A Paranormal Researcher Seeks the Divine

By Robin M. Strom

There are two types of people in the world, those who are fascinated with the paranormal and all its mysteries and those who are not. This dichotomy of which, over the long years, I have become very aware.  Often those that I’m closest to have joked at my pursuit of the esoteric. My own brother rolls his eyes vigorously any time the mention of a big foot comes up.  And I realize the idea of big foot is preposterous to anyone that hasn’t actually experienced one. (I haven’t but I’ve read enough accounts to know that something odd goes on in the woods.)

One can scoff at the existence of the paranormal, but to do so you must ignore the fact that our very government has investigated such things as Skinwalker Ranch and experimented with remote viewing? The feds have sat on evidence of UFOs for years, and then re-labeled them to humiliate, one would suppose, the Ufologists, many of which have spent years and resources of their own in pursuit of the truth. One would ask why would the federal government dabbles in such “nonsense”; unless of course it wasn’t all nonsense. The answer is, of course, they hope to harness power they do not understand in order to create a weapon and yield power. And it isn’t all nonsense, and they know it.

An unfortunate course of events in my own life brought me to a cliff, a stand still, a cataclysmic dead end. Many researchers have come unwittingly to this conclusion that we ourselves are not immortal, and we stand to become the very thing which for years we have researched.   It begs the question, “what in the end was it all for? Predictably I came skulking back to the faith of my youth with my crushed hat in hand.  But, of course, I pursued my relationship with my own odd approach.

To the very religious, to those who think all wisdom comes only from the bible and nowhere else, my kind makes them very uncomfortable.  I make them very uncomfortable.  But I’m still looking for the supporting evidence. If I have one testimony, I’d like to have more. When someone tells me that God spoke to them, I tend to ask the hard questions, such as how? Did you hear a voice? Was it deep bass or baritone? Did it sound instead like the wind?  Was it likely, then, to have been the wind? Did you recognize a sign?  Did a thought just pop into your head? If so, how do you know it came from God? Is there some sort of validation process that we can go through? Can we compare the thought to hard evidence?  Did the thought come to fruition? Have other people had similar thoughts? 

My favorite are the signs. In my research of course, signs were the weakest of evidence.  And suddenly, like a superstitious fool, I’m looking for signs everywhere. I’ve been certain that some happenings were signs that I ought to follow, only to find that I was completely wrong. Then I back track and I question and I try to figure it out.  Of course, I feel like a dope, because I could have sworn that was a sign and it wasn’t. So, is the other thing I thought was a sign actually a sign? It ends up making my head hurt. 

I was told in my darkest time to just, “Wait and know that I am God.

“All right, how long? Are we talking weeks or months? When will I know the wait is over? Will things actually be better after I’ve waited, because they really don’t seem to have improved overmuch. And of course, the most pertinent questions, “Will they validate the parking because the hourly rate is ridiculous?” And, “Can I get home and let the dog out, because he really has to pee?”

I have a friend who feels she has a good relationship with God, whom she calls Gus. She has daily conversations with Gus. I’ve told people this only to have them turn up their nose at the very notion.   You can’t name “God”, you can’t even KNOW his name. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Christians are terrible snobs, which really doesn’t put the whole thing in a good light.   You can just hear the superiority in their tone as they look down their long noses at my kind.

 But I find it offensive to think that God doesn’t have a sense of humor. After all, who created humor and everything else? Why wouldn’t God be able to laugh at ludicrous things, the world is full of ludicrous things.  I think God understands that at my best and happiest I have a wickedly nasty sense of humor, admittedly off color.  I’ve found that the times I’ve actually felt he communicated with me were through humor. Those moments when I just threw my hands up in the air and laughed uproarishly at the whole ridiculousness of the joke. It’s what I refer to as the pineapples. 

My ex-husband and I had a terrible heated argument one night. In a pique I shoved a laundry basket off the second story landing hitting our pineapple chandelier and breaking the glass pineapple in the center of it.  For the rest of the time we lived in that house I tried to replace that glass pineapple. I tried lighting stores for parts. I tried going directly to the manufacturer.  I thought of buying similar but cheaper lighting fixtures to steal the glass pineapple out of the center, but didn’t because the sizing was wrong. In the end, I was never able to replace that glass pineapple. The marriage ended, the house got sold, the chandelier never fixed.  I put all my things in my tiny clown car, something else ludicrous about my life, and drove fifteen hours back to my place of origin. A place I vowed I would never return.  Because in desperate times you go home to the people who actually love you, pineapple breaking banshee and all.

One day, I was cleaning out my mother’s garage when I came across a box. Intrigued, I opened the box and in it was a pineapple bird feeder.  The top portion had the metal pineapple stems, just like the chandelier and the bottom would have screwed right into the light fixture. It was…or seemed to be…the pineapple for which I had been searching for nearly two years. Here it was in my mother’s garage when I no longer needed it to make the marriage right. And I laughed until I cried. I realized that the perfection was in the imperfection, and that was the best that our addled little minds could comprehend.

God, it seems answers our prayers all the time, in ways we don’t always recognize. I thought of a favorite movie of mine, “Eat, Pray and Love.” The heroine, also a divorcee, moves to Italy and begs for love and a family to fill her empty home. At the end of the movie her real estate agent points out that she had received everything she had wished for. The construction workers that repaired the house and made it a home became family and she fed them. And her friend had moved from the states and given birth to a daughter. So, now there was a child in the house.  Pineapples everywhere.

I also thought of a favorite rock and roll song by the Stones that points out, that if you can’t be with the one you love, then love the one you’re with.  The perfection is in the imperfection, and happiness is merely sadness turned on its head. 

The author Kate Bowler, in the book, “Joyful Anyway,” points out that Kant, boiled down said hopefulness  to three things: find someone to love, find something to do, find something to hope for.

Just look for the pineapples, and know the perfection in this life is in the imperfection.

I do know if, God forbid, I had been Eve in the garden of Eden looking on that blasted tree of knowledge I totally would have taken a nibble or two. Not that I’m fond of serpents. It’s just that, like a two-year-old I’m forever asking why? Why? Why? Why? I’m sure like any parent, God just gets exasperated with me once in a while, and simply wants to shout, “Robin, just put the EMF detector down, stop dabbling in Quantum Physics theories, pick up a bible and shut up!”

There’s an apple tree outside my friend’s house. He grew up in the city. I’ve tried to pick the apples to eat them. He’s thrown them away. They’re for the deer he tells me. Apples come from supermarkets not trees.  He’s a smarter person than me.