All I'm asking...

I went to the psychic fair.
The readers and shamans were there.
Went into a trance
Now I'll take a chance
On McClatchy, five dollars a share.

OK, maybe I'm overdoing the optimism a little, here. At last look up, McClatchy was at 3.42 (down .23, or 6.3 percent)
Silliness aside, I did go to the psychic fair this weekend. Or maybe that's silliness front and center.
I've been wanting to go to this event for at least five years--ever since seeing the signs up along Wornall on my way to UMKC. But usually I only saw them after the fact, when the fair had already happened. This fall, however, the stars were perfectly aligned. The fair was on a day I could go. Add that to the fact that the economy has quadrupled my interest in seers and omens. I put it on the schedule. Mike went, too. Hell yes, take the whole family.
The Psychic Fair, put on twice a year by the Psychical Research Society, is made up of tarot readers, shamans and other psychic advice givers doing their thing, surrounded by vendors from every crystal, herbal, aromatherapy and acupuncture place you've ever heard of. Off in one corner, there were various lectures on the hour.
Two were of particular interest: Changing negative energy into positive energy! and Animal Totems (for previous post on my interest in animal totems and the Great Blue Heron, click here).
Talk about your slam dunk.
Sixteen of us waited in the curtained-off lecture hall for AKA Santa Shaman to enter. Here's how the brochure described the talk:
This experiential lecture will help you transcend negative thoughts and feelings, and instead, think and feel more positively. It will help you create a totally different energy and conjure up hope and joy in your heart.
Well allrighty then. This sounds like just the thing.
At around ten past the hour, Santa Shaman entered. He was a diminutive man with long salt-and-pepper hair and beard tucked under a ball cap (was that Kokopelli on the front? I forgot to ask)
He walked slowly with a cart and some plastic tubing at his nose. He explained he'd had a bout with cancer and heart disease, and in fact, was supposed to have died in 2003.
Then he took a handful of bright, artificially colored feathers and shook them at us. "Hey, hey, hey, hey."
"Does that make you feel better?" he asked afterwards.
Um...
"Who wants to come up and heal me? I've been having some trouble with my knee."
A young lady who said she was a healer went to the front of the room. He made some motions over her open palm, first one hand, then the other. Then she bent down, touched his knee and fell a little sideways to the floor.
Santa Shaman then launched into a lengthy story about his quest to become a medicine man, his life as an ordained minister and truck driver, his law degree and his favorite horse (who was struck by lightning the same day the shaman was supposed to have died, which was also the day he had cancer surgery. This horse will be awaiting him when he crosses the Rainbow Bridge, he said he believes.)
"Who wants to be empowered?" he asked us.
Um...
And again with the shaking of the feathers and the "Hey, hey, hey." About a half hour had passed and still no mention of the advertised talk on optimism. Are there any questions so far?
"What about the positive energy?" one of us asked, timidly.
"You are all natural healers," he replied. Then he had us put our hands to our foreheads at the "third eye" and wait to feel the warmth. When that happened, we would put our hands on top of our heads, and SS would draw another volunteer.
He called on another lady, who stood patiently at the front while SS talked some more about his experiences in the armed services and the force of the pendulum. She got to sit down, without doing anything.
A few people got up to leave.
And then, he remembered. When you get those negative thoughts, he said, "go back to your inner child" and think about the things you did that were the most fun to you. "You'll be amazed how fast the gloomy days will go away."
End of lecture number one.
I saw Mike, as I waited for the animal totems lecture. He was just coming out of the talk on guardian angels and looked blissed out. Apparently there'd been some group hypnosis involved. "That was all right," he said, dreamily. (Read his experience here.)
The animal totems talk, by Cliff Humphrey was a little easier to follow. Animal totems are like guides that come to us to offer help and wisdom, if we are still enough to listen. You sit and wait and see what appears. And even though you may not be able to get into the woods for solitude, you can still look for them on a park bench (although, presumably, they'd be ants, pigeons and dogs. Or, if on the beach, seagulls, though I would think everyone who's ever visited a beach has a seagull totem.)
But apparently it's more complicated because it takes a wiser elder, like a tribal grandmother, to notice what particular animals you attract--say a dragonfly in your hair--and tell you to look to those animals for answers and...just as my thoughts began to wander I heard him say "Great Blue Heron."
What? What about the Great Blue Heron? My head snapped up.
And what does it mean that a Great Blue Heron swooped down during a wedding anniversary ceremony...I didn't catch it all.
"It's a blessing."
Well, I tried.
During the hour I had to kill between lectures, I looked around at some of the vendors' booths. At one was a Magic Eye game, which is kind of like a Ouija board only with a pendulum. You hold the pendulum over the dot in the middle, which seems to be magnetized, and the pendulum swings to and fro to spell out answers to the question you're thinking. It was free.
OK. I picked it up.
"Will the Kansas City Wizards win their last match tonight?"
NO
And they didn't (sigh). But they didn't lose, either. They tied, ruining DC United's hopes to get a playoff spot. That made me happy, in a mean-spirited kind of way.
One more question: "Will Mike's employment status change for the better?"
I watched it swing. Yes, No, Luck and then...
Earth.
Earth? Really? I started to walk away but turned around. This was much too important a question to ask with my non-dominant hand. I picked it up again, this time left-handed.
Yes, No, Yes, Luck. It swung wildly. It started to settle on No, so I moved my hand just a little. And the final answer, ladies and gentlemen: Air. Or Money.
Money it is.