A Seer in the House
by Cait Johnson

Intuition is a universal human birth right, but just as anyone can prolong a vowel sound and call it singing while people with perfect pitch or the ability to hit high C are fairly rare, so it is with real intuitives. There are basically three groups of these, I think: those who are born with an extra dose of this innate ability, those who have it and choose to train and perfect their gift, and those who have the gift and the training, plus a rigorous sense of responsibility.

My mother is one of the first group: a natural intuitive. But she is not like the woman in The Medium; Mom doesn't work with the police to solve crimes, and she doesn't wake screaming from dreams of dismembered corpses knowing where they are buried. She is, as she will tell you, a common-and-garden intuitive, with an uncanny skill for everyday living. Perhaps she could have been more, but she was warned away from her ability by a priest when she was a good Catholic girl, and she has always downplayed it. But the gift still claims her from time to time.

At a cocktail party once when she was a glamorous young woman, my mother met a professor of parapsychology from Columbia University who was doing research on psychic phenomena. He had come up with a test to evaluate psychic abilities, and had given it to thousands of people. So, as my mother perched on the arm of a sofa sipping a dry martini in the midst of all the babble, he gave her the test. She scored higher than anybody he had ever tested.

Picture a typical dinner scene at the Johnson house when I was a little girl: like most of our suburban neighbors, my mother, father, and I sit around a large dining table eating iceberg lettuce with bottled dressing and spaghetti with sauce made from a packet (my mother adored convenience foods). Instead of the usual "How was school?" or "Tell me about your day, dear" however, the dinner conversation went more like this: "I'm thinking of a number from one to ten. What is it?" or "Think of a color and send it to me in your mind."

It dawned on me very slowly that nobody else's families did this, but the training it gave me was invaluable—not that it made me very popular with the neighborhood kids. Remember the game where a group hides an object and "it" has to find it guided only by "You're cold" or, "You're getting warmer"? When I played this game for the first time with my new neighbors, I was "it." As I waited patiently around the corner from where they were hiding a ping-pong ball, I saw an image of where it was very clearly in my mind. Sure enough, when they called "ready!" I went right to it. Unfortunately, this just confirmed my status as a total oddball.

Fast forward several years; I'm now a young woman in graduate school and I have driven for two hours on the expressway to have lunch with my parents and am heading back to school. About 20 minutes into the return trip, the hood of my car flies up, completely blocking my view. Somehow I manage to pull over, hands shaking, and I try to get the thing to latch but the catch is broken and the damned thing won't stay down. This is in the days before cell phones: cars are whizzing past, it's getting dark, and there is no help in sight. I'm panicked.

My mother says, "You'd been gone about 20 minutes and all of a sudden I got this really bad feeling; I knew you were in trouble. I said to your father, 'Bob, something's wrong with Caity. We've got to go find her.' Of course, he looked at me like I was crazy, so I said, 'Fine, you can stay here, but I'm going.' When he realized I was really serious, he got his coat and off we went."

I looked up about 20 minutes later, and there were my parents in their big blue land yacht, like knights in shining armor, pulling over, jumping out of the car, and hugging me. My dad later told me, "I‘ve lived with her long enough to figure I should listen when she‘s that certain about something."

Many folks think that if you're really intuitive, you should be able to predict winning lottery numbers, or win big at the races. My mother only went to the races once, and she said later that she "just knew" which horse to bet on, and it did win. But she felt so guilty and weird about it that she never went back. Like my winning the neighborhood game, it felt like cheating.

All through my life, despite my adolescent begging (Will he call? Will we get back together?) my mother has usually refused to tell me what she feels is going to happen because, as she says, "I don't want to influence you." Maybe that's why I won't do predictives for people: I believe we can change our futures depending on the choices we make today.

Like many of my friends, I was given a deck of Tarot cards when I was 16. But unlike my friends, I never put them away, but only deepened in my love of the cards and their magical ways of helping, year after year. Having a system like the cards gave me a structure from which to offer guidance. It is a beautiful responsibility.

Unfortunately, irresponsible intuitives abound. A woman who came for a Tarot reading once told me, "When my sister was 20, a Tarot reader told her she would be dead before she turned 40. She never said anything to anybody, but she carried this terrible fear for 20 years. Finally, on her 40th birthday, she threw a huge party and told us all." It must have taken an incredible amount of courage for her to come for a reading with a family history like that.

Responsible seers use their abilities in positive ways, offering imagery, visioning, and a template within which people are invited to make wise choices. And it is a great pleasure to meet others of a like mind, I can tell you. As of this writing, several of us have joined together to form the Hudson Valley Seers: rune master and shamanic practitioner Tom Cowan, astrologer Tad Mann, and Tarot readers Rachel Pollack and me. (Look for the Hudson Valley Seers ad in this issue.) When I told my mother about this group venture, she was slightly wistful. "I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like," she said, "if I had met other people like me." If she had, perhaps I wouldn't have been the only one to benefit from her gifts.