The Artist and Omar
During the years when I started to write down the stories that Omar told me my children, being teenagers and young adults, still lived at home. When Omar made contact with me, everyone, my family and friends who were around me, knew it. The walls would shake, the dishes would vibrate. Every one took it stride and with good humor.

“Does he have to come during dinner Mom,” my son would ask when the dishes would rattle. My friends and family felt his presence and everyone was curious about Omar and his visitations and the stories he told. There was a great deal of interest in his looks and his clothing. As I was the only one who saw him, I tried my best to describe him in great detail. To help my efforts along I was given a gift.

My neighbor, an artist and teacher, came to visit one day. He brought with him a drawing. “I was standing on the kitchen table painting the ceiling,” he said, “when a man’s face flashed in my mind.” He got off the table as fast as he could and sketched the face.
At that point, he showed me the drawing, and to my amazement, it was a perfect likeness of Omar.

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CHAPTER THREE

Walkingfeather:

A Time of Transition

From 1953 to 1979 I devoted myself to raising a family. Four kids came in quick succession, and after my husband finished his college education and went to work in the family business, we bought the Draker farm on White Day creek. I was young and healthy and full of energy, and it was a good thing, because farm life with its gardens, animals, people, buildings, and community demanded constant attention. Although I was always busy and active, I never totally forgot my vision that I had had on the farm as a 17-year-old girl.

The mystery and the spontaneous happiness it had engendered awoke in me a longing for a deeper, more satisfying communion with life and love. I wanted a closer walk with God, and that was what I prayed for. My search for God often put me at odds with the Christian community around me and the religious beliefs that I grew up with. I felt the need to hide what I thought, what I read and experienced, and I knew better than to talk in public about the new and different beliefs that I began to explore and accept.

Despite the growing chasm between me and the members of my religious community I still drew strength and faith from my connection to God through the teachings and songs of my Christian upbringing. As the days turned into years, one song in particular returned to me over and again, sustaining me in the rough times when I lost sight of the road ahead. I remember standing next to Ma in that little Methodist church in Colfax, WV, singing that old hymn, “Higher Ground,” written by Johnson Oatman Jr. in 1898:

I’m pressing on the upward way New heights I'm
gaining every day Still praying as I onward bound
"Lord, plant my feet on higher ground."

Lord, lift me up and let me stand By faith on
heaven's table land A higher plane than I have
found Lord, plant my feet on higher ground…

In his hymn, Oatman gave words that expressed my longing to live for God and to seek the higher ground of God’s goodness and grace. Consumed by grace, I thought I’d burst wide open when the song triggered flows of spiritual energy that moved up through my body and out the top of my head, leaving me shaking and tingly all over. Looking back, I realized how that song helped me walk up an inner stairway of light and into a space that filled me with ecstatic emotions and love of God.

After the service, Ma and I’d walk back across the old bridge that spanned the Tygart River and down the dirt road a mile or so to her house. We’d walk through the front door and my grandpa would always look up and ask her if the church service had “turned on her utilities.”

As the years passed, I had glimpses of other realities, and many of those experiences supported my belief that there was more happening in life and on my farm than first met the eye. I had grown up with the second sight as my Native American grandmother called it, so I saw and heard things that other people didn’t see and hear. I began to feel the need to go inward. The busy activity of life pulled my attention in many competing directions and I found it hard to settle down and just be still. I wanted to learn how to meditate, to learn how to quiet my mind, so I could know what was going on around me on other levels of awareness.

At that time, I worked for a department store at Middletown Mall outside of Fairmont, W Va. There was a pleasant long-haired boy who worked in the shipping storeroom packing boxes. In those days, funny enough, I had only heard about hippies, and because of his appearance, I assumed that I had met one for the first time. We shared the same lunch hour, and it was on one of those lunch breaks that he told me about his meditation class. For days thereafter I listened to him talk about his experiences and how wonderful he felt.

A short time later a neighbor of mine, an art professor at Fairmont State College, told me he had taken the meditation course as a way to deal with high blood pressure and hyper tension. A doctor at West Virginia Medical Center had given him two options: Take the $1,500 biofeedback program taught at the Medical Center or “go to downtown Morgantown to the new meditation center and get the same thing for $250.”

My neighbor and friend being a thrifty man opted for the meditation process. Once he started to meditate, he had glowing things to say about the practice. I decided this was for me, I would do it!

Because of the area I lived in I felt the need to deflect the criticism that I thought might arise because of my choice to learn meditation. My neighbor provided me with the excuse that I needed to quiet my critics if they appeared. I was going to take the meditation course for its health benefits, particularly to help stem the allergies I had developed over the past few years.

In 1973, on a rainy, stormy December night my husband and I met Adrian Summers, the local meditation teacher at the Court House in Morgantown, WV, where he offered free introductory lectures in those days. When I met Adrian, there was a moment of instant recognition, a deep familiarity that attracted me and intrigued me and set in motion a soul yearning that would take years to understand.

Meditation changed my life. I became focused and centered. I meditated faithfully for a number of years and the process took me beyond thought into the ocean of silence, the vast terrain of spirit. Through the process of meditation I cultivated the ability to quiet my mind and outer senses, and in so doing, I became more aware of the subtleties on the inner planes of awareness. At some point during a deep meditation I suddenly realized that a male figure was in my awareness, meditating with me, using the same mantra I used.

Having been raised in a fundamentalist setting, I was armed to the teeth with ideas of seducing spirits and evil beings in familiar garbs, so it was no light matter for me to accept this unusual contact as a watershed event on my path back to God. But indeed it was. Omar passed all my tests, and a few other people’s too, and finally it was his great patience, love, and wisdom coupled with my own inner sense of safety, truth, and joy that convinced me that he was who he said he was – my Over-Soul, here to gather his lost kinsmen and to awaken us to our long forgotten past and the mission that we had volunteered for centuries ago.

My great grandmother’s prophecy took on new meaning when Omar began to dictate to me the stories of our people’s efforts to help bring light and balance to the people of planet earth. He opened my eyes to the existence of the “mystical land of Arina” and introduced me to Arin, the mysterious figure behind its creation. Beyond that he arranged for me to meet “The Shepherd,” a being of great love and wisdom who watches over and cares for great numbers of souls, as they make their way through the pathways of material life.

The whole revelation unfolded like an exquisite movie script, as I later discovered that Adrian was also an integral part of this epic saga, with an equally amazing story, that would eventually lead Adrian and me to understand our deepest soul origins and to realize what and who we were to each other now and eons ago.