I first noticed it when I was 5 years old. While playing out in the front yard, barefoot as usual, I felt a tingling sensation when I stepped on a certain part of the yard. Stopping to investigate, I found a quarter, a huge sum of money for someone my age in the early 1960’s. I took it in to show Mom and her response was:
“Where did you get that?”
“I found it in the front yard.”
“How did you find it?”
“I stepped on it.”
“Good job! Why don’t you go put it in your piggy bank?”
As I walked to my bedroom to deposit my new found wealth into my ceramic cream colored piggy bank, I wondered if I should have mentioned the coin was buried about as deep as the length of my fingers… I decided to leave well enough alone and didn’t say anything for quite some time.

With each passing year, I learned to pay more attention to the messages I was receiving from Mother Earth. Naturally, the messages were first received through the tingling sensations in my feet. I found I enjoyed walking through historic Civil War battlefields and loved researching where the locations of old watering tanks, hotels, and camps might have been located. I often dug up small artifacts, musket balls and buttons were my favorite, and I even unearthed a couple of old belt buckles. Friends and family all considered my ability to find these things as “Blind Luck”. I knew it was neither blind nor luck.

I always associated my ‘skill’ as some sense of metal detection as I had only been aware of the sensations in my feet and always finding metallic objects. That changed the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I spent two weeks at my paternal grandparent’s farm in southern Georgia. Located in the lowlands along the Flint River, the area had once been the home of the Creek Indians. As children, my cousins, my siblings, and I had walked the furrows of the freshly plowed cotton fields searching for arrowheads and remnants of other flint-rock based tools.The fields were no longer active, now overgrown and the land compacted and baked hard in the harsh southern sun. Yet, I walked the fields. I didn’t expect to find anything since the Creeks were not a metal-working group. I walked, hoping for the tingling in my feet. They never came. The next day, I strolled the area closer to what is now the lake, the lowlands long flooded after the construction of the hydroelectric dam. I wasn’t searching for anything, just reconnecting with Mother Earth and imagining what life had been like just a couple of hundred years earlier. As I walked up to the edge of some obviously older trees I felt a shiver. The temperature was in the mid 90’s and the air was calm. I wish I could say it was too hot for the gnats, but, sadly, that was not the case. I took a few more steps and the shivers subsided. I turned and walked back to where I had come and the shivers returned. I stopped and closed my eyes to see what vision would appear before me. I could see and older woman, kneeling down, using her hand to work a mash of corn and beans in an old clay bowl. The crops grown on this same land my relatives had farmed, the bowl made from the mud, so readily available throughout the lowlands. The bowl was crude, shaped by hand not on a wheel. There were no decorations – this bowl was made for use. I knelt down and brushed the fallen leaves away from where I was feeling the chill emanate. I took a nearby stick and carefully hacked into the dirt then scooped it out with my hands. It took about a half an hour to free a crudely made pottery bowl, about 10″ in diameter, from the grasp of Mother Earth.

From this find, I developed a passion for history, not necessarily from an archaeological standpoint, more from the connection to Mother Earth. I wasn’t interested in the taking away, though I did keep the bowl I had found as inspiration for my future endeavors, I wanted to know what Mother Earth was showing us. After several years of clinical test, both in the laboratories and in the field, many in the scientific community had come to the same conclusion that I had reached many years before, the talent I had developed of the years was not “blind luck”. I was eventually summoned to join a Middle Eastern organization searching for a missing link of sorts. A commerce city once fed the needs of a thriving Alexandria but it’s location had never been identified. Archaeologists had found traces of trade routes that were most likely used but they had never been able to successfully map their entire length from Alexandria to this other, unknown origination. The program tested my abilities to the maximum. I covered hundreds of thousands of acres, first by small plane, 4-wheel drive where accessible, and camels where not. When I felt like we were getting close we set up camp. I asked for three continuous days of calm around camp and the immediate vicinity. There was to be no air traffic, no vehicle traffic, not motors of any kind. I wanted to allow our impact on Mother Earth a chance to start healing. Before sun up on the fourth day, I took a small group and we traveled by foot due east, toward the horizon of the rising sun. We continued until the sun was directly overhead, where the shadows disappeared beneath our very feet. I drove a stake in the parched ground then paced off 600 steps further east and drove another stake. From there, i turned and walked due north for 600 paces and drove a third stake. Turning, again, I walked back to the west 600 paces and drove the last stake, outlining roughly a square out in the middle of the desert. I told them “This is the approximate location of the out wall of the city. Excavate carefully.” Within 6 months, evidence of the walls and inner buildings of the imagined city started to materialize from under the sand.

The success of this mission inspired countless other requests for answers to historical issues once thought to be unsolvable.I refused most of the requests but relished the ones I accepted. We were able to locate lost mines, we found hidden water supplies for remote people, and were also able to conclusively solve several missing persons cases. Then I accepted the challenge that I knew deep down from the very beginning was a mistake, but one I felt inexplicably drawn. I was contacted by the Sate of Arizona to study the purported Energy Vortexes in and around the city of Sedona. Upon my arrival, I was awestruck by the beauty of the landscape. I was drawn to the wind blown, red rock formations. I enjoyed the cooling waters of Oak Creek, Fossil Creek, and Wet Beaver Creek. The trails were plentiful, the scenery was inspiring, the sky full of stars at night. I even ventured into town and ventured into the many galleries and energy shops. It was at one of these store that I purchased my first “Map of Energy Vortexes”.

I spent the next couple of weeks hiking the trails, stopping at each place on the map designated with a small squiggly tornado, the location of an Energy Vortex. As you might probably imagine, most of the supposed energy vortexes were, in my opinion, no different than the surrounding area in the messages Mother Earth was sharing. There were a couple that were actually close to what I would term concentrated vibrations, but the map makers probably noted these based on “blind luck”. One vortex marked, however, sent chills up and down my spine as I neared it. I felt nauseous as I got closer and that feeling stayed with me as I circled the area on foot. I couldn’t get within 30 feet of the location drawn on the map as Mother Earth was succeeding in keeping me away. I set up camp a couple of hundred yards away and waited for nightfall. The buzz of activity died down as stores closed, vacationers retreated to their resorts, the diurnal animals seeking comfort for the night as the nocturnal ones came out. I gathered dried sage from around the campsite and used that gift from Mother Earth to fill a shallow pit I formed in the ground. I lit the sage and using a piece of cardboard, fanned the smoke toward the center of the vortex, cleansing all around. I sat and closed my eyes, looking for a message from Mother Earth just as I had done on the edge of my Grandparent’s farm several years before. The message was not well formed but the message was clear. I asked for permission to enter the area of the vortex and Mother Earth refused. I could still get no closer than about 30 feet to the center of the vortex. I have known the wrath of a woman scorned and Mother Earth was not one with whom I wanted to tangle.

The next day I contacted the Arizona Bureau of Land Management to report that I was unable to fulfill my contract. I confirmed that most of the designated vortexes detailed on the local maps were, in fact, no different than the surrounding areas. I also stated that I felt there was no harm as I noted that I witnessed great ease in the general public as they neared these areas, truly a mind-over-matter experience as the walked with the maps in hand. I also confirmed the existence of energy vortexes in the area but I could not determine the origin of the concentration of energy. That was a lie. Mother Earth had made it abundantly clear what her boundaries were, places not to meddle, to just let her be. I still love the Sedona area and visit regularly. I enjoy hiking the trails through the red rock formations, cooling off in the slow moving creeks. There is one place on the map, though, I will never revisit. “Where is that?” you may ask. That is for you to determine for yourself.