Psychic Telephone · 12
Phoenix
Phoenix doesn’t necessarily think that she’s psychic. She credits Osara with the psychic whatever-whatever. The actual information occurs only when she invokes Osara and has the setup Osara has explained she should have, which involves water. Osara is a water deity. She seems to like flowers and candles too, but definitely a bowl of water, a special concoction she tells Phoenix to make. This process is new for her. She’s only been doing it now for six months, and she hasn’t taken the time to align herself with the definitions. Channeling—she guesses that’s what people call it. But there is this thing in the Yoruba religion where, when you are initiated to a deity, you have a service to that deity. So it’s specifically channeling a deity that she’s a devotee to.
When she gives a reading, she uses the water as a conduit between herself and the client. And she generally touches their hand. This little point on the thumb, that little knuckle thing, seems to be a really good kind of antenna in the psychic world. So she tends to rub that and is able to pick up things. It’s something where it is tapping into that person. And then she just listens for Osara, for whatever she is going to say to her.
Outside of the readings, Osara usually chats with Phoenix while she is swimming. She swims laps in the morning, tries to go around six, and in the water she hears Osara’s voice, just has an inner conversation. She knows it’s Osara because—well, it’s not her thought. And it was while she was swimming one day that Osara came and said, You’re going to do psychic work. She had been working as a professor, teaching art at a small, private, historically Black college in Mississippi, and trying to find some way out of Mississippi. And she was preparing to come to Santa Fe for a six-month art residency, and it dawned on her that Santa Fe was a way out. That she could just move here in conjunction with the residency. Then when she got here, she was like, What am I supposed to do now, Osara? And Osara whispered, Put an ad in the paper. Oh, yes. And then, Psychic fairs. So she looked it up.
She’s still trying to figure out how it works as a business. Once a month, she goes to Albuquerque to participate in a psychic fair there. And she does it mainly to kind of hone her skills. It’s like a dollar-a-minute type of thing, so it gives the psychics a chance to dabble with whatever-whatever. She has not quite figured out how one parlays that experience, because it costs her more money than she makes, driving down there. But she might be beginning to understand how one develops clients from that process? At first she was just excited. So far it’s been about the excitement of it and the practicing of her skills and her relationship with hearing Osara for others and so forth. Whatever Osara says, Phoenix relays to the person. And she tries to help them work out what it might mean.
She thinks that when people get a psychic reading, they kind of know, they have a preconceived notion, of what it is they’re trying to learn. And they’re looking either for confirmation or for any kind of additional information that can assist them. Trying to tap a little further into what their mind can see—just tapping a little further to get to some sort of resolution with their own thoughts. And she thinks that’s perfectly okay. She thinks that’s probably a good way to use a psychic.