Line K Mayer - CRYPTOMOM tuning in

CRYPTOMOM

tuning in

“Whatever you’re feeling is what you’re vibrating.

And whatever you’re vibrating is what you’re attracting.”

- My mother when asked to describe her way of working and existing in the world.

It’s not like I wasn’t interested in what my mom did at work.

I really was curious; my whole family was. Everyone loves a good mystery.

Especially one that’s so close to you.

- “What did you do at work today?”

- “Oh… Not much”

- “But it was busy? Lots to do?”

- “It was fine. It was someone’s birthday… They brought cake.”

- “But mom, what did you do at work?”

- “Well you know I can’t talk about that.”

Asking my dad didn’t yield any results either:

“Your mothers work is so secret that she doesn’t even know what she’s doing”.

He obviously knew as little as I did. I had to find out.

The first step was simple; to find out how someone works professionally you must infiltrate their private life. That’s classic spy training.

Soon I figured out that what I had previously assumed to be normal ‘mom-behaviour’ certainly wasn’t something other peoples’ moms did.

Not all mothers have specifications as to how much a car window should be open, at what level the radio volume is perfect and is the owner of 23 hats all categorized by fabric, thickness, tightness, length of cap shadow, etc. My mom has a collection[1] of adder stones[2], a huge collection of animal-looking sticks without bark, a dollhouse hidden inside a cupboard filled with items and toys.

She digs up little plants and then plants them at home because she just has to know what they’re going to turn into, she conducts experiments on different birdseeds to find out, what kind of birds like to eat what and to find out when and in what manner they’ll arrive.

Another clue is that the items and her actions are not permanent. When she reaches a certain point or amount, they’ll disappear again.

” (…) then I’m sort of done and it goes away again.”

At the moment, she’s on the look-out for toads and rescues a few each day. A special toad-house is apparently also existing somewhere in the garden, but only my mom knows where.

Is it like a game? Unconsciously training for something? Or practicing? Keeping up the talent for searching and experimenting?

__________________________

1 My mom says she’s not a collector, she’s a searcher

2 A type of stone with a naturally occurring hole through it

How is it that a person can tell themselves: “I’d like to find 9 adder stones today” and then do exactly that?

To put this into perspective, let me tell you that in my whole life of walking on the same beach as my mom, I’ve found 1 adder stone. ONE.

My mom has so many adder stones that she’s giving them away; which is, by the way, the only reason she’s still searching for them – otherwise she says she’s done with them.

I started thinking that maybe her job could be held responsible for her perception of things.

Was her job seeping out through the cracks? Was the behaviour I was seeing in fact a sought-after talent by unknown officials? A person with a very fine-tuned antenna unmatched by the usual layman could indeed be incredibly valuable to some institutions.

A previous annoyance turned into fascination and I couldn’t stop asking her more and more questions, which always brought us to that golden question that generated the same dead end I had encountered so many times before: