“Visualize yourself on a hill, Lucifer. You are sitting down, and you can see a broad vista of countryside around you… You feel relaxed and contented… The sun is shining down warmly on you… You feel good as you gaze over the land.
“Eventually, you feel moved to get up. There is a path winding down the hill which you follow… You stroll along confidently. Gradually as you descend, the sides of the path change to woods… You follow the path deeply into the woods. After a time, you begin to hear water running in the distance… The sound gets closer and closer to you until you round a bend to find yourself facing a large stream.
“You walk to the water’s edge and kneel down. You gaze into the water faintly spotting your reflection… You watch the water ripple by under your gaze until you feel a presence on the other side of the stream… Completely relaxed, you look up to see someone standing on the other side. They smile at you. You ask them who they are and have a quiet conversation across the stream from each other…”
“Who are you?” Lucifer asked the tall stranger across the stream from him.
“I’m your spirit guide.”
“What’s your name?”
“Martineau, but everyone just calls me Marty.”
“Marty? That’s not what I expected a spirit guide to be called,” Lucifer commented.
“I just find it sets people at ease.”
“I think I’ll stick with Martineau.”
“As you wish.”
“Then you bid your spirit guide farewell—knowing you can see them again any time you want,” Brenda resumed, “and you turn and walk back through the forest…and up the hill…to sit…and prepare yourself…to return to your normal waking consciousness.” Brenda counted from ten to one, and Lucifer opened his eyes delighted.
“I did it, Bren. I made it all the way through. But, who ever heard of a spirit guide named Marty?”
Lucifer excitedly told Brenda about what he’d seen and felt. Brenda smiled and laughed. She knew it was a beginning for Lucifer. He’d opened a door and met someone who would beckon him through.
* * * * * * *
Large squid did nothing for Frobisher. Although, Tony and Shari enjoyed the scuba diver and the octopus immensely. Sally was chattering on about some work related thing. Frobisher found his mind wandering.
When he was seven, his Dad had taken him and his sister and mother to a large pond out in the country. It was a sunny spring day. They had spent the day collecting tadpoles—the largest ones Frobisher had ever seen. They had brought them home in a bucket. Frobisher and his sister had watched them transform themselves into frogs during the next few weeks. Suddenly, they started to disappear; and then one day, they were all gone.
Frobisher remembered that event from time to time. It was one of the few things his Dad had ever done with them. He wished to somehow preserve that event—make it more and make it better.
He watched Tony and Shari looking at the fish in the aquarium. Suddenly, he asked them if they’d ever seen tadpoles.
* * * * * * *
(1987)
The adult me sat bolt up right in bed. “Marty!....Marty is my wisdom part?”
I had been idly day dreaming or maybe lucid dreaming and had inadvertently tuned into Lucifer’s meditation. I instinctively recognized my own spirit guide when he introduced himself to Lucifer. Although, I had never known his name.
In a flash, I saw the connection between myself as a child and Lucifer and the role he had played in my life. It comforted me to know my own drama had not gone unnoticed by my wisdom part even before I knew of it.
* * * * * * *
(1972)
With the arrival of spring, I began to think more and more about leaving my mother. It had been a long, hard winter. The prospect of spending another summer at home with no school loomed as unsurvivable. At fourteen, I knew I could not live through staying with my mother another four years. I wished I could have a home like other kids where living at home until eighteen was merely inconvenient as opposed to death invoking.
I knew all this was true and yet abandoning my mother seemed like an impossible dream—a guilt I could not bear. I alternated between resolving to stay as my duty and knowing I had to leave as survival. Not to mention the fact that a fourteen, life is not long on options.
I dimly remembered that at twelve I had decided to run away in two years. They had been the longest two years of my life. But leaving my mother and little brother, like my father had, would take more than just wanting or needing to. It would take anger. The kind of anger that comes from a final humiliation.
* * * * * * *
In the way I had escaped to school, my brother had escaped to the fire station. The station was just behind our house. He was nine when his Daddy had left, and the guys had become very fond of him. They gave him a key to the back door. He spent most of his after school time with them. (I think they were probably his life saver.)
It was fortunate that he was able to get his needs met by real people in a healthy environment. Unlike me, who invented people in an unhealthy environment. It was here that my brother, Jack, met Luke. Luke was seventeen and living in his car behind the fire station. He had no money, and Jack discovered that he was hungry. Jack brought him home. My mother took an instant liking to him.
* * * * * * *
I had always promised myself that when my mother got her needs met by someone else—someone to replace me and my father—I would go. During the week Luke moved in, that resolve rekindled itself.
In Luke, my mother had found a listening ear. After years of staying up late talking to me, suddenly my mother started coming to bed at two in the morning after talking to him. I awakened when my mother came to bed but pretended to be asleep. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or jealous. There was no denying a major change was occurring.
One night, my mother had come in for something and caught me with a razor blade about to cut myself. My mother had mistakenly believed I was only sleeping with the razor blade. I didn’t clue her in. But the next night, my mother and I had a fight.
My official bedtime was nine-thirty, but I had not gone to bed at the official time since long before my father left. He had stopped coming home after work, and I had stayed up to keep my mother company—waiting. Now, my mother wanted to invoke the official bedtime rules and go back to sleeping in the living room. I was incensed. I went to bed early secretly uncertain whether to be happy or indignant.
* * * * * * *
The moon was bright, shining in my bedroom. I didn’t go to bed. I just sat staring into the darkness venting with Sasifraz. “I stay up ‘til midnight listening to her for two years. Then, he comes, and it’s ‘off to bed at nine-thirty, dear’ as if I had never done anything different.”
“I know.”
“She comes to bed at two or three in the morning—staying up all night talking to him!”
“Um—hum.”
“And, I’m supposed to play the docile little girl and just do what I’m told.”
I carried on that way for a bit with Sasifraz nodding and listening. Finally, when I took a breath, he said simply, “You could leave.”
I hadn’t come to that conclusion yet, and now my mind leaped on it with a fury. “I could leave….Call it over and be done with it….I could go right now and be finished forever.” (I had a predisposition toward absolutes.) I couldn’t believe it. Yet, I knew that was why Luke was here—to give me an out.
Silently, I sat and conceived of ending the turmoil with my mother here and now. I took deep breaths and wiped my mental brow. How good it would feel to be done with it—to move on and not come back.
I sat for several hours debating while the house stilled. When my resolve was made, there was no turning back.
* * * * * * *
I put on my favorite clothes and filled my pockets with a couple of essentials. I didn’t think of all I was leaving behind. A new energy had kicked in.
I opened my bedroom window and looked out. The night was still with a magic glow from the moon. I paused at the window a moment knowing that when I crossed that threshold there was no coming back.
I reached out and jumped lightly to the ground. As my feet touched, I felt a shell of hardness fall away. I felt lighter than I had ever felt in my life. I ran through the back yard and the neighboring fire station parking lot. My feet felt like moon beams with magical wings. I felt free—the real freedom one seldom feels with its unlimited potentials intact. I knew I would never go back even if it meant running away again and again until they (the Omnipotent They) understood I couldn’t live there any more.