Educated Psychic: Bird Omens II

During my difficult but exciting transition from teaching college English to becoming a touring psychic consultant, media personality and freelance speaker, psychic events happened to me right and left. It was an amazing period. My life had become exciting in a new way. But not everything was pleasant, and I had lessons to learn. A lot of them.

Driving my old arm-breaker Chevy pickup one Sunday evening back in maybe ’76, I felt a profound sadness come over me, but I thought it was only because of driving alone at dusk. I remembered the writing I used to teach freshmen called “Kitchen”, about how Alfred Kazin’s mother at that time of day always suffered “weltschmerz”, a kind of sad longing in Yiddish. It was that sort of Sunday evening as I was driving. A kind of world sadness pervaded the air.

Wishing I was already home, suddenly a bird smacked loudly against my passenger side windshield. The sound of impact told me it had been a large bird of some kind. I never actually saw it, and the surprise jolted me. My immediate thought was, SOMEBODY IS GOING TO DIE, but as my mind raced, I knew it wasn’t me. A warning, a psychic omen, had happened, but I didn’t know what to make of it. But I was certain that someone I knew would die.

In those days I always phoned my mother every Saturday evening. Collect of course. Unlike my disapproving father, she believed my psychic experiences and the stories I told her. As she answered, her voice was different. “I have to tell you something, and I hate to do it,” she began. Uh oh, what now, I wondered. “I have to tell you your friend Mrs. Nass died. She had a massive heart attack last Monday morning, during first hour at school.”                                                       

Mrs. Nass had been my English teacher, and more. A lot more. I’d had a difficult emotional time of it during high school, family problems and all. She was like my second mother, best friend and counselor all wrapped up in one. I’ve often said, whatever I accomplished in my life, it was because of her. She was a wonderful woman who really cared about us kids, the many students who passed under her on the way to maturity. She was a true teacher and then some.

Hearing about the death of my beloved Mrs. Nass, the person who helped get me through some difficult years, I immediately remembered that just the night before her morning death, that large bird, one I never actually saw, had smacked into my windshield. It had been an omen I was sure. I’d known birds to be psychic, spirit possessed, and sometimes harbingers of an upcoming death. It had been Sunday dusk before the Monday morning death of someone I loved.

I didn’t explain everything to my mother in that conversation, but on a later visit I told her my story. We both cried. My tears were for the woman who made all the difference in my life, and my mother empathized with me and my loss of a dear one. After that, my mother went on tell me about some of my Hungarian grandparents’ beliefs about the activities of birds, and their psychic significance, and what their presence or absence predicted about the crops or weather conditions. Nature gives signs of things to come, especially using birds as omens. Of that I am certain.

Richard Lee Van Der Voort, M.A. Please see my website that includes books, blogs and psychic services at http://psychicconsultingbyemail.com, and more blogs at www.blogger.psychicmind and www.blogster.psychicexcellence  For more information about psychic readings my e-mail address is pschicmind.vandervoort231@gmail.com