Watch The Episode

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In This Episode

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Takeaways:

Jo Taylor’s life experiences have shaped her writing.
Imagination plays a crucial role in storytelling.
Short stories and poetry can convey truths that novels sometimes cannot.
The process of writing a novel can take years and requires patience.
Exploring different genres can enhance a writer’s creativity.
Nursing experiences influence her writing style and content.
Genealogy can lead to profound self-discovery and understanding of one’s value.
The story of Mimi and Maurice highlights the importance of legacy.
Mediumship can provide insights and guidance in the writing process.
Connection and unity are fundamental themes in life and storytelling.

Chapter
00: Introduction to Joe Taylor’s Journey
01:21 The Power of Imagination and Storytelling
02:43 Exploring Psychic Experiences and Writing
05:50 The Evolution of Writing: From Poetry to Novels
08:39 The Making of ‘Margaret of Thibodeau’
11:58 The Influence of Nursing on Writing
13:43 Genealogy: Discovering Self Through Ancestry
16:06 The Impact of Family History on Identity
18:22 The Story of Mimi and Maurice
22:43 The Role of Mediumship in Writing
24:43 Heroes in Life and Literature
26:45 Lessons from Life on a Boat
28:45 Words of Wisdom for the Younger Self

Links:
https://www.jotaylorauthor.com

About Scott

WEB:
Want to connect with Spirit, get a private reading, or attend a live event? Visit mediumscottallan.com for bookings, event updates, and more.

PATREON:
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Scott’s Patreon

 

UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT:

Psychic Medium Scott (00:03.832)
Sometimes the best stories are the ones that refuse to behave. Today’s guests survived three stepmothers and I’m told not at the same time. She lived on a boat and traced her family tree so far back it might just be fiction. Along the way she’s written poetry, short stories and a novel that’s as unruly and unforgettable as she is. My guest today claims the one thing more obstreperous than a night shift in the ER.

is her own imagination. Joe Taylor is a retired ER nurse, a genealogist with a healthy skepticism and author of postcards, collected poems and short stories, as well as her debut novel, Margaret of Thibodeau. Married for 33 years to a real life hero, Joe brings the same grit, wit and irreverence to her writing that she brought to nursing. And she’s here to remind us that sometimes the messiest stories are the ones that save us.

I’m Scott Allen and you’re listening to the enlightened life podcast where we explore the soul’s journey, the mysteries of healing and the moments that transform us. Let’s get started. Joe, I have been looking forward to this. You’ve lived a life that could fill a dozen novels and somehow you’ve managed to fit it all into poetry, short stories and now a debut novel. So welcome to the show.

Jo Taylor (01:24.828)
Thank you, it’s lovely to be here.

Psychic Medium Scott (01:26.766)
So glad you’re here. You call yourself obstreperous. Not a word most people use on their resumes. So where does that come from and how has that shaped your life and your writing?

Jo Taylor (01:40.2)
So my dad used a different word, but it’s not as kind, not as socially acceptable. Pardon me. And when I was an ER nurse, the ER docs called me that. They said, you’re being obstreperous. And so they could say that to me with patients around without most of them realizing that that meant I was being a pain in the ass, which is what obstreperous means. So I kind of owned it and gained it.

Psychic Medium Scott (01:47.928)
There you go.

Psychic Medium Scott (02:03.022)
That is funny. Yeah.

Jo Taylor (02:10.097)
Anyway, yeah.

Psychic Medium Scott (02:12.526)
So with all you’ve got, know, three stepmothers, boat, and a 33 year marriage, you your book really does read a little bit like a novel. How do you decide what makes it into your stories and what stays in the family vault?

Jo Taylor (02:23.664)
that’s a great question. this particular I started with this novel, I have four others in the works. But I started with this particular novel because I’m also a psychic medium. And but I didn’t discover I was, I had psychic experiences my entire life, but I didn’t realize I could talk back to them until about 2016. And when I discovered that I could have some control, I could learn what this was.

