You Must Be Julie

In June 1994, I drove out to Hanging Rock with my friend Pam.

Hanging Rock sits about an hour north of Melbourne - a volcanic formation rising out of the flat plain, dense with old growth and silence. Most Australians know it from Joan Lindsay’s novel, the one about the schoolgirls who walked into the rock on Valentine’s Day and didn’t come back. What the novel understood, even if it couldn’t say so directly, was that the rock is ceremony ground. The Wurundjeri people knew this long before anyone wrote a word about it. I didn’t know it consciously that day. But when Pam gave me a Reiki treatment on the top of the rock, and a white cloud moved toward us from the right and wrapped itself around us both, I understood that whatever had just happened was not Pam.

I named it White Cloud. It was the most powerful thing I had felt in my body up to that point in my life. On the drive home I had one thought: I need to learn that.

Pam had trained in the Usui method, so we got out the yellow pages and looked for Usui Reiki centres in Melbourne. We found two numbers. The first didn’t answer. The second was the Usui Reiki Centre in Camberwell. I signed up.

The teacher was Denise Crundall. She taught with a quiet authority I recognised before I had words for it — the kind that doesn’t need to perform itself. At some point during the course she mentioned her son, and his girlfriend. Something moved through me — small, quick, gone almost before I could catch it. A sense of no about the girlfriend that I had no business feeling. And then, underneath that, something quieter and stranger about the woman teaching the room: she doesn’t know me yet. But one day she will.

I had no idea what that meant. I noted it and kept going.

By then I had moved to Macquarie Street with Pam. The share house in Electra Street had come apart — over toothpaste — and we had landed in a place belonging to a friend of hers. We had somehow acquired a ginger cat named Leckie, a tabby I named Bastet, and a rabbit from across the road that had adopted us of its own accord. Life had that quality it sometimes gets in your mid-twenties — slightly improvised, surprisingly full.

The Reiki 2 workshop was smaller than the first course. When we were assigned to partners for the absent healing, I remember thinking, with more confidence than was probably warranted: who is going to be the lucky one who gets me. It ended up being a woman named Danare. Watching her receive what I sent was one of the purest feelings I had known — not pride, something cleaner than that. The truest form of giving love, I wrote in my diary that night.

There was a man at the course I didn’t pay particular attention to. When I arrived - the last one - he looked up and said: You must be Julie.

I assumed he could read minds. He laughed and held up my name tag. I was simply the last name left on the list.

I didn’t know he was Denise’s son. I filed the moment away and thought nothing more of it.

Six months later, in April 1995, the vision came.

I was sitting in the lounge room at Macquarie Street, the rabbit settled on my lap. Then something shifted, not a sound, not a light change, but a quality in the air, like a veil coming down. My surroundings were still present. I could feel the rabbit, the floor, the room. But overlaying all of it was somewhere else entirely, vivid and specific in the way that distinguishes vision from imagination.

I was standing. To my right was someone I recognised as a soul connection, a man the universe had already made clear would not become a partnership in this lifetime. To my left stood another man, dark-haired. He turned to me and said: You must be Julie.

Then the veil lifted. The rabbit was still on my lap. The lounge room was exactly as I had left it.

That night, according to my diary, the vision came again. I don’t remember the second time with the same clarity, only that I wrote it down: the vision was shown again last night. Whatever was being shown to me wanted to make sure I had received it.

I didn’t know what it meant. I wrote it down and waited.

It was saying yes to Chris Harvey that set the next piece in motion.

Chris had been my shift team leader at the chemical plant. He was retraining as an outdoor recreation instructor and needed a group for his final assessment - hiking, rock-climbing, abseiling, sailing in the Whitsundays. I have written elsewhere about the series of impossibilities that resolved themselves so I could go, that story is in The Houses. What matters here is that before the trip, there was a registration night.

Everyone attending was asked to gather at a house in Canterbury.

I made my way there on my own, the way I did most things in those years. I found the address and knocked. The door opened.

The man standing in the doorway was dark-haired.

Before I could speak, before I had even fully taken him in, the memory arrived; Reiki 2, the last name on the list, the man who had looked up when I walked in. And behind that, immediate and vivid, the vision. The lounge room at Macquarie Street. The rabbit on my lap. The veil coming down. The dark-haired man turning toward me.

You must be Julie.

He said it again now, in a doorway in Canterbury, holding out his hand.

It was the same man. The same words. The same moment I had been shown twice in my lounge room, seven months earlier, while a rabbit sat on my lap and the world went briefly somewhere else.

I stood there and let it land.

