How to Communicate with the Universe: Asking for Signs

Posted: July 10, 2021

By: Phoenix Giardino

“We bury our dead alive, don’t we? We hear them every day, they talk to us, they haunt us, they beg us for meaning. Conscience is just the voices of the dead trying to save us from our own damnation.”—Commander Christopher Johanssen, X-Files, Season Three, Piper Maru

(Photo: Courtesy of Phoenix Giardino. Taken in the tent where Shh…Prologue was written September 2019)

All’s Fair in Love and War

Ah, Botswana. Beautiful nation. Located in the southwestern portion of Africa, it tops my list as the most incredible places in the world I had the privilege to explore. Like most desert climates, dawn breaks a cool fifty degrees Fahrenheit in September; the nights dip as low as forty; and mid-day temperatures easily reach the low triple digits. During those insufferable hours, I holed up in my tent and tried in vain to pen the opening to my first memoir, Shh… Regardless of the angle I attempted, each time I began, images of an extremely vivid dream I experienced six months earlier pounded at the forefront of my brain. In this vision, I’m working alone in my office when an all too familiar sensation tickles my brainstem and glides down my spine before it sets fire to every cell in my body. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I know a beautiful Marine Sergeant, a man I’ve run from for thirteen long and torturous years, has returned to pick up where we left off so many moons ago.

(Image of Charlie & Maverick, Courtesy of topgunday.com)

If you’re familiar with the movie Top Gun, you’ll know EXACTLY what I mean when I say the sergeant and I were the real-life versions of Maverick and Charlie. If you’re not, watch it.

Without giving away the ending of my second memoir, If Wishes Were Horses, let it suffice to say “Maverick” and I had a falling out of epic portions. An hour after we initially split, my estranged husband seized my only biological child, and I fought the court system for nearly two full years to regain physical placement. In the span of a single hour, I lost my first real love and my greatest reason for living--then I lost my mind. Every ounce of anger and resentment I harbored for my agony was deftly aimed at anyone who crossed me, namely Sergeant Jordan Gray. I’ve done a lot of shitty things in my life, things I will never be proud of, but the things I did to Jordan are by far the most heinous of all. And that’s where this story begins.

More than a decade after I divorced and remarried, I went door-to-door to ask for forgiveness from each person I wounded during my mental collapse. With each soul who forgave my trespass, my heart and mind healed a little more, until only one person remained—Jordan Gray. Thirteen years had come and gone since that mind-shattering night and a snowball had a better chance of surviving in hell than Jordan was likely to speak to me, let alone forgive me.

Holed up in my tent and trying in vain to pen the opening of Shh…, the dream throbbing in my temples, beyond befuddled as to what I should do, I lobbed my question at the Universe. IF the dream, the memories, the constant reminders of Jordan I witnessed in the most unexpended of places were in fact pushes of Divine direction, I needed to know. IF the Universe truly intended me to contact Sergeant Gray, I need to see a sign—an unmistakable indicator I had never seen before and never would again—to prove to me the time to make my final peace with my past had come. Instantly, the words which had eluded me for weeks flowed from my pen, forming an apology letter to Jordan, should the opportunity for forgiveness ever arise.

“The dead are far more organized than the living.”—China Mieville, Un Lun Dun

From Your Mouth to God’s Ears

An hour after I returned home from Botswana, I gazed at my new husband jetlagged and asleep on the sofa and shuffled soundlessly out the front door to allow him to rest. To my amazement two fawns--one I intuited to be male, and the other female--loitered in my lawn unfazed by my sudden appearance. Stunned, I silently seated myself upon my porch stoop, conscientious of my every move, fearful of ruining this bliss-filled moment. For more than thirty minutes, the fawns grazed, their eyes casually meeting mine. Hesitant to pursue our interaction, the baby buck kept his distance. But minute by minute the little doe inched closer to me till she was so close I could have feed her from my hand, had I something to offer. Tears filled my humbled eyes as I raised them to the sky in hushed gratitude. Beyond a shadow of a doubt THIS was the sign I’d asked for a week earlier. You see, I knew Jordan was now the proud father of eleven-year-old fraternal twins—one boy, one girl.

“The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind and the signs they left scattered behind them.”—Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo’s Calling

Signs, Sign, Everywhere There’s Signs

In the post What is Vibration and Why is it Important to Spirituality, we now know everything in the Universe, at its most basic level, is a form of energy, including you and me. As we learned in the post What is Synchronicity? the Universe sends each of us signs to catch our attention and direct us toward choices not only for our best interest, but for the world as a whole. Just as the Universe sends us signs, so do our dearly departed loved ones.

(Photo: Courtesy of Phoenix Giardino. Taken at the Tautona Lodge in Botswana, 2019)

When our human bodies are no longer needed, our energetic souls, complete with all the knowledge, experience, and memories we’ve acquired on this earth return to the Universal tapestry. In her book, Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe, Laura Lynn Jackson explains the process. “At first, the Other Side will use what I call default signs to communicate with us: objects, animals, or events that jolt us into seeing a meaning that might otherwise escape us. Default signs might be coins, birds, butterflies, deer, numbers, and electrical disturbances such as empty cellphone messages, among other things.”1

“I am quite confident that the most important part of a human being is not his physical body but his nonphysical essence, which some people call the soul…The nonphysical part cannot die and cannot decay because it’s not physical.”—Rabbi Harold Kushner

Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe: Jackson, Laura Lynne: 9780399591617: Amazon.com: Books

However, these communications are a two-way street. Not only can the deceased communicate with us, so, too, can we communicate with them—through the language of signs. The true beauty of asking the Universe for an affirmation, whether it be to know if we’re currently on the right path or if now is the time to finally make that bold move we’ve put off due to fear of the unknown, is that WE can choose the sign rather than the Universe choosing it for us. The key is being as clear and specific in nature regarding what it is we need to know in a “Yes” or “No” format—what we need to see to confirm our answer. And truly it can be anything you want it to be. The key to seeing your sign is opening your heart and mind to all the strange and beautiful ways it might appear.

1. Jackson, Laura Lynn, Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe. (New York: The Dial Press, 2019), xviii-xix