Meeting Papa

That sounds like a harrowing WWII movie, but really, it's what I did on Wodinsday.

I've been a whole week and a half without real spiritual stimulation, which is probably why I've been so blah. In this down time, I need my medical and spiritual frameworks to give me a reason not just to sit in the house, all the time. They get me out, they get me moving, they get me thinking. But meeting was cancelled last week due to emergency on the parts of both the intended guest speaker and the leader for the evening, so we just gave it a miss...and, of course, Daughters of Kali was on a weeklong hiatus because Leela was visiting out of state for the Fourth. So, on Tuesday, I was totally hyped for the meeting, eager and excited.

I didn't feel that way for most of Wednesday...other than the fun with CDHSarah on instant messenger, the whole first portion of the day was one piece of suckage after another, from the missed phone call to the callback without benefit of a cigarette to keep me calm while on the phone with DisabilityLady, the subsequent and sneaky disconnection of the phone from its power source by a feline yet to be determined, which meant that not one of my phone calls got through for 2 hours. I realized this about the time I needed to be getting ready for meeting, and by then I was so over the entire thing that I could barely make myself get up and get ready.

Good thing I did.

Tish has been channeling Odin for ten years or so, and while I have heard about the sessions, I have never attended one. In fact, I had never attended a channeling, period. I've seen spontaneous trance, but never with someone else "coming through".

I can't describe it. I want to, because his words for me were all about my writing, how it's what I'm supposed to be doing right now, but I just can't.

I've known Tish for what seems like forever. I've known her husband for almost ten years, but I don't remember when I first met Tish...seven, eight years maybe. I know her. To see her go away -- to see the arrangement of the muscles in her face contract and contort subtly until I might not have recognized her at first glance, to see the change in the way she moves and speaks and even breathes...it was disconcerting, but not frightening, because Odin was there. He was looking out of her eyes, and they weren't her eyes any more. It reminded me almost exactly of the reading I've done on Santeria, etc, in the description of what it looks like when God mounts the head of a human.

Yes, yes, could have been faked, could have been cleverly practiced playacting with a decade of experience in playing the role. Except that it wasn't. One of those faith things, because you couldn't take this one to the lab. But Tish isn't like the Shirley Maclaine-style channelers, she doesn't accept money or even "love donations" for it; why would a woman bother to put on an elaborate fiction with no conceivable reward? It doesn't matter. Odin was there, and that's how it is.

Odin is mostly jolly when he manifests through Tish -- he rarely shows his anger inside her vessel, I've been told -- twice that she can recall, but as is usual she doesn't remember much when she comes back out. He joked about the spindly diner chair being too small for him, about Tish's worry that she wouldn't make it back out in time to pick up her husband from work, about CDHSarah's bunnylike tendencies. After the first few minutes there were giggles, then full-out laughter. We laughed with the All-Father quite a lot.

He told us a tale of the Norsemen, of their life, of how they came to seek gods as ruthless and crafty and powerful as themselves. He answered our questions. He assured us that our brother the Artist will be protected on his journey. And he told us all what we needed to know. More than that, and words fail.

The hour was too short, and we all can't wait to invite Tish and Papa back again.

We misspent the rest of our free night in eating Chinese food and rewatching the first four episodes of Kingdom Hospital. And when I called to check my voice mail? Every call for which I had waited patiently was accounted for. I've got things mostly under control over here, feel better than I have in days, and will have some progress for the Nigerian doctor to chart when I get in tomorrow. In the meantime, as I don't know how to give him my thanks in his own language, Ya Devi Sarva Buteshu Odinrupena Samsthita, and Om Sri Ganeshaya Namah, for the ever-appearing $5 bill and the promise of the money to pay the cable bill by Friday.

New reviews up tomorrow with luck, but probably later in the evening as I expect to finish both books I'm reading while getting worked in at the doctor's tomorrow.