Psychic Medium Scott (02:38.318)
.

Jo Taylor (02:48.742)
Because in the 70s and 80s, no one wanted to hear about this. I didn’t tell many people that I had these experiences. And so I kind of took what happened to me in my childhood, that I don’t want to hear it, but still having weird things happen to me. And I kind of thought, well, what if I reinvent my story?

Jo Taylor (03:12.796)
I decided that I would just kind of retell my childhood in a way that someone would be there to explain to me what it was that was happening. And so the one of the characters is actually a mentor that you can find in the Akashic Records. So I used her teaching, Margaret, the things as something I would have loved to have heard.

My childhood would not have been so fraught with disaster if I kind of knew, hey, this is normal. This happens to people. We just don’t talk about it as a culture. So that was the first thing. And I’m kind of trying to normalize intuition and psychic experiences because you know there are people out there who either live in families that it’s not discussed or the culture they’re in or there’s really nowhere for them to learn.

Psychic Medium Scott (04:02.04)
Thank

Jo Taylor (04:11.75)
They, I kind of did it as an instructive. This is a real thing. There are people out there who can talk to you about it. So I’m trying to normalize this type of experience.

Psychic Medium Scott (04:24.75)
I think that’s great. I mean, it’s funny because I have a very similar story. wasn’t a nurse. I was a funeral director for 35 years. I, you know, the joke is, know, thousands of dead people, not one of them talked to me, but you know, I knew there was something was up. Something was weird. You know, like that’s how I used to describe it. Well, that was just a weird coincidence. You know, how does this happen? And it wasn’t till I was an adult and I was out of that field that it really started to.

presents itself. So it’s just it’s just interesting. I love to hear everybody’s stories. Your first book postcards. That’s a collection of poems and short stories. What drew you to that form? And how did you speak truths, you know that a novel sometimes can’t?

Jo Taylor (04:56.744)
you

Jo Taylor (05:03.592)
So the writing really started for me in 2008 or nine. As a nurse, I wanted to get away from the bedside and go into administration, but you had to have a bachelor’s degree, any bachelor’s degree to do that. And I had, before I went into nursing, I had been studying biochemistry. And there was no way I was gonna be able to go back and finish that. So I got an English degree. And in the process, I I loved writing. So I got some great advice. Start with…

short form. Before you tackle a novel, a novel is this giant undertaking. There’s form and structure and you have to have some kind of plot line and develop character. And so if you start with the shorter forms, you develop skill. And I had started with the short stories and someone said, you’re very verbose, you talk a lot, as everyone will see on the podcast.

And they said, you’ve really got to be able to be concise sometimes. So learn formed poetry, like the formal stuff, the Shakespearean sonnets and all that. So I learned formed poetry. And then once you know the rules, you can break the rules and go into free verse. And I just loved it. It’s very fun and freeing. And it’s different for me to have to make everything be concise.

Psychic Medium Scott (06:19.086)
Peace.

Jo Taylor (06:24.528)
And so I had gathered, I think I had written 350 poems and about 50, 60 short stories. So not all of those are in the collection, only the best ones are in the collection. But I decided that to discover what publishing was like, I was gonna put out that collection and run it through the whole cycle of editing and production and publication. And I learned a lot that helped me with my debut in all.

Psychic Medium Scott (06:55.387)
wow. So which was Margaret of Tibbido? That is your debut novel. I was just gonna say you released it this year. Congratulations. What’s the story behind that story?

Jo Taylor (06:58.332)
Yes, yes, that came out in March.

Thank you. So that’s the one where I’m kind of retelling my childhood. Margaret is, it’s 1974 and Margaret is 14 years old. Her mother passed when she was eight. Mine passed when I was two. And so I used kind of some of the similar things, enough different where it’s not really my story. But her dad decides he’s gonna get remarried as dads do.

