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WE DID PSYCHIC readings for each other all the time. It was the ’70s. We felt stuck in the Mississippi Delta; we were restless, often bored, and not stimulated enough. Imagining the future was a way of escaping our limited circumstances.

None of us had done the hippie pilgrimage to San Francisco, but our mentor, a wise and patient older sculptor, had lived in New York and New Jersey for decades before returning to Greenville to teach art classes in what had been the family corner store. He brought a mystical perspective to our mundane frustrations — a little Plato mixed with “The Tibetan Book of the Dead.” Over many a coffee at both Jim’s Café and Brown’s Delish Shoppe, he taught me astrology; I practiced with the natal charts of all my friends. Leon could do astral projection too — I tried but could never manage to do it. So he surprised me once by recommending me to a woman who had called him for a psychic reading. The next thing I knew I was walking into her house, past her teenage kids hanging out in the front yard, and using a deck of regular playing cards to do a reading at the kitchen table. I had taught myself how to do it by making up a system to entertain friends in the spur of a moment; to my surprise, I was now discovering that it worked.

The woman was desperate to know whether her husband, who was having an affair, would come back to her. In the middle of the reading, he walked in the back door and looked at me sheepishly. I brought the reading to a close, and she never called back.

I studied with an astrologer in Memphis who specialized in horary astrology, where a horoscope is based on the moment a question is asked. She also did charts for propitious times to do things. In my case, years later, that meant travel times: the time “when you leave your home and close the door behind you.” For me, it also meant the best times to pitch proposals. As a freelancer in New York, I needed every possible advantage when sending stories to editors with big slush piles. As an artist, I needed the right times to send grant applications. She would cast the chart, provide a synopsis, and sometimes give me a few caveats. My favorite travel time was for a trip to Europe after I’d received a grant in photography. She said it was going to be full of amazing and colorful adventures, and aside from the moment my camera fell apart in Zurich, it lived up to the forecast. A few years later, I booked a trip to London so impulsively that I forgot to check with her first. I was invited to house-sit over the holidays, and my friend left me with a dying dog and an unexpected roommate who was chattering nonstop, on cocaine. Bad experiences can be memorable, but I wouldn’t choose them.

When I first went to the shaman in Mexico, he asked why I had come. “To be closer to the spirit world,” I said. “Then you will be,” he responded, giving me a candle and further instructions. A few years later I came back and he told me I’d gone too far; I had attracted so many spirits that I needed to burn sage in my apartment and do a clearing.

I guess I feel unlucky. Left to my own devices, I would go down rabbit holes of obscure folly. Propitious times keep me on track. David Kain’s mother once read my palm: “You’ll live a long life, honey, but you’ll never get what you want.” She had been drinking when she said it, but still. String theory has theorized 11 dimensions. Physics has caught up with the occult, but I am happy for it to linger in the mysterious, “irrational” margins, in the world of uncanny insights and mystical phenomena.