Minneapolis is ablaze in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. It’s hard to know what, if anything, to say. If there is a hope, it’s that things will change as a result of this. For now, all you can do is feel love and grief and empathy for the people who are hurting so much.

Al and I have been reading Laura Lynne Jackson’s books “The Light Between Us” and “Signs”. The stories are so compelling. In them she describes the ‘Other Side’, a semi-place where our souls go when our bodies die, from which we can communicate in subtle ways with the physical world. One of these ways is through signs - things like coincidences, number sequences, random messages.

It begs a lot of questions. Why can they only communicate in these ways? If they can affect change in the physical world, why don’t they write out a sentence or two? How much of the future can they see? If they are pure consciousness, why do the spirits have personalities? Why do they come through Laura Lynne so much more strongly? Also if, as she has described, time doesn’t exist on the Other Side, and spirits are available for communication even after they might have reincarnated, could she choose to communicate with Jesus? Buddha? Abraham Lincoln? Hildegard of Bingen? I’m sure they’d all have something to say about the world we live in now. What about unsolved murder victims? Why not talk to them and get them to show you who killed them?

Despite all of this, it still rings true somehow. There are so many things in our lives of which we are unaware, or which are hard to explain. What I like is that the message of the books, as she puts it, is not to make you believe in the supernatural necessarily, but to be more open to the possibility of things beyond yourself, your senses. And if you do believe in the Other Side, then it is a comforting thing to know that it is full of love.