Psychic Medium Scott (07:07.628)
That’s the one that you retweet.

Mm-hmm.

Jo Taylor (07:29.736)
And Margaret wants none of this. And the main reason she wants none of it is because her mom comes in and visits her at night, sits on the bed, sings her songs. She still is connected to her mom and she’s afraid if this new woman comes in, her mom’s not gonna come around anymore. But she doesn’t tell anyone this. And so it’s all her shenanigans over a summer of trying to get this to stop. so it’s just the story, a coming of age basically of someone who has psychic skills.

And so I liked being able to combine those two ideas.

Psychic Medium Scott (08:00.142)
Thanks.

Psychic Medium Scott (08:04.3)
Yeah, how long did that take you? Because that is a huge undertaking.

Jo Taylor (08:07.442)
my gosh, novels are weird for me in that I’ll start them and write them and then I put them away for like a year and let them soak and then kind of like soup and then I’ll get it out and I’ll fuss with it some more. No, not a year. That would not be good. So Margaret, I probably started Margaret in 2015.

Psychic Medium Scott (08:19.554)
Yeah. Except you don’t want to leave soup for a year. Probably not a good idea.

Jo Taylor (08:31.994)
And so it took 10 years to ultimately, hopefully all the rest of them, now that I know what I’m doing, won’t take quite so long. The one I’m working on now that should come out this next March, I started working on the next year. So it’s also been about 10 years. But the other ones will be quicker, I hope.

Psychic Medium Scott (08:39.021)
Yeah

Psychic Medium Scott (08:46.766)
And I’ll say too, you mentioned you have four others in the works. I don’t know how you do that. I published my first book, it came out in January. And it really is the story, my story, kind of like this is your story, except it’s not a novel. It is the story, kind of going through my childhood into the funeral business and then into the awakening. But that took me four years. And not only did I not know what I was doing, it started out as notes.

And then it started out as, you know, well, maybe I can make this into something. And then I realized by the time I got to the end, that my writing style had changed. So I had to go back to the beginning and I thought, I don’t like that now. And I had to rewrite that. So it was really interesting. that’s why it just took forever. So people are saying, what’s the next one? And I think, I don’t know. I put so much on hold to do that, to finish it up that I’m trying to

Jo Taylor (09:25.21)
Yeah

Thanks

Psychic Medium Scott (09:45.122)
work through that now and I’ve got this podcast and I’ve got my regular business and everything and I and I just feel like I don’t know where the time comes from. I don’t know when to sit and write.

Jo Taylor (09:54.364)
Exactly. So most writers who actually put out book after a lot of people have a book in them. They have a story to tell. Fabulous. It’s a whole lot of work to do that. But the stories are usually worth telling. But they don’t necessarily want to be a writer and do it again. So I am a writer and I love fiction. And so that was kind of what I wanted to do. And so

Psychic Medium Scott (10:04.718)
Yeah.

Jo Taylor (10:18.608)
One of the things that makes it easy to work on a bunch at the same time is they’re all over the place. Like Margaret is, it’s literary fiction. It’s a little bit more young adults, although it’s not particularly young adult. The next one’s gonna be a historical fiction. The one after that is a psychic thriller. And the one after that is, I haven’t categorized that one. I’m not far enough into it yet to decide which one. And then there’s another one after that. So it’s kind of…

Psychic Medium Scott (10:40.333)
Yeah.

Jo Taylor (10:44.806)
For me, I can kind of categorize them, but some writers who write in the same genre, they can just keep going with the different stories. And sometimes it’s questions people ask you about your book that make you go, huh, hadn’t thought of that. Okay, I’m gonna have to write that now. So it’s lovely to talk to people about the book, not just to sell it, but to get their take on, okay, well, what happened after this? And that’s where sequels come from, I think a lot of times.

Psychic Medium Scott (11:01.408)
Yeah

Psychic Medium Scott (11:11.886)
Well, I was just going to say, is, any of these a series like Margaret? Will she come back?

