Sweetie and I have our disagreements every once in a while.  We’re not clones of each other, we have differences, however invisible they may seem to our friends.  (Friends tease us we are slowly becoming the same person.)

When these disagreements happen, we may have a fight.  I call it a fight, because I hate these times, it makes me feel very upset when our partnership harmony is tossed on the seas of strife.  To someone else, it may not look like a fight unless there are raised voices involved (which doesn’t always happen.)

Over the holidays, a couple such fights occurred, enough for John to comment, “You girls have been fighting a lot recently.  It makes me feel sad to see you both upset.”  (I’m paraphrasing the feeling of empathy he projected.)

I replied, “Yeah, I know.  I don’t like it either.  Any suggestions?”

“You could try this:  take a small break from finding a solution and just spend some time hearing each other.  Someone talk, someone listen.  Then switch, so that each of you has completely expressed and completely been heard.  Then find a resolution later.”

I brought John’s advice to Sweetie and we discussed it – and we think this will really help.  We haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but I think it could really be the tool we need to diffuse the hurt and emotion from our infrequent conflicts. 

We always have and continue to find compromises we both feel at peace about, but I look forward to reducing the pain of the process.

Over New Years, Sweetie & I travelled a few hours away to visit friends on their little hobby farm.  We invited John to come with us for whichever parts he liked.

I’ll tell you about New Year’s Eve in a subsequent entry – that night deserves its own entry. 

The funniest part of the weekend was when we toured the city with our friend Shelly, and John came along.  I’ve done some readings for Shelly before, and since the reading I wrote about, she’s had a few more from me.  I was very happy when we started to get some things we could confirm for her – things like her cat describing her surroundings to such accuracy, I could not possibly be making it up.  Since Shelly now seems to believe in and respect my psychic skills, she’s a lot more open to really hearing what I get for her, when she asks about her future or her relatives.

And yet I did not tell Shelly John’s last name when he showed up at our New Year’s party, but I did introduce him as a spirit-friend who is helping me practice, which is true.  My friends are REALLY understanding and have cut me a lot of slack, weirdness-wise, and yet I hesitate to test just how far they’ll suspend their disbelief for me by telling them I’m talking to John Lennon.

John thought it was really funny that we’re keeping his *true* identity a secret, and so he kept cracking jokes and saying things to get me to trip up and accidentally spill the beans, or drop enough hints that Shelly would figure it out.  To make matters worse (or funnier) John was wearing the above pictured Big Floppy Hat paired with a pied-piper colourful coat and huge platform boots with heels.  He has such a picture strolling around on those long legs of his it was all I could do to not describe his every nuance or vogue-pose!

Because I’m so used to just letting the words flow, I often will just mindlessly narrate whatever John says, which is where the *real* challenge was.

Sometimes it comes out as a callback to one of his songs (making Sweetie snicker).  Or, a Beatles song will come up on the radio (which happened A LOT this past weekend) and he’d chime in with little back-stories for the songs, which I’d have to keep to myself or, if I blurted it out, pretend I’d read it in some magazine.

My favourite was when we drove past a VW Bug and I exclaimed “John says Oh look, a Beatle!”

If Shelly caught onto anything, she didn’t say.

I think that’s it for this week’s John Lennon Friday.  His advice to bring peace into our partnership was one of the best things that happened this weekend – and we had a *great* time.