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Dorothy Fagan Waggener
. . . has been speaking to me for
as long as I can remember. Our conversations have been such a natural part of my
life, frankly I never considered them unusual. In fact, I never really
considered them at all!
You see . . . my conversations with
Earth Mother weren’t audible. They
weren’t even verbal! Rather, our dialogue was visual. It was a lot
like taking dictation, really. Generally it would go something like this
. . . I would see something in nature which caught my attention and respond
by capturing the essence of it on paper with my pastels. And so on.
The visions came to me constantly . . . one after
another. I was so accustomed to them, I was unaware of them as anything
unique. My friends noticed, however. “Where did you go, Dorothy?’”
they would ask. “Where did you get that idea? How did you come by
that information?’” they always wanted to know.
“I didn’t go anywhere,” I would
insist. “I’m right here.” My friends remained unconvinced.
And I continued taking dictation from Earth Mother in my deaf-mute manner
for three decades.
I painted some of the visions on paper. Others,
I painted in my imagination. The rest fell by the wayside. While I wondered
why I felt so driven to paint particular ones over others, I had no idea
I would one day discover that each one was a mirror of my life. And I certainly
never dreamed they contained messages from Earth Mother concerning aspects
of transforming my life!
 Silent
Mist
 iscovering this .
. . didn’t just happen on the way
home from work one day! On the contrary, my discovery was a direct result
of jumping off the treadmill altogether. You see . . . I was so tired of
living a life that felt as though I was always chasing my tail, I had decided
to kill the artist herself! Not physically, just that woman who was driving
me so hard!
I am sure this may sound strange, yet it was
really very simple. I was tired of re-playing the role . . . saying her
same old lines, doing what she was cast to do . . . I decided I could recast
myself in a new script . . . a new life! I guess you could say I died and
came back to life. Like many who have experienced death and come back to
tell about it, I had an extraordinary sojourn on the other side. And that
is where I began to see myself in Earth Mother’s mirror.
Killing the artist off sounded simple
enough . . .
In the summer of 1995, I called my old friend
Bob Mayo and asked him to liquidate the contents of her studio. Suddenly
his twenty-year quip about only representing dead artists seemed poignantly
appropriate. He agreed and pointed out to me how hard it might be for people
to understand how an artist could be dead . . . without being dead!
I told him this was of no concern to me. And
spent the next several months cleaning out her studio, filling the dumpster
each week with her stuff which I had toted around for years. At the same
time, I closed out her graphic design company.
By Thanksgiving when Bob came to the studio to
remove the paintings which remained, I handed him her will. “Use the
paintings to provide scholarships to those working in the area of responsible
creativity,” it read. “Don’t ask me how, I won’t be
here, remember!”, I thought to myself as we squeezed it all into the
van.
He drove off and I was free! I went upstairs
and sat at my desk. The silence was deafening. Nothing to do. No one to
call. It was wonderful . . . . Or so I thought.
For the two years which followed, I went where dead
people go . . . to the other side!
Or more accurately stated, onto the transition
bridge. Yes, I still walked around in my body. Yet very few people saw
me. I felt as though I had disappeared behind a one-way mirror. Everything
seemed to be backwards from what I had known.
The physical world I thought was so real became
just a grand illusion! People and things appeared and disappeared. And
I grappled with my senses to understand my experiences.
As I did, I began to see myself in Earth Mother’s
mirror. I began to see that the body of paintings I had created in that
life, foretold everything I was now experiencing! “Divinely Guided?,
Me?” I wondered in awe at the pictures and their now crystal clear
messages.
This is when I learned that my role on earth
is simply to listen, to receive inspiration like a divine gift, to ground
that creative energy here in the physical world, and to invest my creative
energy in what I truly intend to create!
Then one morning in the fall of 1997, Earth Mother
spoke clearly in words. And suddenly my
backwards world inverted itself. I woke early that morning, took my coffee
in the living room and as I wrote in my journal, Earth Mother’s voice
gently welcomed me to the new life I had thought was only a dream.
What she said sums up the whole of my sojourn
on the other side. I hope her words and my paintings will lift your spirit
and restore your faith as they have mine!
Mill Stream
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