Desperately in search of reasoning and an explanation for this unusual sighting, I sought help as anyone would by enlisting the assistance of a smartphone and a search engine.. “Surely this is going to unearth a detailed explanation of what just occurred”, I thought. “Who on earth was that in the mirror anyway, and why appear now?” My fingers were charged with electricity, hovering at the ready and waiting for my brain to spit out the relevant search words. But no, my fingers were at a hopeless standstill until eventually I awkwardly start poking the keys. “Seeing monk orange mirror”. “Monk headgear orange”. “Why monk appear mirror”. “Signs of hallucination”. My eyes squinted, jaws clasped and facial muscles tensed awkwardly as my visage expressed with LAMDA-worthy quality my embarrassment over my ludicrous searches. Such comedically irrelevant search results would have been useful if I wanted a framed picture of a monk or if I was in the market for an orange-clad mirror frame. Search aborted. FFS.
The strange thing was that I didn’t feel any fear when I saw him, I wasn’t scared. If anything I felt warmth and reassurance and I had the beginnings of an intuition that the answer would be somewhere within. As more and more questions swirled around my head I soon realised that there weren’t many people I could talk to about my experience. I am blessed with some amazing friends, it just didn’t feel like there were many that I could talk to about this particular topic. It’s not that I feel they would really judge me, more that they would politely look for some words to get through the conversation until they can pivot towards something they consider more interesting and less weird.
I had two people I could talk to at relatively short notice. My amazing coach and reiki therapist and my friend Claire. Claire is an emotional wellbeing coach and very attuned to energy. Given I was on a work trip a few miles from Claire’s home I contacted her on the off chance she could endure an enthusiastic if slightly confused monologue, and lucky for me she could. “Maybe it’s a spirit guide” she said to me casually, prepping dinner as her four year old son clung on to her left arm whilst eyeing up the pasta. “Harry, no!”. The notion of a spirit guide was essentially new to me, yet my intuition was clear: what I had seen was real.
Starting to see, aged 43 