I can’t write about what’s really happening to me right now. Great big elephantine gobs of change are stomping through my life. If gobs can stomp. I think they can on Willie Wonka. I digress. I can’t talk about what’s happening because I have to keep radio silence at the moment. I promise a full report after it’s over.

All I can say is it’s really scary when God listens with both ears. Usually I think He’s listening with one ear, the way I listen to my kids, saying yeah, yeah, I’ll get you some pink milk in a minute. Just let me finish this important grown-up thing I’m doing. But when God pauses, sets His work aside and looks you in the eye, it’s a bit mind blowing.

The last time God listened to me like this, I wasn’t even praying with my mind. I was praying somewhere deep inside of my soul for something I wouldn’t even admit that I wanted. It was a man who belonged to someone else. And yet, through a series of divine coincidences, this man was delivered to me. To be mine. For the rest of my life.

Now my soul has been crying out for something else. The chance to write. Every day it asks for this, even though I say, “Shut up now, that’s not doing anybody else any good. That’s not going to put food on the table or clothes on ours backs.” But my soul keeps crying out anyway. It wants what it wants.

I’ve been to a fortune teller three times in my life.

The first time was on a whim. A girlfriend and I were at some sort of fair in San Antonio and she suggested that we get our cards read. The fortune teller was a little Hispanic woman in a closet-like room that looked sort of like a confessional. My friend went first and I strained to hear what she was being told, but all I caught were bits and pieces. When it was my turn, I didn’t learn much more. The fortune teller talked so fast in broken English that all I got was “jealousy” and a “blue-eyed man.” That’s it.

The next time I visited a fortune teller was years later in Arkansas. I was in a bad marriage, so when the psychic fair came to town, I went. Alone. I approached a middle-aged woman sitting at a cafeteria table. She asked for something personal of mine to do a reading from. I handed her my wedding ring.

“Second husband, two kids?” she asked me.

“No, first husband, no kids. You must be thinking of someone else,” I said.

“Hmm,” she said. “Give me something else.”

I took off my headband and gave her that. She then predicted that I would go to England. Still waiting for that to happen.

The third time was a favor from a friend. A young woman I worked with read tarot cards regularly, and she offered to give me a reading when I was going through infertility torment. She lined out the cards in some sort of pattern on the floor of an empty cubicle (it was slow day).

“This card represents you,” she said. It was a card that represented motherhood. “You are going to be a mother, and it’s going to be easier to get pregnant than you expect. Science will help, but it will come easy.”

I did feel better after her reading, but I figured she was just telling me what I wanted to hear. I didn’t really remember her prediction until years later when Girl came along as a surprise.

I’ve been thinking about fortune telling lately because I’m researching tarot cards for my novel. I have a box of Rider-Waite cards, and I took them out to look at them the other night when everyone else was at swimming lessons. I did not lay them out on a table but chose the floor near the bathroom.

Those things creep me out. Some of them, especially the Swords suit, give off a definite eerie vibe. Do I believe in them? No. Do I think they’re evil? Not really, but they are definitely not divine. I think what they are is very human. They represent the mortal longing to grasp the future in order to have some control over it. They are scary because they conjure up fears of the future – loss, ruin, chaos, death, the passing away of the familiar, the inability to cope. The comfort I take in learning about the cards is how comprehensive they are in describing the human condition, and how ancient and universal that condition is.

Far be it from me predict the future, but I believe I will never go to a fortune teller again. I have no desire to know the future. I’ve got my hands full with the present. I’d rather just be surprised.

I did yoga today after a two week hiatus. It was if an old person had high-jacked my body and replaced it with something stiff and awkward. Not that I was supple before — I’ve never been flexible or athletic, but I had reached a point where I wasn’t falling out of the poses all the time. Not so today.

As I went through the set — cobra, downward facing dog, warrior one, triangle — I realized that grief had settled into my bones. By the end of the class I was crying.

It was only after I started doing yoga that I began to write again, after an eight year hiatus. Yoga has opened me in a way that’s hard to describe. I need to remember that yoga is physical prayer.

Do you ever read a news story and think, “Wow, they must have written that for Martians, because everyone on Earth knows that already”?

Such was the story about text messaging in The Facts, Brazoria County’s newspaper. The headline: “Professionals finding texting to be useful tool,” then it goes on to quote professionals who find texting to be a useful tool.

Beyond the “duh” factor, there’s a kernel of truth here about technology: If you haven’t experienced something for yourself, it’s almost impossible to understand it. Or as my Asian religion professor would say, “The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.”

I resisted Facebook and Twitter for a long time because I thought they would be time suckers (and I am vindicated). When I asked people what they were like, they all had the same answer, “You’ll just have to try it and find out.”

Because I know some of you will NEVER try social media (Dad), here’s my attempt to explain the surrealism of Twitter and Facebook:

Twitter: You’re sitting in a huge auditorium with thousands of other people. Everyone has a little yellow sticky pad that they’re writing notes on. Everyone is passing these short little notes back and forth. None of the notes are related to each other. These notes pass through your hands and you read them. Some of them are funny, some of them are smart, but most of them make no sense to you whatsoever.

Facebook: You show up at your high school reunion and ho, what’s this? Your work friends are there. And hey, there’s your cousin from Nebraska. And your college roommate and whoa, an ex-lover – where’d HE come from? Better duck into the restroom.