The Call: Listening for What Lies Beyond

An excerpt from a book in progress

The Call

Before I knew the word spirituality, I knew there was something more.

I didn’t have language for it as a child — the strange moments of awareness, the dreams, the feelings of connection, the sense that the world held mysteries beyond what I could see. I only knew that ordinary reality wasn’t the whole story. There was activity and energy hidden beneath the surface, powerful realities waiting to be discovered.

From an early age, I carried questions that seemed larger than the answers available to me. Where did we come from? What happens after death? Does consciousness continue beyond this life? Are there worlds and realities beyond what our senses can perceive?

Sometimes these questions frightened me. Sometimes they made me feel alone. But they also carried a strange familiarity, as though some deeper part of me was searching for something I had once known and forgotten.

As a child, I had experiences I couldn’t explain. I felt the presence of beings beyond this world. There were moments when my consciousness seemed to move beyond my physical body, when I experienced myself as awareness separate from flesh. I didn’t know whether these were imaginings, dreams, or something else entirely.

At the tender age of five, I swallowed a peg piece from the board game Sorry. I remember hovering above my body, witnessing my father frantically trying to dislodge the blue plastic from my throat.

I also had a recurring dream that followed me for years.

In the dream, I was running through the woods while a bear chased me.

The bear was enormous. Powerful. Terrifying.

I could feel it behind me as I ran through the forest. Sometimes the dream brought me to the edge of a cliff. There I would stand, trapped between two impossible choices. I could let the bear reach me, or I could jump.

Then I would wake up.

For many years, I believed the bear was something to fear.

Only decades later did my relationship with it change.

I began to understand that the bear was not chasing me.

The bear was trying to get my attention.

It became a teacher, a protector, a guide — a presence I continue to connect with today.

Looking back, I can see that my relationship with mystery began long before I had any spiritual language to describe it.

I was raised in Christian traditions, shaped by both Catholic and Greek Orthodox teachings. I learned about God, Jesus, prayer, religious ritual. There was beauty in these traditions, and they shaped me in important ways.

But there was also a part of me that wanted something more.

I did not want to believe simply because I was told to believe. I did not believe in suffering, or evil, or hell. And I especially did not believe that God was male, or that women were innately less powerful or less knowing than men.

I wanted to experience.

I wanted to know.

Even as a young child, there was a rebellious part of me that resisted accepting someone else’s version of the sacred without finding my own relationship with it.

When I was seven, I received my first communion. During the service, I placed the sacred wafer inside my handkerchief. Then, on the way out of the church, I walked outside and threw it behind the bushes so my mother would not find it.

Looking back, I don’t see only rebellion in that moment.

I see a child already asking a question that would shape my entire life:

What is sacred, and how do I know it for myself?

That question would keep calling me. It would lead me through many landscapes — religion, art, psychology, yoga, nature, ministry, and eventually shamanism.

But before I found any path, there was first the longing.

The longing to understand.

The longing to remember.

The longing for something beyond the ordinary world.

And perhaps that is what a calling really is. Not necessarily a voice telling us exactly where to go, but a quiet knowing that keeps returning — a longing that refuses to disappear. Something within us that remembers, even when we do not yet know what it remembers.

For me, the call began in childhood.

It has taken a lifetime to understand where it was leading.