Obscure as Ever (eBook)

Chapter 1

Once again, Brenda tosses and turns most of the night and into the morning, like she always seems to do these past few months. This inability to get a good night’s sleep is even more pronounced when she dreams about Vincent. She falls asleep fairly quickly and enters a deep, short-lived sleep, but once the dreams take her to a certain place, she wakes and has trouble falling back to sleep. There are numerous residual effects from the lightning strike that put her in a coma, and almost killed her, and this one is wearing her out. Even though she’s exhausted, she starts to laugh and turns over again to face the window. Looking out, she gazes upon the dawn-infused light coming through the trees, and tries to think of all the positive things she’s experienced since coming out of her coma.

What comes to mind first is that she dreams of Vincent almost nightly. They talk, and Vincent imparts tremendous wisdom during these dreams. Often what he tells her is cryptic, and she ponders for days at a time, trying to figure out what he’s telling her. Other times, she writes it down on the pad she keeps by her bed. Maybe this is why she can never get back to sleep after her dreams. Although not all of her dreams are about or with Vincent, she still has trouble falling asleep afterwards. The good news is that this seems to allow her to remember the dreams better. The bad news is, she’s very tired when she gets out of bed in the morning.

She turns again and pulls the covers up to her chin, thinking maybe she’ll be able to fall back to sleep for a little while. She closes her eyes, then remembers she wrote a lot down on her pad last night, and reaches over to read it. She crinkles her brow as she reads the same message that she’s written down three times this week. Vincent tells her, “You will meet a messenger. Trust them to guide you.” He tells her this in between other pearls of wisdom, but this is the only piece she remembers having written down three separate times. She hopes she’ll learn more about this during her afternoon meditation, when Vincent often shows himself. She tells herself it’s best not to obsess about it and to have patience. Sometimes it takes a long time before something Vincent tells her to reveal itself. When he first died and Brenda realized she could see and communicate with him during meditation, she drove herself crazy trying to see him all the time, and immediately wanted to figure out what he was telling her. After several years, she’s fine-tuned her abilities and ways of deciphering his messages, although certain elements have changed since she was struck by lightning.

While making her morning coffee that she desperately feels she needs, Brenda tries to go back to her train of thought on the positive outcomes of her lightning strike. She puts the enhanced, more frequent dreaming in the other category for now, and thinks more about the positive elements. She focuses on the changes in her paintings and how these changes, although subtle at first, started once she got out of the hospital and back on her feet. Her closest friends have commented on it, and even pointed out things she hadn’t really thought others would notice. Now when she paints, she feels textures, and is able to transfer them from her brush onto the canvas. The result causes one to see multiple dimensions within the painting, while giving a tactile sense of wanting to touch, or already having touched what you’re seeing. Brenda often finds herself lightly feathering her fingers over her latest paintings, and drawing immense satisfaction from the way they feel. There’s one painting of hers hanging in the Gallery, where she shows her latest work, that the owner actually asked her if it was okay if he hung a sign that said, Do Not Touch. He was concerned that the oil and dirt from people’s fingers would somehow alter the painting, since everyone who stood in front of it reached out and touched it. Yes, that’s definitely something she hadn’t experienced prior to the lightning strike.

Brenda’s artistic ability has gone through more changes and enhancements than most people would believe possible. If she told the real story about how she accessed the Universal Mind in the desert that night with Vincent, and gained infinite intelligence that allowed her to make that leap to becoming a master painter, they wouldn’t believe her, and would seriously question her sanity. If she went even further to explain how her partner was successful in creating a pair of sunglasses that provided the same effect when worn under certain conditions, she would be accused of heresy, or at least be judged harshly and become an outcast. These thoughts make her laugh again in an ironic sort of way, and bring her friend Helen to mind, who is the only person on the planet who has any true idea of the gifts that were accessed from the Universal Mind. Even though Helen knows more than anyone else, Brenda still keeps a lot to herself. She has yet to divulge to her friend her thoughts on these new occurrences, and the phenomenon she attributes to the lightning strike, although they could be the residual effects from the sunglasses, or a combination of both.

Starting to feel more awake now after her first cup of coffee, Brenda wanders into her studio and opens the window shades facing east. The morning light casts an ethereal golden glow in parts of the garden, making the shrubs and tall grasses shimmer with movement. The dense wildflowers have a softer blended hue, while the more groomed pansies, snapdragons, and petunias face upward in salute to the direct sun beaming down on them. Opening the windows all the way, she breaths in the first-blush scents of the break of day, happy to be alive. This sense of appreciation is something else that has been enhanced since the lightning strike. Brenda came so close to death that day, and remembers so clearly how Vincent told her she had to go back, that there was more for her to do. She almost gave up, but now, looking out on this glorious sight, she’s thrilled that she’s still here.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees movement and hears the continuous whirring of fast-beating wings. Ah, her hummingbird friends are here, and she’s glad she remembered to fill their feeders last night. There are six of them! They flit back and forth between the feeders and the flowers, pausing occasionally to hover in front of her, letting her know they see her. Brenda’s mesmerized watching them, until she notices a small gray tabby cat with white paws slowly making its way through the grass towards the hovering birds.

“Oh no you don’t!” she cries out. “Get away from those birds! Get! Get out of here!”

The cat stops and looks up at Brenda with luminescent green eyes, and what almost appears to be a smile. They stare at each other for a while, neither of them moving. The hummingbirds seem completely unaware of any danger and go about their flitting frenzy, stopping only for a short second or two on the top feeders.

Without breaking eye contact, Brenda says to the cat, “I’m watching you, so don’t get any ideas. Do you hear me?”

The cat is the first to look away, and bends down to lick a paw and ponder the situation. Then quite casually it turns and saunters away towards the bushes without even the slightest glance backwards. Brenda laughs at the audacity of the cat, and at herself for almost hoping it had stayed a little longer. She wonders where it came from, and notices it didn’t have a collar. It was older than a kitten, but probably only about a year old at most.

She looks back towards the hummingbirds, and is startled to see all six are hovering in what is almost a straight line directly in front of her. What a sight! She’s never seen anything like it, and suddenly feels as though they’re trying to tell her something. She watches this synchronized dance in awe, then realizes their beating wings sound almost as if someone is speaking. She can feel as well as hear what the birds are saying, and it sounds like they’re saying, “I love you”.

Without thinking, Brenda says, “I love you too.” The birds then swiftly disperse and start flitting from one end of the garden to the other, higher and higher, until they’re out of sight. She steps away from the window and sits in her favorite chair, marveling at what she thinks she just witnessed. She feels as though she just communicated directly with those hummingbirds, and wonders if it really did happen that way, or if she was just reading something more into their bizarre behavior than was actually there.

During her late afternoon meditation, Brenda feels distracted, and takes longer than usual to get into the transcendental state she needs to be in to find Vincent. Finally, she sees him coming towards her, but he stops by a floating bed with a huge fluffy blanket, and beckons her to lay down. He gently rubs her brow and tells her she’ll soon be sleeping much better. He tells her the dreams will not disturb her sleep any longer, and that the discomfort she’s been experiencing from the dreams is only her heightened intuition, growing ever stronger. These are growing pains from the electrical energy — an unanticipated gift, he tells her.

Vincent withdraws his hand and Brenda watches as he turns to drift off. He moves away, then turns slightly and smiles. In his arms he’s holding a small gray tabby cat. The cat’s eyes are closed, and they both disappear as Brenda starts to bring herself back from her meditative state.

As often happens, after an especially thought-provoking session, Brenda tries to remember all that presented...