Listening for John D.

Sometimes those magic moments that we call epiphanies happen quickly, flashes of clarity that come out of the blue bringing us enlightenment, but this week I had one that took 30 years to come to fruition. You know how some people just stay with you, continually popping up in your mind, far more and long after you think would be reasonable? One of these people for me has been John D. and now I think I understand why.
John D. was a classmate of mine in high school. He was the biggest guy in school, a tall and strapping farm boy, and due to “alphabetical order” we were linked throughout our high school experience. In this tiny rural Nebraska school, Kelly F. followed John D. I sat behind John in most of our classes; I lined up next to him in PE, shared a locker with him and sat next to him on the stage at our graduation. But even with all of this close contact I have to admit that I didn’t know John very well. I was terribly shy and insecure back then and John was one of the popular kids, (yes, there are cliques even in tiny schools) and I guess I just didn’t feel worthy to open up to him. I have always liked to sit back and observe others around me and I observed John a lot. He completely fascinated me. There was just something different about him. He was just as wild as any of the other boys in the school but there was something more to him. There was a depth to his eyes that I have since come to understand as a mark of an old soul. He had a way of disarming a volatile situation by transforming his huge presence with unexpected silliness. What I get now, 30 years later, is that John wasn’t ego. He was authentic. He was who he was and he was just fine no matter what others thought of him.
John passed away in an accident only a few weeks after we graduated in 1980. I had moved to Phoenix and didn’t find out about it until after his funeral. The news rocked me to my core. I was unable to process all the feelings of shock and loss at the time, there was just too much to sort out and I didn’t have the knowledge or skills to put what I felt into words. So like everything else, it went on a shelf within me until I could figure it out.
A few days ago John once again popped into my head but this time I let him just sit with me trying to understand why he has stayed with me all of these years and then I got it. In the last few years I have been working to hear and trust my intuition. I have long known that sometimes “I just know things” but now I have come to realize that I am very intuitive and always have been. The thing is that my intuition has a soft voice, a whisper in the wind, and to hear it I have to really pay attention. In thinking back on my memories of John I suddenly realized that the whisper was there. My fascination was an attraction on the Soul level. John must have had some “gift” for me but I was unable to let him in to my life at the time. When John died, so did my chance of ever discovering what that gift could have been. That was what was at the root of my grief. Even though I wasn’t capable of understanding it at the time, my Soul knew. My Soul knew that I had forever lost my chance to discover what special gift John’s Soul wanted to bring to my life.
I pondered this realization for a few days. All the memories and emotions attached to them are as fresh as if they had just happened yesterday but with this new understanding I can see how all of the pieces fit together. What has become so clear for me is that John is really still with me, just on a different level. He still has a gift for me but now I will have to listen for the “whisper in the wind” to receive the message. The good news is that now I am ready and I am listening.
Blessings,
Kelly