Walking up a craggy path of a mountain on the outlying areas of Amman , Jordan where I used to live, I experienced great excitement and enthusiasm as I was to meet the lady who everyone knew of but few were lucky enough to meet. I had been told that she had airline tickets sent to her by Jordanians living all over the world –these people were rich, in difficulties and wanted her guidance. The first thing I noticed when I entered her tiny one room house built into the mountainside was a number of these unused airline tickets on a shelf in the corner of the sparse room. The first thing I wanted to check out was apparently true. She never used the airline tickets as she had no desire to leave her shanty town like room that had been her home all of her life.
The old Muslim lady had long red hair and appeared to be in her seventies. I thought strange that she did not know her age any more than did her fellow Jordanians. This lady had always lived there in her one room home since anybody could remember –she had always been there. She had the reputation of having a kind heart for any who needed her reputed exceptional psychic, mediumistic or healing help. I had been told people went to her to make a long distance telephone call with those who had passed on, to help with health problems, and to learn of past, present, future and distant events. I went to see if indeed this lady was what I understood to be a shaman – a person who has much in common with some of the select mediums around today.
I was surprised that she had names that were foreign to her and gave them to me slightly mispronounced in her strong Jordanian accent. This shaman or medium of superior abilities then informed me that I would be leaving Jordan within months as two years there was the time she had in her book. She spoke of my teaching job there, the pull the Middle East had had on me since my childhood and my childhood determination and passion to travel as soon as possible in the Middle East to learn more about and experience first hand numerous sites of religious archaeology.
Without getting too personal she told me that there was a named person who I had become fond of was in for a nasty shock as his mother was having telephone conversations with a woman in Syria unknown to him to have him forced into an arranged marriage of his Syrian mother’s choosing. She told me that if he did not comply with it his mother had forced his father to tell him that he would have to leave the family business that he had been running and would not receive the apartment that they had had build for him and all that they would give him was his clothes! The mother had done this as she wanted her son to care for her when the older father passed on. The old lady warned me he would be devastated and would confide this in me before I left Jordan . The lady informed me that he had studied in the United Kingdom although I had not known him in the UK and that he had learned our free thinking ways and that he had mistakenly thought his parents had adopted these ways as they had sent him and financed his study in Britain.
It is always the case for the reader to dismiss a strange occurrence like this particularly when it is someone elses experience that is recounted from their diary some years later. For me however, no-one in Jordan knew about my parents, grandparents or their childhood experiences and origins. The two people who had accompanied me to this lady’s home did not know the friend that she spoke of in Jordan . Arranged marriages did occur but the friend she named did inform me before I left the country of his shocking news. He believed his life was ruined, and that he had been betrayed by his parents who were forcing him to spend his life with someone he did not love or as yet even know. It was a shock as they were a modern professional family.
I will always remember the feeling when I left her home, it was like she had looked through a lens into the apparently blank pages of her strange and precious leather book and showed me ‘a day in the life of my father as a child’ my mother as a child and also the childhood of my grandparents which led to their marriage as romantic childish teenagers –it was made even more strange that she was not only speaking of the past that I was barely aware of but also speaking about people at the other side of the world who I had not seen for nearly two years and had little telephone contact with. She picked up detail and emotions connected with them too much to go into here, just as she seemed to have such a knowingness of what made me tick on a personal level too.
For the sceptic even if this shamanic-psychic-mediumistic lady used brilliant guess work on me, the information she gave on each of my parents and grandparents was much too detailed for it to have been guess work. Some may argue she used telepathy digging deep into my mind. Some may think she used her precious, ancient, leather and apparently blank book as some might use tea leaves in a tea cup, or tarot cards, as a tool to focus her mind, to pick up detailed information regarding past, present, and future events perhaps from the Akashic records.
