I’m going to take a risk here. Many a skeptic, rationalist and psychologist would be instantly dismissive, maybe even concerned, about these little accounts. I have a life full of them, and I generally keep them well under my hat, but for some reason these two stories just pressed forward to say, “Tell me. Go ahead. Just do it.” So I’m gonna. Maybe I need to show up, come out of the closet slightly more than I have been willing to.

Since I was a little girl I felt quite sure that fairies, gnomes, leprechauns and the like are real. I never outgrew sensing them. I always “saw” in the eye of my imagination their little kingdoms under the leaves and bushes and branches, all through the forests, and out on banks of the Mississippi where I grew up. When I was in my 20’s the woman who was my spiritual teacher visited my home and said there was quite a colony of fairies living in my back yard. She told me “One day you will be able to see them.” I always wanted that to be true, and frankly felt the truth of it, as if I had always known it would be so. And so I have waited. Never turning skeptical about their existence just outside the edges of our perceptual capabilities, I have wondered when, if or how that expected vision would arrive for me.

Well, it happened one day in June. I was sitting on my front porch with a visiting friend having coffee that morning, chatting away, thoughts of such magical visions far from my mind. Suddenly, a little ball of light, maybe two-inches in diameter, otherworldly but clearly visible with my physical eyes, flew in an erratic pattern across the top of the bushes directly in front of me. A little figure was slightly visible inside the glow but the sight was mostly light. I jumped from my chair to see if I could follow where it went but the vision was gone. It took a moment to register what in the world this could have been, but suddenly I knew beyond any doubt that I had just seen a fairy. I saw one! I have questioned myself a number of times since then and simply can’t deny it. It happened!

I wasn’t sure if or when I might make this report in a more public forum. But just now I ran into a little quote by Doreen Virtue that says, “Helpful strangers who appear suddenly and disappear without a trace are often angels in human form.” I had an experience a few months ago where I thought this had just happened to me. It has stayed with me, and seemed more and more as though I could believe it. When I read this quote I felt something like angel wings flutter all over my skin and inside my right ear with the memory of that encounter flooding in, seeming to affirm my perception of it and whisk away any doubt. I was sitting at my computer so I decided to write both of these tales right now in this blog.

This event happened at the gym, of all places. I had been trained on using the weights on all of those many machines, but was finding it hard to remember how to adjust all of the several knobs on each piece of equipment. It felt beyond me. Suddenly a fellow came up to me to show me how to adjust one I simply couldn’t remember. He stood and watched quietly as I fiddled with some of the others, and showed me a thing or two more. As I moved on to other machines, he seemed to appear and show me whatever it was I couldn’t figure out, just as I couldn’t figure it out. After the second or third time I wondered, “Is this a weird dude that follows women around the gym?” But his energy felt very clean, his demeanor quite soft, and his manner seemed only to be helpful. He showed up a few more times as I made my way through the hour-long workout. I thanked him kindly. I thought, “I think that guy is an angel.” But I didn’t give the thought too much power. I did realize afterward that between the moments of his arrival to help me I did not notice him sweating it out on the equipment anywhere else in the gym.

Over weeks at the gym the various characters who come and go start to become familiar. I enjoy the familiarity. But I had never seen that guy before, nor have I seen him since. As I now adjust the machines I remember him standing there teaching me, and have thought each time, “I think he was an angel.” The thought just comes in, it never changes.

Just now I saw the quote about helpful strangers who appear suddenly in human form often being angels. When the sensation of wings moved all around me I decided to tell these stories. There it is. Angels and fairies. I have thought I needed to protect an academic reputation as the good Doctor of Psychology. Even though dream analysis is my specialty, and maybe even especially because of that, I have not wanted to sully my credibility as a rational person with a clear mind. There you go. Sullied. My gay daughter once told me, when I was fiddling with the wording on my brochure trying to maintain respectability in spite of my activities around the margins of things, “Mom, you have to come out of the closet.” She knew whereof she speaks, and her courage emboldened me.

I’m out.