Experiencer

For Ellen Marie Carll Kucera

My mother never knew the word “experiencer.” Yet she moved through the world as one, a quiet keeper of mysteries, a lighthouse for the strange.

That word arrived for me recently, and when it did, I began to survey my life through a new lens. Moments of terror, bizarre coincidences, uncanny synchronicities, and inexplicable encounters began to snap together like puzzle pieces. The scattered bits of high strangeness fell into place, forming a map I had never had before.

My mom had no map.

Childhood trauma opened her portal to the strange. To survive, she had to dissociate, making her vulnerable to forces we do not yet understand. It gave her a gift of psychic sensitivity but also drew all kinds of bizarre energies around her. Is it the chicken or the egg? She carried her abuse as a secret, even to herself, until her forties, and then no one in her family believed her. She wondered if she could trust her own mind. Her mind had kept her safe by erasing these memories, but when she awoke to them, she realized she had been betrayed by the very people who were supposed to protect her.

She was always drawn to the unseen and the mysterious, a woman of intuition and the woo, and she raised me with her own fiercely unconventional perspective.

Around her the uncanny gathered, and in her presence my own encounters bloomed and multiplied.

Experiencers are ofter multi-generational and in my bones I know my mom was an experiencer (my brother too).

I wonder if my mother’s mother was an experiencer. How far back does this go?

I write this for her, and for all who have walked that lonely nameless path, grateful for the life she gave me and for the way she opened my eyes to the unseen from the very beginning.

I wish she had known there were others like her, that she was never truly alone.

Even now, across the Rainbow Bridge, she feels ever near.

I have always believed her.