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Marconics
The Human Upgrade Vol. 1 The Clarion Call
By Alison David Bird, Lisa Wilson Balboa Press
Copyright © 2016 The Clarion Call
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5043-3678-9
CHAPTER 1
Angels in My Tea
In my office, I have a wonderful cast miniature statue of a mourning angel with immense, powerful wings furled at her back, kneeling and draped over a gothic stone plinth, her head resting on her forearm as though she is in despair. I keep it to remind me of my journey. How, over the many years it took me to reach this point, they tried so hard to guide and direct me, warn me and protect me, and I just steamed on like an unmanned super tanker — unstoppable and out of control.
They weep for us, but they don't despair of us. They don't stand around the water cooler, saying, "What the hell, man? Is this woman ever gonna wake up?" They don't decide who is better or more worthy or most popular. Their task is to guide, and they love unconditionally.
* * *
I grew up on ancient Wiltshire farmland in a house surrounded by fields where the first crop circles were being discovered. Spirit tried to contact me as a child, but I shut it down. Its attempts at communication terrified me. My family was military and nonspiritual. Awareness of anything beyond what I could see simply meant crazy.
Until I was an adult and married with children, I lived a three-dimensional life, striving to be successful in the male-dominated world of journalism in the UK.
Like everyone else around me, I aspired to success and wealth. I was acquisitive and materialistic and competed with everyone to survive and feel valid. I continued on that path in spite of attempts by Spirit to move me off it.
When I was thirty-four, I was involved in an accident and became bedridden for a year and disabled for ten years. I saw the opportunity for change but not in a positive way. I pretty much gave up on life altogether.
After a bitter divorce, which included a battle over my children, my life seemed too much like hard work. It was easier to buy into the victim mentality that provided me with the excuse to not have to compete in a world where I felt I didn't belong. I was safely locked away behind closed doors.
I marked the relentless progression of my existence — which I planned would last until I reached about sixty, at which point I could finally let go and die — by the arrival of my monthly disability check. This went on for some years.
I was sensitive to chemicals at that time and had a variety of serious food allergies. After eating some rice contaminated by a spoon that had served a portion of MSG, I endured a reaction in sleep, during which I was given the clear opportunity to cross over and leave the planet.
I found myself flying above a beautiful, meandering river with lush, green banks, lulling voices telling me it was my time and that I must cross over, that if I stayed I would be stuck in an in-between space.
I felt the finality in the message and began flapping my arms in a kind of flaying backstroke so I wouldn't cross the river. I fought and fought against it until I realized I was simply being recalled. It was as though they were saying, "This isn't going so well, is it? Why don't you come in now, get another body, and we'll give it another shot."
I was failing dismally at my life, and I suddenly remembered there had been purpose. There was something I had come here to do, and I had forgotten. I agreed in that moment to come back and meet my contract.
This happened in a dream sequence. In the past, if I had a reaction like that in sleep, I would scream as loudly as I could until my partner, eventually hearing me whimper, could wake me up.
So I screamed out to him repeatedly. The next thing I knew I was being dropped on to a hospital gurney, the wheels moving underneath me, and I could hear the rustling of white coats and the snapping of rubber gloves. I felt the needle of an IV inserted into one arm. I thought, "Chris must have heard me he but couldn't wake me, so he called for help." I reasoned, "I'm in the hospital, and all I need to do is to stay conscious, and they will fix me."
They seemed to battle for me for some time, but when it stopped, I found myself sitting bolt upright in my bed at home. None of it had happened.
I knew from that moment that I had renegotiated. I had been allowed to come back, and this had been my first experience of spiritual intervention.
It was the beginning of my recovery, and several years later, following a series of synchronistic events, which made the impossible possible, my family moved to the United States and opened a British tea shop.
It wasn't long after we opened the shop before someone asked me to read tea leaves. No one has read tea leaves in the UK for two hundred years, so of course I said no.
Then one afternoon, a frustrated mom with a party of six kids pleaded with me to entertain them. So I thought, How hard could this be? I downloaded symbols from the computer; the heart means love, the horseshoe means good luck, etc.
As I began to stare into the teacup at soggy, black clumps of leaves, stories began to emerge. People's darkest secrets were revealed to me so that they could be guided to make better choices. The information was specific and personal, and I had no idea where it was coming from. So once again, I shut it down.
Then a friend who was going through a divorce asked me to read for her. This was good because I felt her need over my own, and it soon became a daily practice, which allowed me to hone my skill.
