Chatting With Spirit Guides

I have a few spirit guides I call on now and then for advice.

Usually it’s for writing. Sometimes it’s to talk out ideas about travel or how to gather information or how to process something artsy.

I had a younger male slave dude from ancient Greece for my first novel. For the second and third in the series I’ve been consulting with a rather large, carefree woman from France. I’ve also mused with an Italian Renaissance gentleman when working with erotica, (someone I haven’t seen in quite some time, I confess), a dime novel writer from the ’30s for a shorter novel, and a Chinese philosopher who nudges me to watch Chinese and Japanese movies about ancient warriors with English subtitles to get ideas of other worlds, other cultures.

Sometimes we have great conversations driving home from work or walking around the back yard. When I get stuck on how to approach a certain time period or way of thinking,  they’re there to bounce ideas off of.

Sometimes they’re off helping someone else and tell me they’ll be right there. As if spirit guides aren’t omnipotent.

They are spirits from the past, from past generations, past dynasties, past worlds. Important people and simple people. You would think the airwaves would be jammed with spirit guides filling every possible frequency, trying to communicate with willing human beings. But as I have discovered, this world and other worlds are not jammed at all. You call, they’re there, often with fresh ideas and lots of idle chatter.

Of course, common sense tells us when I’m talking to spirit guides I’m really talking to myself. Making up another personality to converse with. Perhaps that’s where split personalities or multiple personalities come from.

But I’m content to name my “common sense” side with a personality that I can learn from. Someone who “gets” me. Someone to help me through rough transition passages and quirky personalities that are not my own.

Putting a personality to a spirit guide helps me get through the rough patches of my writing life. They tell me things I already know but don’t always know I know. And when they really want me to figure something out they have me do research.

I don’t have anyone to really bounce writing problems off of. Sure, I have friends and family whom I can dump on for personal stuff, but no one that gets how important my work is to me. Writing may seem like a solitary experience, and to most it is. But when I get stuck, when I wonder why someone did what they did, they are there to give me an answer. To make sense of what I’m confused about. And it does help.

Too bad they don’t have an answer for the madness of the world today, too.