Wednesday, Feb. 03, 2010

Psychic looks for stuff with inner eye

When she closes her eyes, rubs her temples or handles a favorite rock, psychic Maureen Temple Richmond can see pictures in her mind: whether your boyfriend cheats, whether your stocks are doomed, whether you're about to get fired.

But that's meat-and-potatoes astrology. Boyfriends do cheat. Stocks tank.

For Richmond, the real thrill of having psychic powers comes from the high-wire act of finding lost things - a service she offers at the recession-friendly rate of $50 an hour. No find, no fee.

"Pets are really hard to locate," she admits. "They're constantly moving."

At 58, Richmond looks nothing like the storybook fortune-teller, the wild-eyed soothsayer in a turban. She's a blue-eyed country girl from Little Rock, Ark., who discovered in high school that she could sometimes hear other people's thoughts.

She doesn't eat meat, sip coffee, drink booze or swallow so much as an over-the-counter cold tablet - all things that interfere with an astrologer's vital serenity.

You might have seen her lecturing at Dancing Moon Books on Raleigh's Wake Forest Road or teaching meditation at the Unity Church of Raleigh.

If you call the Psychic Power hotline and ask for White Owl, you'll be directed to Richmond's apartment in Pittsboro, where she counsels clients from Singapore or Brazil - frenzied people hungry for guidance on financial gambles, shaky business partners, lovers who can't commit or misbehaving toddlers.

But the thing is, in a wrecked economy, even the most spiritually hungry callers hesitate to pay roughly 40 cents a minute for a stranger's advice. They don't want information so much as someone to care about their doomed careers and straying lovers, Richmond explains, and too often, they're willing to cut this comfort out of the budget.

So that's why Richmond wants to dive back into lost-objects retrieval, a craft she picked up through studying the obscure field of horary astrology, and an expertise that maybe 2 percent of the world's astrologers claim.

Finding lost stuff is grinding work for a psychic-astrologer. It's one thing to offer a client some vague prediction about love or money; it's quite another to produce a specific material object using nothing but a planetary chart.

But Richmond has done it, a feat she described in a 1991 issue of Horoscope magazine under the headline "How I Found The Diamond Ring."

In this case, she followed time-worn procedures. First, you plot the heavens on a grid at the moment the client calls. Next, you note the position of the sun or the moon. If either one of them falls below the horizon, retrieval gets very tricky. If both sun and moon fall below the grid's x-axis, kiss your diamond ring goodbye.

From there it's a matter of poring over data, noting precise locations of heavenly bodies. Scorpio rising ... Pluto rising ... Diamond ring in the kitchen sink.

Wrong answer.

"She had a plumber come and take the thing apart," Richmond said. "It was a great embarrassment."

Undeterred, Richmond led her client into a closet, which was separated from the kitchen sink by a thin wall. And there, inside a seldom-worn shoe, twinkled the missing diamond ring.

"All the signs were there," Richmond says. "Venus rules jewelry. Venus was in Pisces. And Pisces rules feet."

Richmond wants to help. She wants to stretch her astrological wings. She wants to show how life on Earth is mirrored in the heavens, and that if you're patient enough to read the data, you can even see the nation's economic recession starting to fade midway through this year.

There's hope up there, and clarity, and a map to all the precious things scattered around our feet.