Innehållsförteckning för June - July 2016 från Mysterious Ways

How much do we really know about our parents’ lives before ours? About events that took place years before we were born or old enough to understand? It wasn’t until I was 17 that I realized that my mom and dad had once been young adults themselves, with their own struggles that made them into the parents I knew. We were on a family vacation in Tuscany. My grandfather was emotional; it was his first time back to Italy since World War II. Clearly, it brought up painful untold memories. The weight of all those secrets was enough to force one out. In a hill town our guide called the Silent City, my grand­ father couldn’t hold back his tears. He put his arm around me and told me what…

Any military family will tell you that all the moving around is tough. On average, it’s one move every three years. By the time I retired from the Air Force, last summer, my wife, Missy, and I had had 14 addresses in 20 years. Marriage is hard enough without that stress. One thing, though, stayed with us, no matter where we landed. We met at a Buffalo Wild Wings in Morgantown, West Virginia, over spicy chicken and trivia. It was February 1995, a few months before my graduation from West Virginia University. I was a political-science major and in ROTC. By June I’d be leaving for McChord Air Force Base, outside Tacoma, Washington. The orders were cut, my move-out was scheduled, and dragging someone along with me was not part…

A gentle touch on his wrist guided the man’s hands to the woman’s head. To this day he can’t say what compelled him, or why the woman should trust him. She was an employee in his small Connecticut framing shop, one who’d complained earlier of a paralyzing migraine. At the end of a long day, she was still suffering. He might have offered sympathy or a bottle of aspirin. Instead, he lightly touched her head and prayed silently for God to take the headache away. He drew back his hands. She looked at him with astonishment. The pain was gone. Nigel Mumford the healer was born. I’d read many stories about Nigel and his gifts, knew people who had gone to him over the years, heard how they had been…

“We should have come home earlier. I would have loved to see one last snowfall,” Doris, my mother-in-law, said. We sat in her living room in front of the big picture window that looked out on the yard. It was a beautiful, sunny June day, and hummingbirds darted around the feeder outside. Only a few months had passed since Doris had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She and my father-in-law had been in Florida for the winter. They’d returned to Michigan for her surgery. It didn’t help. Now in their home on Lake Huron, she only had weeks to live. My husband and I kept Doris company and made her comfortable as best we could. Though she was fading, she insisted on making her way to her recliner next to…

This cavern in northern New Mexico wasn’t formed by nature—it was carved into the sandstone hills with only a pickax and a shovel by Ra Paulette. The 69-year-old artist has no formal training and works without blueprints. He carved his first cave in 1985 as a hideout to help him overcome a heart-break. But when visitors left religious mementos behind, Ra realized his life’s purpose—to create light-filled “wilderness shrines” for spiritual renewal. He’s carved more than a doz-en. His most impressive, outside Santa Fe, took nearly 900 hours to complete. Some have running water and electricity. All offer a place to pray and, as Ra puts it, be transformed. —Allison Churchill, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Explore Ra Paulette’s caves and visit more Secret Spaces at guideposts.org/secretspaces…

San Diego, California “Rest in peace, Luna,” Nick Haworth, a fisherman, posted to Facebook. His year-old German shepherd–husky mix had fallen off his fishing boat and vanished two miles off the San Clemente Island naval base. Navy search planes and a team of wildlife biologists found no trace of her. Five weeks after Luna was presumed dead, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune, those same wildlife biologists were carpooling to work and spotted a hitchhiker. A canine hitchhiker. “They opened the car door, whistled, and she jumped right in,” one biologist told the paper. Nick was reunited with his dogged companion. No one knows how Luna managed to swim two miles and survive on her own for five weeks, but a Navy commander awarded her a special dog tag for…

Carl Jung, one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, was a great believer in the power of dreams. To him they were evidence of what he called synchronicity—connections between people and events that defy causal, logical explanations. Jung believed his patients’ spiritual lives were integral to healing. In some patients, however, he encountered resistance. He wrote of a young woman who was “psychologically inaccessible” due to her hyperrational way of looking at life. “After several attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up,” he said. One day, the patient recounted a dream in which someone gave her a jeweled brooch shaped like a scarab. She was puzzled over…

There were always cats in our house when I was growing up. First Klondike, whom we adopted when I was five years old, and then Milo, who joined us five years later. To me, my mom and my sister, the joy of having cats was unquestionable. Who didn’t love a purring feline? My dad, for one. He grumbled that they scratched the furniture, got underfoot. If we pointed out how affectionate they could be, how attached they were to our family, he would say, “It’s just because you feed them.” Any pet parent would argue otherwise—but how do we really know? Perhaps there was something to what my father said, and the cats were just behaving instinctively. Their “affection” was nothing more than an evolutionary response to the sound of…

