When it arrived, the cabinet looked empty. It was up to me to go about filling it for myself.

There were no rules about what was to be placed in wha position or on what shelf. Visible through glass doors or hidden in the drawer or lower cupboard? It was all up to me and my own determination.

I didn’t know what to put in it or how to find the objects that would become its contents. Were they magical before I put them in the cabinet or did they become significant through the act of placing them there?

Beside the cabinet stood the old radio, a freestanding piece of furniture with its speaker grill cloth placed rather ecclesiastically within a gothic wood veneer shape of three high arches like stained glass windows. Perhaps through the speaker I could hear the messages I’d need to understand how to fill my cabinet. There was a large circular indicator showing tuning for regular radio and long distance short wave. Turning the little dial made the long red line move within the circle, to reveal the exact coordinate of the radio ever. Static became recognizable sound, words and music, sent from a distant place to be heard here in my home. I hear the crackling and highpitched tones as I turn the dial but when the red line reaches the south, the signal is loud and clear.

Beautiful music plays from the churchy speaker, as I polish the cabinet with furniture wax. Humming along to a famous tune, I recall my childhood days gone by. Sitting like a pixie on the floor crouched beside the radio speaker, a three year old girl, listening to coverage of a civic parade. The marching band begins to play and I burst into tears, crying, “That’s my daddy, that’s my daddy.”

A few years later, I’d play pretend radio myself. “Turn me on, turn me on,” I’d say. My parents flipped an imaginary switch. I ran behind the couch, crouching, singing my heart out, “Let me go, let me go, let me go, lover. Let me be, set me free from your spell…” I was Gayle Storm, I was on the radio. But I couldn’t sing with the same abandon when I was face to face. Somehow reality blocked the other reality.

Today I go in and out of trance as the radio inside me sings songs I must transcribe. But like doomed Orphee in Cocteau’s film, I can sit at the radio for hours and hear no message at all – only gibberish. Wrong station, wrong frequency? Or is it that the hidden has garbled the intensity of transmutation into form and manifestation? Kind of like a ship trying to go through the asteroid belt without being hit by fragments from the explosion of past moons and planets. (And the other ships that didn’t make it.)

There is a better way: ignore the radio and use the intuitive intellect.

It has already refined itself to become an instrument of contact between the seen and the unseen, and it has the vital component of being part of the heart – of resonant heart energies.