Holding the Frequency with Velvalee - #18

And how I meet Craig and Rosetta

If you are just joining this memoir now, in order to understand the allusions in this piece it might make sense to retreat a few episodes and read about what’s happened up until this point in 1994. Or even to start at the beginning. The easiest way to do that is to “subscribe” for free. You’ll get an email with all my Substack memoir writing in order to click through. You can also look for the archives at the bottom if you are reading on line or in the app. Otherwise there are links to most of the relevant posts when I remember to insert them.

By the time I returned from home from work, the shock of being literally knocked off my feet by a gentle touch had turned into curiosity about Velvalee. How did a hairdresser from Heavener, Oklahoma, come to be the person Carman would invite on stage to lead his Pool of Prayers, a person who had thousands of people queue up to experience what I had that morning? We ordered in, and over hot and sour soup and orange chicken I heard her story.

Velvalee had a talent for painting which took her to study at the Art Institute of Chicago. She returned home to Oklahoma, raised two children, and, by the time we met was enjoying her grandchildren. A pretty ordinary life. Then in 1992, while spending time in Alaska, Velvalee had a vision and painted The Blessed Mother, a painting she called “The Souls of Humanity. This was not an ordinary painting. People saw The Blessed Mother move her eyes or cry tears. They felt healed by the painting. The energy I had experienced started pouring through Velvalee. She toured with her painting in Europe, Russia, the western United States, and Hawaiʻi. I only saw the original once, hanging over the piano in her sisterʻs home in Oklahoma. By this point, she traveled with reproductions – poster size, print size, the small card I still carry in my purse.

Velvalee developed a devoted and far flung group of friends and supporters, many of whom she spoke with on the phone for hours while drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and “holding the frequency.” She did the same with whomever she happened to be staying.

While we did not start my training that night, “holding the frequency” was to be the first practice I would learn from Velvalee.

The skill of “holding the frequency” in a conscious manner is difficult to put into words. In todayʻs holistic therapeutic parlance and literature, it is commonplace to speak of emotions like love, acceptance and peace having a high frequency, and emotions like anger, grief or shame having a low frequency. There are even scientific studies to try to quantify frequency correlations with emotions using tools such as EEG scans or measuring emotional response to auditory stimuli. As I was experiencing it with Velvalee in 1994, the closest explanation I had was that it felt like taking my meditation practice off the cushion.

Or maybe better said, “holding the frequency” was like going directly into the state of calm and heightened presence that I sometimes felt after a long period of meditation or a high elevation hike in solitary silence. It was not accessed by seeking one of the high frequency emotions. It was a manner of connecting somatically with the frequency independent of thought or emotion and sustaining it regardless of the charge of incoming stimuli or inner thoughts or emotions. It was something I would get to practice and expand on over the next few years, although I had no idea yet that I would spend more than a couple of weeks with Velvalee.

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The Mass for the 21st Century had its debut at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors the following week and Velvalee was supposed to leave soon after. But thatʻs not what happened.

What happened was that Alvenia asked for help. Her friend Craig Gadson, who years before she had hired to travel with the Rolling Stones as their makeup artist, had been hospitalized following his return from a photo shoot with Cindy Crawford in Mexico. It was serious enough that Craigʻs mother had flown in. There was an assumption heʻd picked up something nasty on his trip, and Alvenia begged Velvalee to visit Craig with her healing energy. I fired up the Pathfinder and drove them to the hospital, waiting parked on the street. Eventually they returned. Alvenia folded her tall body into the car and broke down in sobs. Craig had just told them he had AIDS.

In 1994, antiretroviral treatment was a few years from being perfected. Being HIV-positive was a death sentence. For those of us living in New York, in the West Village, moving in artistic circles, it was like watching a game of Russian roulette as those around you fell. And barely something you could talk about outside of those circles. One of my administrative assistants at the Bank, a young, too-thin black man, died of “pneumonia” and left it to me to explain how that could happen to his grieving mother the day she came to pick up his belongings from his desk. He never told her he was sick, not even that he was gay. He and I never discussed it either, but he knew I knew when I agreed to take him as my assistant. He saw it in my eyes and heard it in our agreements about having a computer at home and covering my calls by forwarding the phones when he was not strong enough to come in.

So Velvalee stayed. Every single day “Just Velvalee” joined the Rev. Rosetta Dubois-Gadson of the African Methodist Episcopal church in praying and holding the energy at Craigʻs bedside during his first hospitalization.

When I wrote about my three mothers I did not include Rosetta, although sorted along another axis, Rosetta and Craig were the third significant mother-son pair to adopt me during that period of my life. There is no way to write about my relationship with Craig without saying that there are things I know but do not believe. Like I know that following my intuition can save my life and that omens and voices can give me the guidance I need. But I do not believe in guardian angels or spirit guides or channeled ascended masters. I know that with a few rare people in my life I felt an instant connection beyond logic, that we saw each other and loved each other (not necessarily in a romantic way) before a word was spoken. But I do not believe in karmic relationships from past lives or in finding a twin soul or outra parte.

In other words, I know these experiences are true. I just donʻt think any of the ways people and traditions conceptualize these Truths are True. Which leaves me at a loss for words to explain that Craig was my brother. We looked into each other’s eyes and we both knew that I was there to accompany him and Rosetta through this precious journey. Velvalee knew it too, and instructed me that she was leaving them in my care when she departed for Hawaiʻi via Oklahoma a few months later.

Or maybe, it is equally true to say she left me in their care. Rosetta did what a mother does. She moved to New York to be with Craig. Each in their own way, Rosetta and Craig taught me in the last two years of Craigʻs earthly life how to be present to one another in the hardest and most blessed moments we share as humans. The moments of hearing hard truths. The moments of facing mortality. The moments of offering and accepting care for physical needs with grace. The moments of simply taking joy in being together with laughter and love because we still have that moment together to laugh and love. And to savor a delicious home-cooked holiday meal and drink Sancerre and sometimes just sit with absolutely no need for words.

I was surprised and charmed to discover that although a pastor in a traditional black denomination, Rosetta was unafraid to acknowledge God in the way she personally knew God. Often Rosetta refers to Her as “Mother.” You know that moment in a store or public place when a child cries out “Mommy!” and every woman automatically turns her head? That is the love and concern with which I feel the Divine attends when Rosetta calls to Her in prayer.

Despite her initial denial that her son could possibly be gay and had been caregiver for his partner who died of AIDS, Rosetta found a calling as she became a voice for black churches to begin acknowledging and embracing the HIV-positive members of their congregations. Within a few years of Craigʻs passing, she had a special AIDS ministry at St Lukes AME Church in Harlem, joined the Board of the AIDS Interfaith National Network, and worked with The Balm in Gilead in New York. When GMHC interviewed her for their Board, she told me she warned them she talked about God. Turns out, thatʻs exactly what they wanted.

There is not a Thanksgiving or Christmas that I do not wake up thinking of Craig and Rosetta and feeling grateful and joyful for their presence in my life. For those who know my fondness for Sancerre, especially a bottle shared with my dearest friends, now you know I drink always with a silent toast to Craig. And the photo of them that sits next to the photo of my mother, the only two photos by my desk? Perhaps I do believe in angels after all.