This evening, on the Ides of March, while cooking T-Bone steaks I found marked down almost 40 percent at Albertsons, I looked over and spied a deck of cards Ryan was examining. Thinking he had bought himself an oracle deck I jumped out of my skin when he held up a card and asked its meaning. OMG, that can’t be, can it? A few cards later I was reeling. I loused up the boxed mashed potatoes (I hate using them but it was raining I didn’t get to the store.) while processing the fact that Ryan had found a deck of cards I had sworn I had thrown out.

“Why on earth would you throw out oracle cards, especially a deck your mom gave you”? Why indeed? PS several years ago I wanted to replace the deck and the cost was over $280. It’s come down. But still. It’s pricey.

The late Harry Leo Duran, MD., Ph.D., MPH had decided to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy after having converted from Roman Catholicism and Father Mark was coming for a visit. If Harry had found my 1985 Christmas present from my mother, he would have destroyed them the way the Taliban blew up the Twin Buddhas or the missionaries to Hawaii had destroyed shrines, or how Oliver Cromwell ordered the burning of books in 17th century England. Harry, you see was a fanatic!

I thought I had actually thrown the deck out rather than watch my bookcase next to my bed get toppled and everything torn up. While in San Benito, Texas I used to hide the latest Harry Potter book under my bed. Fearing they, too, would get torn to shreds, I gave the entire collection of first edition hardcovers to the library where I worked when I moved away. Broke my heart.

When I lived in El Paso, Texas, I worked with a 5th generation curandero. Living RIGHT on the border, it was hard not to take an interest in curanderismo. Harry flew into a rage because he felt that was a province of study that only HE should write about, but I created a huge bibliography, published it on the web, and wrote a conference paper that got accepted. In fact, I was the lead speaker on Alternative Medicine at the National Medical Library Association Conference in San Antonio, Texas in May 2005.

Which doesn’t make me an expert. BUT I can talk about SOUL RETRIEVAL and LIMPIAS and PLÁTICAS because tonight I got to experience a soul retrieval in my kitchen and well I’ve had a limpia and a plática done to me back in El Paso. In 2005, curanderismo was a word people asked me to SPELL (pun intended). “What is it? Never heard of it”.

So, what happened tonight? An oracle deck of cards reappeared along with another deck of cards I received at a Tibetan empowerment in New York City in 1997 (8 Heruka) and a card from a deck of flash cards one of my students had let me keep. At around 1:30 p.m. this afternoon, I was talking to the vet tech telling her about how I used to teach Prehistoric Rock Art and then at 6:45 pm., one of the student assignments shows up at the dining table.

THREE pieces of my soul were retrieved during dinner! If you watch all the fancy rituals that cost quite a lot of money to retrieve a piece or fragment or sliver of your soul that took off when you were traumatized or injured or abused or simply frightened, you will see how important it is to FIND all of the pieces of your soul that got lost over time.

BUT you don’t need to do a ritual if you live a truly MAGICAL life. The divine will do the ritual for you and if you are blessed with living with a conduit through which the divine can manifest healing, all the better. Ryan is a pure innocent who has found more than one soul fragment. I saved his life the night he was attacked by pit bulls in July 2021 and he saved mine in Las Vegas in November 2021 and tonight he found fragments I thought I’d never find. It’s like Humpty Dumpty. The soul shatters. In order to be a truly powerful healer or a successfully tax account for that matter, one needs to be whole. I’m getting there.

https://www.ritualcravt.com/platica-a-heart-to-heart-conversation-with-a-curandera/