He was Denise’s son. The teacher who had placed her hands on my energy field and whose lineage I was now standing inside, her son was the dark-haired man in the vision. The instinctive flicker at Reiki 1, the name tag at Reiki 2, the veil descending at Macquarie Street. Eighteen months of separate moments, each one filed away and half forgotten, had just collapsed into a single doorway.

His name was Sean.

I stepped inside and said nothing about any of it.

The trip itself is another story, parts of it already told or waiting to be. What the Whitsundays gave me, beyond the red rock wall and the orbs becoming O and S, was something more immediate and considerably more inconvenient.

Somewhere in the middle of it, the nudge arrived.

I had been getting to know Sean over the course of the trip. He was easy company, and I noticed his shoulders. And I had become quietly certain, in the way I had learned to trust by then, that I was supposed to ask him out.

The problem was that he had a girlfriend.

I sat with this for longer than was comfortable. The nudge didn’t care about the girlfriend. It simply kept arriving, patient and consistent, the way those things do when they mean business. I told the universe, silently and with some firmness, that I couldn’t do it. That it wasn’t right. That there was another person involved and I had no intention of being the one who complicated that.

The nudge didn’t argue. It just stayed.

I had learned, by then, that spirit responds to action, but also that it can be tested. I had drawn a square on a Melways and told the universe to find me a house inside it. I understood the principle. So I made an offer.

Sean was driving. I was in the back seat. I looked at the clock and I made my terms: if he tweaked his nose, tipped his hat, and pulled his right ear lobe - all three, in that order, within the next ten minutes - I would ask him out. Three movements, ten minutes. I sat back feeling quietly confident that I had made it impossible.

At nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds, he tweaked his nose. Tipped his hat. Pulled his right ear lobe.

I sighed.

Damn.

The right moment came not long after, the two of us alone in a four-wheel drive, the kind of accidental privacy that doesn’t come twice. I took a breath and asked him if he’d like to go out for dinner when we got back to Melbourne.

He looked startled. Then he steadied. He told me he was in a relationship, but that he and his girlfriend had been talking about ending things. He wanted to sort that out first, properly, before he reconsidered my offer. He asked if that was alright.

It was. He had said it cleanly, without deflection. We drove back to Melbourne. I let it go and got on with things.

Months went by.

I heard nothing. I got on with the business of 1995, the house, the new job, the settlement, the slow ordinary work of building a life. I didn’t wait by the phone. I had asked, he had answered, and I had released it in the way I had learned to release things that were out of my hands. But as the months stretched I began to think, quietly, that I had simply been wrong. That the nudge had been real but the outcome hadn’t meant what I thought it meant. That sometimes you are moved to act and the act itself is the point, regardless of what follows.

And then, one day out of the blue, the phone rang.

It was Sean.

I have been with Sean for thirty years now.

I won’t tell you it has been easy. It was never designed to be. When I eventually studied our chart synastry, I found the architecture underneath what we had been living — the reason two people who chose each other can spend decades simultaneously drawn together and rubbing against each other’s rawest edges.

Our North Nodes are conjunct in Aries - we share a direction, a soul assignment in this lifetime. But it is the cross-wiring that tells the real story. My North Node, the direction I am here to grow toward, sits conjunct his Chiron - his deepest wound. His North Node sits conjunct my Chiron. We are each other’s medicine and each other’s provocation, written into the chart before either of us arrived. What is my purpose triggers him. What is his purpose triggers me.

That is not a problem to be solved. It is a contract to be honoured.

In the early years of our marriage, Denise gave Sean a book for Christmas. It was called The Red Lion. I read it twice.

I didn’t know what to make of that at the time. I have more thoughts about it now. But that is a story for another piece, and it requires more of the map to be visible before I can tell it properly.

What I know is this: the teaching that began on top of Hanging Rock in 1994, the one that sent me to Denise’s classroom, that placed me in a lounge room in Macquarie Street with a rabbit on my lap and a veil coming down, that moved me to the back seat of a four-wheel drive somewhere in the Whitsundays watching a man touch his ear, was never only about finding a person to build a life with.

It was about learning to follow the thread. To notice the small specific feeling and not dismiss it. To dare the universe when you need confirmation, and to honour the answer when it comes, even when it costs you something.

Even when you sigh first.

The next piece looks at what it means to listen to your body when it knows something the room does not — including the day a voice on an operating table told me I should not have been there.

The patterns I write about here can be read in your own chart too. If you’d like to explore your soul map, I offer galactic astrology readings at divinehealingx.com — including an Asteroid Deep Dive that explores the soul-level threads traditional astrology often misses.

If this writing resonates and you’d like to support it, you’re welcome to do so here.