker came to visit and got very quiet and serious and told me that a friend had committed suicide in the hall way quite recently, I kind of got the message. Well, it took me a while because the woman to whom I paid the rent had told me over and over that she and her child had lived there for several years. Not true, it turns out. I never saw the ghost of the man, but I was sick there. Very sick and when the crazy landlady kicked me out, the neighbors concluded that the real owners were probably coming to town.

Because of the wonderful Dr. Blanco, and because of the help of my dear friend Gretchen and because I moved to a light filled happy house, my recovery began the day I moved out. It is too much of a mishmash to sort things out with any certainty. Did the guy commit suicide partly because he was living in a fucked up space? Was there something actually toxic there? Hard to think that when the house was hundreds of years old and fully open to the elements. Was the vibe of the very deranged landlady the curse or was the pain of the man lingering? I don't know. I never saw any apparitions, but my feeling upon leaving was such relief that I only walked past the house once after I left.  Bad mojo for sure.

My daughter saw or felt a ghost in the upper room of our Marblehead, MA house. The house was historic, but not ancient for that town. It was built in the 1700s. She described the presence as neutral. She just would mention once in a while that he was around. One day the previous owner, a man in his eighties came by and asked to look around. He had been born in the living room of our house. he was happy to see his old house and then turned to me and asked whether the ghost was still around. I allowed as how I never felt it, but my daughter did. He said, "Well, no harm done in any case." Our feelings exactly.

This kind of experience is entirely different from the times I have felt my mother next to me, guiding me through a rough spot and encouraging me in something I am doing. Those visits leave no questions. they are clear. They are less frequent as the years pass.

I have no conclusions to shed light on any of this. i am not running out to research this, but i am recalling and pondering certain moments stimulated, of ,by whomever was visiting me last night. (No, I am not taking any drugs or medications. It could be a brain tumor or indigestion I suppose.