Easter 2009 in Pennsylvania
My dad would have been 64 today. In my words from the past entry, on January 30th, I wrote about letters that I found from my dad. What I didn't write about was what happened the next day.
January 31st I had the worst emotional hangover that I can remember having in years. I felt low. After barely surviving the work day, I was driving home that afternoon when I felt an immense compulsion to go back to the letters. I had them all neatly organized by year in little plastic bags in the basement, but I wanted to take all the ones from my dad out and keep them separately with me in my room.
What follows here is an entry that I wrote, but never published, on February 1st. I'll preface this by saying that I am a spiritual person, and I do believe in universal energy and signs. If you don't, that's alright, but it's hard for me to dismiss it after what happened that day. Whether it's "real" or not, I don't really care. My dad/the universe came through for me that day, and I felt more at peace than I had in months.
2.1.17
I’m grateful that I’m not someone who has frequent really hard days. Yesterday was a really hard day. And today, I feel better. I realized that part of the reason I was so upset was because between losing my dad, my grandfather, my godfather, and my exes, I felt like I wasn’t someone's "special someone" anymore. That's a really difficult thing to feel.
I felt compelled when I got home yesterday to gather the 4 letters from my dad in the basement and take them all out and keep them separately, perhaps in my room. I was surprised to find that there were actually 6 letters, and I must have overlooked them the day before. One of the letters was a postcard, and the picture on the front was of stones overlooking the sea and a mountain at sunset. I thought my dad probably picked this card because of the sunset, but I wanted to read more about it, so the description of the card said it was of the stones at Ballochroy, Scotland.
Of course my curiosity got the best of me, so I went searching online about the stones, and I found all of this cool information about the ancient astronomical significance of the stones, but what was most striking of all was that all of the descriptions said that it “faces southwestward to the island of Cara.” Cara Island!! How crazy is that? And I’m sure my dad didn’t know that when he picked the postcard, because he probably would’ve told me that in the letter, and it doesn't say anything about that in the description on the card, which actually makes the whole thing way cooler to me. I just couldn’t believe it. I had this strangely peaceful feeling that came over me, like my dad was saying, You are still special. You even have a whole island with your name. I never would have found the postcard that day had I not had that feeling that I needed to go back to the letters.
Naturally, I started looking up everything I could find about the island, and the stones, and the family that owns it, and in my friend Sean’s words, “How far are you going to go down the rabbit hole, Alice?”
I went pretty far. At least until I was so tired that I passed out, and then picked up the books I saved from being thrown out at the library TWO WEEKS ago about Northern Folklores and Legends. This led me back to the “withdrawn” shelves, and I found another book, Celtic Mythology that I just had to save. I perused the table of contents, and what particularly caught my attention was the section on “The Otherworld.”
Way led onto way into this chapter, and I found out how the Celtic year was divided:
The feast of Samhain is on the first of November, and it signifies the winter half beginning. The summer half begins at Beltene on the first of May. These were further divided into Imbolg, the first of February, and Lughnasadh on the first of August. I don’t believe it’s an accident that I ran into Imbolg on it’s actual day, so of course I did more digging.
Coincidence? Sure. But I’d like to think that my difficult days on January 30 and 31st, and then waking up feeling great on February 1st was not an accident. I literally woke up feeling better on the day of the year that symbolizes the end of a dark season, and the beginning of something new. As a sidenote, Brigid was Christianized into St. Brigid. When I was making Confirmation and needed to choose a Christian name, I wanted my name to be Brigid. When it was time to choose names, ultimately I ended up choosing my own middle name, Lenore, because I think I needed to explain my Christian name to the priest and I couldn’t come up with a good reason fast enough! However, I’ve always considered my Christian name to be Brigid, despite my lack of due diligence with the priest.
And no, I’m not making any of this up, although it certainly sounds unbelievable, even to me. How do we know when something is truly a sign from “The Universe”?? I feel like I’ve been led in this direction of finding all of these coincidences that I never would have found if I didn’t go back and find that postcard yesterday. I communicate through words. Words, dreams, and symbols--it’s actually what I do for a living. If there really is a spirit world, why wouldn’t they use that? There’s millions and millions of words in the world, why not use them to communicate? I don’t know, this all sounds crazy, even to me, but something told me last night that I stumbled on something real. A real sign from my dad, a real sign from “my” saint that she’s got my back. The universe doesn’t want us to suffer.
I wrote this just yesterday before I went home: “Having to have faith when you're doing what you think you should, and you don't see where the outcome is going to be, is one of the most challenging things to do.” I literally wrote that at work, and when I got home, I found the postcard. Letting go of control and having faith is one of my hardest challenges. I put it out to the universe, and the same day I got a confirmation of faith. I don’t know what exists out there, I just know there is a universal energy that is tied to everything.
So, happy birthday, Dad. Just putting it out there.
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