My predictions could come true in hours. The tea leaves seemed to morph and move during a reading, so I could show the images to the customer. They looked like silhouetted pictures drawn with a felt-tip pen. People would take photographs.
Once, I had some tea left after a reading and decided to do a cup for myself. I could see a small aircraft flying over a mountain range with something falling from the windshield. My husband and I were due to fly with friends to Washington State in a small Cessna. So I did another cup. The plane was nose-diving into the mountains. I showed the cup to my friend and asked her what she saw. "It's a plane crashing," she told me.
So I did another cup. All I could see were the mountains and the tail section of the plane sticking up.
I told my husband we weren't going to fly, but we couldn't tell our friends why because they would never believe us and we would lose two good friends. I reasoned that if we weren't on board, we had already changed something. I was relieved to find out the pilot cancelled the flight on his own because of a feeling.
However, he called me about three months later when he had attempted to make the trip to Washington again. Midflight, in the dark, the plane had been struck by a large bird, which caused the windshield of the plane to fall out. He lost his glasses, his radio set, and with it all contact with the tower.
The news report said the pilot's incredible skill allowed him to maintain contact through Morse code to the tower, and they talked him down into a field in the dark. He suffered only slight injuries to his head and face.
If I had been on that flight, I would have flung my arms around his face and neck in a hysterical attempt to save myself, and we would all have been doomed.
Tea leaf readings became a big draw for the tearoom. People sought advice on relationships, retirement plans, and life-changing decisions. Local businesses decided whether they should cut and run during the 2008 crash. One time, in a tearoom full of customers who took turns looking into the cup, the leaves predicted the death of democracy just days before Senator Ted Kennedy died.
For years, my understanding of the metaphysical was limited to knowing that there were ghosts, that people died and went somewhere else that enabled them to come and go by choice in this dimension. And just as there are good and bad people, there are good and bad spirits.
My grandmothers had become my Spirit guides and loved a good tea leaf reading, though I didn't really understand how or why. I'd never known my great-grandmother and barely saw my grandmothers outside of the few years when I was in boarding school while my parents were stationed in Germany. Every home weekend, about once a month, I went to Birmingham, England, and they shared responsibility for me.
I knew Nana Fletcher had powers, and her sons and their cousins were all aware that she was a witch. She knew things before they even happened. As kids, they could never get away with anything because she always seemed to have inside information on where they were and what they were doing.
She always knew moments before it happened that the phone would ring, exactly who was on the other end, and even the nature of the call. She'd stop midconversation, raise her hand, and everyone would fall silent. A moment later, the phone would ring.
"Ah," she'd say, "it's Jack. Mary's dead," or something similar.
I also believed any contact with spirits was to be avoided and feared until I became aware of my guides.
Since then, I've been educated to understand that my new belief system isn't a bag of pick 'n' mix. I'm not supposed to say, "Oh, I believe in this, but I don't believe in that!" Once I began to peel back the layers, I realized how multidimensional the truth is about who we are and where we come from.
My education seemed to continue daily, with people I had never met walking into my shop with snippets of information that were seemingly meant for me to hear at that exact moment. It was as if they were laying down a trail of breadcrumbs for me to follow to lead me to the next clue on the treasure map.
On one particular afternoon in July 2009, a Canadian lady was paying for something at the counter. She handed me a stamped metal disk with a guardian angel on it. At this point, I had no awareness of or belief in angels. They were a sentimental, sickly-sweet, man-made myth. For a start, their wings would have to be a lot larger than depicted if we were to believe they could fly! And secondly, where did they live? I'd been up in a plane, and they were not languishing around, strumming harps on fluffy clouds!
The Canadian woman said, "I like to give these out when I see someone who should have one." So I took it and said thank you.
Later that day, two West Indian women came in for tea. Afterwards, as they paid at the counter, one of them went out to meet up with their husbands waiting outside the shop. The other, who apparently could read auras, hung back until the shop was empty. She said, "Did you know you are from the angelic realm?"
I didn't answer. I was still trying to process the question when she added, "I can tell by your aura, you are from the angelic realm. I thought you might like to know."
She smiled and walked out the door. I looked across at Lilly, the girl who worked for me each summer, who had appeared from the basement and was standing in the kitchen with her mouth open.
She just rolled her eyes.
I sat down at the computer next to the till and brought up Google.com.
There's a realm?
Yes, according to the wizard that shall be called Wikipedia, there is indeed an angelic realm, and I received my first lesson in angelology.
