Hi, Desert

Thursdays with Starseed: Seek and ye shall find…surprises.

I'm at the Aztec, which isn't actually newsworthy, because I'm here every week—be it for the kale salad, the loose-leaf yerba mate or the free wi-fi (OK, and the free wi-fi).


But I'm not here to milk a single glass of South American tea while rewriting my website; I'm here for the Starseed.


I'd seen his flier next to the register, offering spiritual counseling on Thursdays, from 1-5 pm. I'm not sure I'm really in the market for spiritual counseling, but I can definitely use something—clarity, insight, a colonic—and so here I am, lumbering between tables, looking for the Starseed.


What am I hoping he'll tell me? I'm not sure. That the goddess of HBO development is hovering in my field, thrilled to offer me a seven-figure deal based on my bestseller? That he sees more adult contemporary dance classes manifesting in Santa Fe, and then offers up the coordinates to a secret ocean at the top of the ski mountain? That the astrologers have it all wrong, and Mercury's going direct tomorrow? Forever?


I find him sitting alone with his laptop in the back room. His name is Mattheo, and he's luminous and pretty, with scruffy hair, a rumpled collared shirt and a generous smile. He explains that Starseeds are beings who remember their stellar nature, and come to Earth to help out during times of transformation. As I understand it, they started incarnating around the Harmonic Convergence in 1987, and are a type of indigo consciousness, oftentimes armed with fifth-dimensional sight. But I hold my tongue, because I'm not interested in what I know, rather what he does.


"I see you," he says, round blue eyes boring heart-shaped holes into my soul 40 seconds into our impromptu staring contest.


"What do you see?" I ask, holding his gaze.


"I see sadness."


I've heard this before. My sad eyes, sad heart and sad aura are the first things all mystics notice about me—that, and my messy hair. Big deal. This isn't news.


"You're a faerie," he adds, writing it down on an index card lest I think he means diminutive Disney "fairy" instead of omnisexual earth shamaness.


"Did you say I am a faerie," I ask, "or that I'm of the faeries?"


Mattheo's eyes flutter back in his head as the words tumble out of my mouth. I'm not sure what I'm even asking, rather hoping that if I press him to go deeper, ninja journalist-style, he'll see more, and share it with me.


He taps the feather dangling from his ear three times, then goes back into his internal, eye-fluttery space while the black and white feather with the pink spine swings back and forth above his shoulder. I wonder what sort of bird surrendered it. It's too small to be an owl, too stripey to be a pigeon. What kind of bird has a pink feather spine, anyway?


"You are," he finally says. "You know about the I Am—it's your thing."


He's referencing that ubiquitous I Am consciousness that affirms our unity, infinite creativity and generalized multidimensional awesomeness. He's also right. In fact, I just loaded a video blog about the power of those very words onto YouTube this morning.


It's my favorite conversation, the kind I've had hundreds of times with reality-hopping friends. Mattheo articulates what I'm thinking as I'm thinking it and what's present in my field with real-time precision—tracking, tracing and speaking to countless multidimensional forces and levels of being and sharing that shatters all illusions of separation, of Newtonian duality and of the lies that 3D materialism is all there is, and that life is boring.


Mattheo offers me a healing, and asks for permission to touch me.


With one hand on the back of my heart, he sings in tongues, offers affirmations and reminds me to breathe, all with a vaguely Arthurian accent. I do my best to stay present and grateful and available to receive, while blocking out the sounds of café murmurings and trying not to think of genitals, which I compulsively do when hanging out with psychics—my own kinky mental Tourette syndrome.


"Your lineage is fucking loving you up, right now," enthuses Mattheo, as I release my maternal trauma into the crashing ocean I hold in my mind, while filling the newly freed-up space up with pink light and fighting the urge to pee.


It's sweet, and it's moving. I haven't had a healing, a shared mystical, interdimensional depth-diving experience, in a while. It feels like home.


"I'd like to be your friend," says Mattheo, hand on my sacrum, Sir Gawain accent fading. "Will you be my friend?"


I nod, still integrating. We exchange numbers and emails and hugs and smiles. As I walk to my car, lighter, tinglier and still kinda wobbly, I realize that a friend is precisely the secret desert mountain ocean I'd been wanting, and the sweetest miracle of all. 

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