I stopped at Lord & Taylor after visiting my mom at the hospital, where she was recovering from a bad fall. She was going to be fine. But I needed a little retail therapy before heading home. 75% OFF! read a sign. I felt better already. A black velvet scarf caught my eye. It was gorgeous—and only five dollars! I headed for the checkout. The saleswoman rang up my purchase and sighed. I asked if she was okay. “I’m a little tired because I just finished cancer treatment,” she said. Then she looked me in the eye with an intensity that gave me chills. “I don’t know what you believe, but the Holy Spirit wants me to tell you something.…” She explained in detail a medical procedure she’d undergone called…

I thought I knew my father. I thought I knew my mother too, for that matter. Until a dream unlocked a family secret. I’d driven two hours from Kennebunkport, Maine, with my six-year-old, Sarah, to Mum’s house in Massachusetts to find out the truth. Now that I was sitting in her kitchen, though, I didn’t know where to start. She glanced up from her cup of tea, straightened her pearls. “Everything all right, dear?” she asked. Mum knew that my husband, Jon, and I had separated, but I hadn’t come to talk about that. She would never be able to understand our troubles. Her marriage had been so strong. My father had been perfect. Tall, handsome, charming. A charismatic Irishman, who went to Harvard, then took Wall Street by storm.…

Dawn Casey This February, my husband and I celebrated our twenty-sixth wedding anniversary. We’re young at heart, though my hearing isn’t what it used to be. The morning of our anniversary, I left the supermarket and—lucky me!—I spotted a penny on the pavement. Every-one who has been around me long enough knows I love finding coins on the ground—I’m quick to pick them up. The only other person nearby was a store employee, pushing a rackety row of carts through the parking lot. I bent to grab my little sidewalk find. The sharp ping of another coin falling rang in my ears. How could I hear such a sound amid the clamor of the shopping carts? Yet there it was, 15 feet away, a quarter. Seemingly fresh fallen from the…

Most afternoons, I pick up my son's daughter from preschool and bring her to my house for snacks and playtime. It's the highlight of my day. She’s the apple of my eye. She munches carrots at our kitchen table, then plays alphabet games on the computer, or we go to the mall to watch people ice-skating and do a little shopping. This year my granddaughter turns five, an age etched deeply in my heart.t’sowldyon,aul, was when something happened to him that I’ll never forget. Now Paul is in his fifties, and I haven’t spoken to him in years. He’s struggled with alcoholism and has been in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous programs, the reason I’m name. He and his wife divorced soon after their daughter was born, and Paul lost…

Ever fall down the internet rabbit hole like Alice on her way to Wonderland? You search for one thing, find another, and next thing you know, where has the time gone? Sometimes we get totally lost. Most times, I’d say. Then there are those times when it feels like we have been led. It was October 21, 2015, at nine o’clock at night. I was in bed, watching some home-makeover show on TV, when it hit me. I hadn’t checked Facebook all day. I grabbed my phone from the nightstand and opened up the app. A post caught my eye. From someone I knew through an animal-rescue group. Something vague about feeling melancholy over the loss of someone special in her life. Whoa! Wonder what happened there. Had someone died?…

A lot of people hate to drive. Not me. I’m a 58-year-old wife, mom and physical therapist, and I’m on the road a lot—about an hour a day commuting. There are three different routes I can take to the hospital where I work. Sometimes I prefer whichever takes the longest. I use my time in the car to clear my head and relax. Sometimes I pray. These past few years, though, I’ve had the three most difficult drives of my life. I wish I could say my biggest problem was heavy traffic. A week before Christmas, 2012, I drove home from the butcher shop near my parents, the same one where Dad used to order all his meats and where I had just picked up a rib roast. It was…

Imagine the greatest hits from Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson and Ella Fitzgerald don’t exist. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and “We Are the World” never became part of our cultural Zeitgeist. Where would we be without Quincy Jones? The composer and producer has earned a record 79 Grammy nominations in his 83 years, but in a recent interview with Los Angeles magazine, he made it clear how close he came to creating nothing at all. Growing up in Chicago, Quincy and his brother “wanted to be baby gangsters,” he said. The Depression-era Windy City was a violent mix of economic despair and deep racial divides. Quincy’s father worked as a carpenter, his mother suffered a breakdown and was committed to a mental institution. No doubt that’s why the family moved…