A week or so later, I was with one of my early Reiki clients, a cancer survivor. Since beginning her treatments, she had been receiving very clear visions and messages associated with her healing. Every week, she would spend a few minutes describing her visions and showing me detailed pictures she had sketched in the moment. The visions usually came when she was in the bath. I reasoned that this was because water was a great conductor, and the plumbing provided grounding. She drew the shower screens around the bath, which enclosed the space and made it easier for energies to manifest and be contained.
She said that, during a vision, a gold hand appeared over the site of the cancer surgery. She asked, "Whose hand is this? Is it my guide's? Is it God's?"
"This is Alison," she claimed to have heard very clearly. "Everything you do with Alison is safe."
Then she said she saw me depicted as this soft, rounded, beautiful angel with wings that made me look even more rounded in shape. I was exalted and high up, with my arms open, ready to embrace. Each of my wings had feathers that curled at the ends, forming a circle.
I struggled with the concept of angels. It felt like a reach, but I was now not in a position to pick and choose who and what I believed in. I trusted that at some point it would be reaffirmed and then made clear, so I waited each day for my new lesson. When it arrived, Lilly and I would witness it together and say, "Here it is!" I always acknowledge my lessons with a "Thank you!"
Lilly was less comfortable with it and preferred to dismiss most of it with a shake of her head and the mumbled words, "Oh dear," or, "I don't know."
She began to call me Crazy Lady and referred to my growing collection of crystals as pet rocks, but I knew it wasn't entirely wasted on her.
In the days that followed, I couldn't get away from angels. Angel images, angel books, angels on T-shirts and key chains. Just like when you change your car, and suddenly every third person seems to be driving the same one. I got it.
Then, within a few days and out of the blue, a young Irish girl who had worked for me two summers earlier made a special visit to the island to see her old boyfriend.
We got into a conversation about what was going on, and she recommended a book published that year by an Irish woman named Lorna Byrne, titled Angels in Her Hair. She said, "You have to read it! This woman has seen angels since she was little, and no one believed her."
I ordered the book, and there I found my affirmation. I dare anyone to read that book and doubt the existence of angels.
I had a lot of reading going on at the time and felt this book had been brought to my attention by way of confirmation of something I now believed to be true. After that, I thought I could lay it aside and move on.
Not so. I was guided back to the book several months later. One wintry afternoon when I was snowed in and satellite television went down, I heard, "Read." By that time, my list was a little thin. Read what? I thought, and scanned the shelves. The book was out on the coffee table. I picked it up and opened to the next chapter from where I left off. It was as if this chapter had been written for me, to me even, describing my own very personal experience and addressing all its surrounding issues. I had carried the lingering effects of this event around with me for years, heavy with the pain and guilt it still caused me, and here it was being referenced in black and white between the pages of someone else's book, and filled with compassion and forgiveness as if it was always meant just for me.
It was about the souls of unborn children and how they never leave you. How they know even before they are born that they might not make it. That they stay close to the mother throughout her life and love her without blame even though she may never be able to consciously feel their presence.
With tears streaming down my face, I lay back against the sofa and glanced out of the window. It was snowing, and it reminded me of the section in the book where she talks of angels riding the snowflakes to make her laugh. In the window screen, the light and shadow was such that I could see the outline of an angel with huge wings I had never noticed before.
My husband came home soon afterwards, saw my tears, and laughed mockingly. "Oh," he said, "what have you been reading now?" I sat him down, put the book in his hands, and made him read what I had just read. He cried.
On another occasion that summer, two more women came in together for tea leaf readings. One was a visiting medical intuitive from Florida. Her friend was a local woman who sponsored her visits.
They introduced themselves properly after the readings, saying they had heard about me and wanted to come to check me out.
She said she thought I was the real thing and that I was developing as a psychic healer just as she had but faster. We talked for a long time, and just as if another teacher had been sent, she confirmed a great deal for me.
Later, she asked if I was protecting myself correctly.
I told her I felt I had been experiencing some psychic attacks. Without really knowing why, I found myself saying, "Archangel Michael, please protect us in these hours of darkness." I felt it had just been put there, so I continued to do it as part of a nightly ritual.
She said she had experienced psychic attacks in her early development and added, "Michael is our archangel. He protects healers from negative earthbound energies. He takes them off you and leads them to cross over."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Marconics by Alison David Bird, Lisa Wilson. Copyright © 2016 The Clarion Call. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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