Kim Part 2: Rich's Reading

In this section, we learn that Kim connects with spirit guides to give her insights into past lives and current issues. I brought a tape recorder and had jotted my impressions within two days of the visit:

After Kim had spent an hour alone with my husband, I heard her step into the bathroom, next to the room I was waiting in, to wash her hands. She looked in on me, still seated on my comfy couch, and invited me to join them. She excitedly announced that she had learned what she could this session and had much to share.

I saw Rich still lying on a massage table, smiling broadly. I thought he looked incredibly peaceful.

When Kim started to speak I showed her my recorder and asked if she minded. She nodded her encouragement, then spoke while I sniffed the strange scents in the air.

“This man is not from here. He is a very old soul. He has a long life ahead of him, for as long as he wants. He comes from the Seven Sisters.” Her words flowed rapidly as if she had far more to say than could possibly be understood. More ideas, more thoughts, more impressions than words could possibly describe. I was glad I was recording her, because I just can’t listen that fast! “He has no molecular density at all.” she said. “He is a feather.”

I was already impressed because I would agree that Rich is like no other man on this planet. When I first heard his voice, eight years ago, I was struck by its airiness, not effeminate, but airy, light, soft, musical. He had been speaking to me through his poetry, online. We had never met in person. I had no other impression of the man except through his poetic words, and then his voice, both which struck like feathers.

“He brings his music and his works from his home. When he’s spent time here on Earth, in other existences, he spends it inside the earth. In the belly of the mother. In the womb of our mother. He’s very connected to the earth-mother in this life.
I see him as a crystal miner. Gathering many beautiful crystals, which help keep the density of the world away from him. He’s very magnetic in nature and magnanimous in stature.”

Another insight, since Rich is a collector of stones, a few crystals, but mostly petrified wood. Some pieces he collected alone in the desert and one can’t help but wonder how this slim old guy managed to unearth and carry them to where they stand now, as proud sculpture in his mountain home. But once you know him, you discover how resolute and stubborn he is, and it wouldn’t matter how or what, it would be so once he decided it such.

“What John is bringing to him in that connection through the music is a new song.” Her reference was to John Denver, the musician who Rich had connections with before he died ten years ago in a plane crash. “It’s about peace. I heard this song while I was working on him and, ah! It’s so awesome. The guitar parts are great. He’s being encouraged to learn to play the banjo though, to spread the beauty around through a different intonation, a difference frequency band that is wide. Or the mandolin. It’s a resonance that will expand where he presently is. He doesn’t have to learn these instruments. He only has to remember how to play them. He already knows the role that’s the mandolin.”

I can’t picture Rich with a banjo, maybe the mandolin, but keep all my thoughts to myself.

“The song is important because music is a mathematical equation. And he knows these equations from the Seven Sisters. In the song, he mentions the Seven Sisters … and it’s all about peace, peace within your own body water and how it ripples out to everyone else… I feel there’s something about this particular tune. It’s where John comes from too (The Seven Sisters). That’s where the connection came from. There’s something about this particular tune that will reach many ears and touch many hearts.”

Rich considers John to be one of the three most influential men in his life. Rich was recruited by one of John’s lookouts to teach songwriting at Windstar, the artist’s summer cooperative that John started.

Kim’s runs one subject into another without changing expression. She simply announces a new topic: “The physiological level.”

“He told me about his injury, and we worked around those areas.” Rich is working through a broken collarbone from a fall off his horse. “It feels as though there is a very heavy energy around his respiratory system. His heart right now. He is a healthy man. And I see his longevity well in order. So it is important to take measures within his immune system to protect his respiratory system. Natural B vitamins. Aromotherapy would be very good. He needs to keep better care of himself this winter than he normally would.

He is resilient and regenerative. His injury was to slow him down. Of course we have free will… Everything he gets is completely guided, comes straight from source. Which is why he’s able to do what he can do. Which is amazing.”

Kim changes the topic again, “I want to get into other lifetimes. I picked up on three.
The mining. The crystal miner I saw before he ever got on the table. The crystals were used for healing. He was not particularly interested in selling them. He was a traveler. He just traveled a lot, picked up on them, and traded. It was a really beautiful simple existence. And then he would go back down again to the belly of the earth.”

All my vacations with Rich are like explorations with a curious child. He detaches from my hand to run off for hours, looking for shells, sticks, stones and other treasures and finding them in the most unlikely places.

“He went from that sort of beautiful place into the state of Kentucky. I actually saw some sort of “Welcome to Kentucky” sign. Not of this decade. I feel the energy of the Second World War, somewhere about that time. And he was a coal miner in the belly of the earth. We had to deal with some stuck energy here, stuck around his chest. Part of this had to do with Black Lung. Not of this lifetime, but the resonance, or frequency of this, he does still carry because he was trapped in the earth.

Sometimes when our physical form becomes trapped, the essence of our spirit clings. It doesn’t mean he didn’t transcend. But there’s a shadow. And they call it a traveler’s shadow.”
Kim talked over my head about techniques she used to help Rich with his travelers shadow. I had no idea what she was talking about but did not wish to interupt the flow.

“We used a lot of those on him. He was definitely easy to work on. It just popped out of his body like that.” She snapped her fingers. “He was no challenge on popping them out. That was awesome.”

