Many people ask me what it means to see the future, or the past, or the invisible. For Martin Luther King, for example, it could mean a possible construct, a hope. For Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell, it is the logical succession of events in a person’s life, predicted as easily as if one were looking at a travel log: the hero’s journey. For me, it’s something else.
I am fortunate to have been my mother’s daughter, the sharpest and most intuitive woman I know. We all felt it was very normal, but it was definitely not the fact that, just by looking at a person, we knew exactly where their emotional ailment, their manipulative corn, and their medicine was. She was, in turn, the granddaughter of Eleonora, a woman of deep Catholic convictions, a philanthropist of the most conservative sectors of the Catholic Church but who, on a certain day, would wake up dressed in black with the certainty that before sunset she would receive the unfortunate news of a deceased relative… And always, without exception, it was like that.
My great-grandmother Eleonora was Momó’s daughter. This character, half out of a mythological encyclopedia, crossed the Atlantic last century in a ship, abandoning his origins in some Dutch colony to arrive in Venezuela and marry, against all possible tradition, my great-great-grandfather Jorge, a poor fisherman with black skin, as black as the night. Of Momó there are some oral records that place her at the end of her days, tiny and with piercing blue eyes, sitting with her legs wide open and extended, spreading a group of Spanish playing cards on the folds of her immense skirt.
As for my genealogy, that’s as far as the research goes. Regarding my own life story, I can say that I have always, from the beginning of my memoirs, taken snippets drawn from the ethereal to understand people and situations, their pasts and their futures. From time to time it manifested itself as an imperious need to hold someone’s hand and stretch it out before my eyes, not to interpret lines or grooves, but to understand their whole life “in one fell swoop”.
After those imprints, the presence of my teachers, my mentors, those beacons on my path, which some might call “spiritual”, was the most important. The first person who put an oracle in my hands, their infinite kindness in opening to my intellect a whole mysterious and at the same time obvious world, the long succession of writers who nurtured avid and hungry spaces of my soul and finally the practice, that necessary development of the extrasensory muscle, that sense that sees, hears, feels and knows everything.
Some ask me if it is a gift that one is born with or if on the contrary, it is something that we all bring and will have to develop. I certainly don’t know in a generic sense. In my particular case, I think there was a tendency in the genes, a kind of biological predisposition to “feel” or “know” things. There has also been rigorously ethical and committed study and practice. What is certain, what I always say as a truth that fits my story, is that if you feel the inclination, the calling or that weird little thing in the center of your chest, you have to search, you have to attend the summons of life and explore, because perhaps, in the end, you will end up “seeing” what it is your destiny to be.