- April 19, 2024
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Nature Scapes garden center in Bunnell hosted the Illumina Psychic Fair the weekend of Sunday, June 26. I went, I saw, and I didn’t leave until I knew my future.
The sidewalks are lined with flowers and fortune tellers.
It’s Sunday, June 26, the second and final day of the Illumina Psychic Fair at Nature Scapes. And the weather hasn’t been cooperating.
I wonder how the seers didn’t see this coming.
“A real hippie fest” — that’s how Nature Scapes owner Mary Lou Baiati described the fair on the phone. Last night there was a drum circle and a flute player, she said. A couple hundred people came. There were belly dancers.
The afternoon showers lasted just long enough to cool the air and change the sky from day to dusk. Nature Scapes, the landscaping/garden center off Moody Boulevard, in Bunnell, is the perfect place for a fest like this. Tucked away. A maze of foliage and cobblestone.
The perfect place for my very first psychic reading.
Sprinkled around the hedges are tents and tables, banners advertising the services of pet mediums and numerologists. Financial healers. Reiki masters.
But I’m not here for any of that. I’m searching for the velvet curtains and the crystal balls. I want to breathe incense and wade through waves of fog. I want to hear who I’ll be tomorrow.
I want to see my future.
“They come from all over,” Baiati said of the fair’s patrons: from Tampa, Miami, places up north. It’s a whole community of future chasers and aura-philes.
Last year, the first Illumina Fairs were held at the European Village, organized by Terri Juchs, local real estate agent and event planner.
“This place has great energy,” Juchs said of Nature Scapes. “So beautiful and serene.” That’s why she switched venues.
Cats ramble around the property like they own the joint. Tropical birds croon. Somewhere — I haven’t seen them yet — goats and chickens are on the loose, making compost and eggs, eating bugs.
“I don’t work in death, doom and gloom,” one of the psychics tells me. The Rev. Carol Jo Garfinkel. She tracked me down when she saw me by the sculptures, snapping photos.
She says she’s internationally acclaimed. She says she has a 95% to 98% accuracy rate.
Lost inside a purple dress and light colored glasses, she details her 30 years of experience in self-healing, metaphysical training, ghost removal and palm reading. She’s ordained, she says, and has done work for police investigations.
I follow her to her table, her hair white and curly, pulled up to keep her neck cool.
“I have spirit guides,” she tells me. “I work with the angels, the archangels … the doctors and masters of the spirit world.”
When she speaks, she looks me dead in the eyes, or she glares absently past my shoulder. We’re sitting close, face to face. I think I’ve found my psychic.
She closes her eyes.
Rocking slightly in her chair, she jerksforward and tells me I’m inquisitive, ever since I was a boy.
She begins to grin.
“You’re an Indigo child,” she tells me. I have psychic powers, but I haven’t accepted them yet. I’m special, not like the rest. I’m here to lead others toward enlightenment.
I begin to grin.
She feels my vibrations, envisions my aura, all light blue and yellow. I’m intelligent, she tells me, not satisfied with what I have. I’m meant for more. Meant for National Geographic. Meant to lead.
But I’m also a loner. I won’t commit to one girl, she tells me. And I should definitely run for office.
She says maybe one day I’ll be president.
Immediately I begin mentally filling seats in my future White House cabinet: my brother, my friends, my brother’s friends. I’ll be the first bachelor president, the kind of guy you’d want to sit down with and talk turkey. The kind of guy to use the phrase, “talk turkey.”
I’ll have a dog called Jethro, and I’ll build a Wiffle ball stadium on the lawn.
I’ll turn union addresses into stand-up routines, expose the absurdity of partisanship through socially conscious quips, shatter party lines with perfectly timed one-liners.
Mr. President? Please, call me Mike.
My Nat Geo catalog will line walls in the study — right next to my Pulitzer, and a picture of my parents’ house, to remind me where I came from.
Leaning back in her chair, my psychic comes out of her trance and rests her hands in her lap. She shrugs happily. “Just like that,” her body seems to say. “Crazy, right?”
“Is any of this sounding right to you?” she asks, her lips parted and curved up at the corners.
I smile back. I nod and blush.
“Wow,” I say. “Every. Single. Word.”
PSYCHICS ON HAND
• Aynne McAvoy, psychic, astrologer, Reiki master
• The Rev. Carol Jo Garfinkel, psychic medium, spiritual counselor, past lives, psychometry, aura reading, cartomancy
• Joseph Fullington, intiuitive, numerologist, presenter, lecturer
• Sister Lucinda Bennett, intiuitive, card reader, financial healer, metaphysical spiritual teacher, constultant
• Peter Cheney, Osho zen tarot, I Ching spiritual adviser, psychic intiuitive, recovery and life coach
• Connie Layton, doctor of metaphysics, Reiki master
• Diane Gianlorenzo, psychic and medium for pets and their people
