Beyond The Crystal Ball

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A musician friend recently said that all Gaelic love songs can really be boiled down to one theme, “I loved you from afar and now you’re dead.” I’m glad to be able to refute this view. As a working psychic, I’ve found that people who ask me about romance are more hopeful about the topic. Most of us have stars in our eyes, no matter how tarnished, and secret melodies in our heads. But no one wishes to be caught being sappy—we hem and haw, pretending we have more important things to think about.

I think of the young woman who sat at my festive mystic’s table at a school grad night celebration, or the 60-year-old man who came a little sheepishly to my office, or the female lawyer in Florida who called for a telephone session.

“What’s going to happen in my future?” each one asks. When I probe a bit deeper, it turns out that at least one of the questions is really, “What’s going to happen in my love life?”

Teenagers are usually braver than adults, but almost everybody hesitates to ask about romance directly for fear of sounding trite or impractical, or just like a second-grader wondering about fairies and dragons. Years of doing reflections readings with others have shown me that love—that mysterious, compelling connection to our real selves—is always on our minds in one way or another. Partnerships and solitude are two of the ways we learn more about it. Why on earth wouldn’t we long to know about relationships? But finding out about relationships and romance turns out to be complicated.

Consider Siberia, a vast region of 5.2 million square miles, a fact which is difficult to comprehend. If Siberia (like matters of the heart) was just one country, you could traverse it easily almost just by asking about it. However, Siberia has eight time zones, through which you would pass if you happened to take the Trans-Siberian Railway, which is a seven-day trip from Moscow to Vladivostok. Most people picture Siberia as a land of howling arctic wastes sprinkled with penal colonies, but the truth is more complex. Western Siberia is covered by a swampy plain, the central plateau is a tangle of thick forest, the east reveals soaring mountaintops. Only the extreme north is actual tundra, with temperatures below -68 Centigrade in winter.