I‘ve discovered plenty of shadows around Rich in the past eight years. One the largest is his obsessive fear of being left alone, although I had thought it inconsistent that he can travel so comfortably in Nature by himself. He’s logged over 250 miles hiking the Grand Canyon after episodes of abandonment by others. When I took my son to Chicago for Christmas a few years back, he could not handle being left alone in the house and went off to collect rocks near Holbrook and St. Johns AZ near the Petrified Forest.

“The release came from being trapped. The thing about being trapped. Like there was some huge cave in or drama in that way. I’m not sure quite how that happened. There were two other people with him. I feel they went somewhere that was not the regular place to be. On their own. And got lost. And that’s where the trap came from. They just didn’t get back out.
But he was okay with that. I think that’s even why there was that shadow of an essence of himself that was still there. Because it was so peaceful. There came the energy of peace again. Which was everywhere, like all over. Very blue.

The color blue is very important to him. He is a Star Man. He has stars in his eyes. Telepathic communication would be very easy for him to pursue. I don’t think he’d have any trouble with it if he wanted to go that direction. He communicates through music, and the lyrics of his music. But basically if you’re in his presence and he wants you want to understand him, you only have to look at his eyes. It’s all right there.”

Rich has the deepest soft blue eyes, now wizened with years of gazing, mostly at Nature, often toward the stars. I remember our first New Year’s Eve, welcoming 2002 by stepping outside to see a magical halo around the near-full moon, at precisely the stroke of midnight, with Rich happily pointing out the surrounding constellations on that crisp cold night. The winter constellations would have included his home of the Seven Sisters.

“I did pick up this other time. It’s like a native American time. I feel like the people were called the snake people. They’re Shishoni. We would say, Shishoni. You have this sort of head dress, it was just phenomenal, and you were working with the owl, which was not common. So a sort of medicine man, or shaman. And you worked with different types of owls. The ghost owls came. That’s what we would call a barn owl. That’s very much associated with the Seven Sisters.” Kim is speaking as though seeing these more clearly for the first time.
“And so a shamanic journey or meditation with the ghost owl would be very beneficial to you to be able to feel that sense of home, from where your soul-source is.
A lot of people are superstitious about owls and think they bring death. But it’s just so not true. If you want to believe that, you can make that happen. But, the ghost owl is the traveler. You move from realm to realm.”

I laugh to myself thinking about a wall hanging we have made from found materials, including an owl Rich preserved that he lovingly rescued from the side of the road. It hangs in the center of a portrait montage in our living room.

“I do feel like your sleeping circumstance needs to improve. In the sense that you may sleep but your rest level is not where it needs to be. Meditations with the owl would help put this back into balance.”

Rich’s sleep schedule coincides with the sun. You’ll find him asleep shortly after sunset, awake before sunrise, nearly every day of the year. Sensitivity to extraneous noise or the slightest change in the household, worry and restlessness awaken him. Yes, I agree, he is like an owl, eyes wide open, hoo, with each rustle in the darkness.

“A Hopi cocina, one which is so sacred that she’s all of Nature, like in the headdress, that’s who did most of your session. That’s who worked through me. It was not so much the healing, which was part of the treatment, but it was more about releasing the pressure. So that feels really important.”

I look at Kim’s face, and see the youthful energy, like a residual effect, still around her. Is it the residual energy of the cocina? It had taken me a while to notice that Kim is not nearly as young as I first took her to be. She is past fifty, yet when she opened the door and I first saw her, I felt as though I was looking into the face of a woman twenty years younger.

“In the Shishoni Life -- that’s where you know him from. You were his woman, Adele. And he wasn’t to take a wife because he was a medicine person. But that’s where you came in, anyway. You took care of him. In fact when he left there were some problems… You sang him to the stars, to home. Because you knew he was from the Seven Sisters, even then.
And you are a singer. You are, like a, spirit singer and there are spirit songs for you to drum with, in your heart. But we’ll get to that later. That’s where you know him from.”

Rich speaks, “When we sing together, our songs are very much about breathing. And the flow comes through as healing songs. She is such a singer.”

“You are so beautifully linked together -- a breath of fresh air.” Kim replies. “
If you think things have been good before, man, you’re really on a beautiful path. Your path is all about beauty. All about beauty.”

“What can I say,” Rich sighs.

“Your new song is like there. John had a message. He wasn’t here much. John said “Mannnnnnnnnnn, if you think flying in a plane gets you high….you have no idea what it’s like on the other side.” Kim laughs at her John Denver imitation. “He had with him a red-tail hawk. So when you see a red tailed-hawk, that’s John.”

I smirk to myself, “Are you sure it’s not an owl?” The portraits in the living room are all realistic drawings of John Denver over his lifetime, drawn by Rich. The group took over a year to complete, not only because of the painstaking detail lovingly represented, but because it was the artist’s first attempt at drawing portraits. Rich healed his vast grief by drawing a portrait of the beloved musician when he died. When others at Windstar saw the results of Rich’s first successful portrait, they kept bringing him more photographs to draw, even little stamp-sized newspaper clippings of their musical hero. Eventually he drew more than twenty charcoal and graphite portraits, refusing offers to sell, due to the pain he felt after the first and only sale. The first six months of drawings were used at John’s Memorial Day dedication. Rich sang a song he wrote for John, at one memorial while staring into the weeping eyes of John’s mother. Later I would give Rich one of his most prized possessions, a Taylor koa-wood guitar, one of only 250 made to commemorate John Denver. On the neck is a pearl inlaid representation of the commemorative statue, and an eagle, not a hawk, not an owl, on the frets.

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