Jo Taylor (11:15.176)
Not intentionally. Margaret could be, Mimi and Maurice will not be. That’s the historical fiction because that one is based on a true story. I have letters from a man and a woman who wrote from 1922 to 1957 over World War II and the story is completely told in that one book. I’m not the biggest fan of writing series. I think that my brain doesn’t

Psychic Medium Scott (11:38.924)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jo Taylor (11:44.744)
connect the dots for that long. And my novels do tend to be on the shorter end this Margaret was like 65,000 words. And then the other one’s going to be 100,000 words. And that might not mean a lot to people who are reading. But some of the fantasy books that come out like this, they’re like 175,000 words, war and peace was 550,000 words. So the bigger the book, the harder it to structure. So I tend to be a little bit shorter.

Psychic Medium Scott (12:05.038)
Sure, sure, yeah.

Of course it is. You know, does your experience in the ER find its way into your novels at all? And not so much the experience, the actual nursing, but some of the vulnerable moments that you’ve experienced.

Jo Taylor (12:23.75)
Yes, a lot of my short stories actually are about nursing and quite a few of the poems are too. In Margaret, there was a couple medical type things and I was very, very confident when my editor wanted to change something to make it smoother and I said, yeah, that wouldn’t happen. So that’s one thing that I have an advantage over other people because almost all the time, if you’re going to tell a story, there’s some kind of health problem or there’s some kind of thing that happens. And I also worked ambulance for six years.

So to have that knowledge of how things go, mostly I can write it very easily without stressing about it. And then when my editor’s like, we should change this, I can either say, okay, or no, and know that I really have a problem when things are not medically correct.

Psychic Medium Scott (13:10.318)
Right, right, right, right. No, that makes sense. That makes sense. You know, I’d like to shift just a second because you mentioned that you had traced your family back to like the year 310 maybe, probably or whatever. don’t know. But it’s like a rabbit hole with no bottom. You know, have you, what have you learned about yourself in that process?

Jo Taylor (13:27.872)
you have such good questions. being a medium and having been able to go into past lives, we’re not usually our relatives. So yeah, so I can go way better. We actually have a Roman, if all of this that we’ve found is correct. And my son has kind of taken over the genealogy search now. But a lot of times when

Psychic Medium Scott (13:41.134)
That’s interesting.

Jo Taylor (13:54.726)
when people who are not necessarily in the psychic community, they talk about, well, I think she’s my grandmother reincarnated or she’s my aunt. I personally think that that’s a little bit more genetic that you get quirks and like my son would rub his head when he went to sleep when he was little, little, and I do that. And so he didn’t do it from watching me. There’s weird genetic things that people do that are quirks. So I think that’s one thing I learned is that

Psychic Medium Scott (14:18.518)
Yes. Sure.

Jo Taylor (14:24.52)
It’s really not, it is the sum of everything. All those people had to be alive and procreate for me to be here. That is just astounding when you think about it. I kind of wish some people who think that they’re not valuable sometimes in this world. It’s like, look at all the people that came before you. You’re precious. You’re the only one that came from that thing. Or okay, maybe you’re two siblings too.

So it’s a different way to look at your value as an incarnated human.

Psychic Medium Scott (15:02.04)
Well, not just that, but look at it the other way too. You how many people, you know, you can look back. How many people will come after you because you exist and what types of changes in the world will take place because you exist? We don’t know.

Jo Taylor (15:13.124)
Exactly. Right. And I think we do incarnate sometimes that way. It’s not necessarily that each of us is supposed to have a stellar or amazing life or do something. know, everybody’s out, what’s my purpose? Your purpose is to be here and have those children and have these relationships and influence your friends and influence anybody else you can. And all the generations after will still remember you.

whether it’s actually remembering you or it’s like, don’t know my fourth great grandfather, but there’s influence in me from him that I don’t even realize. And so I think that’s one thing that genealogy kind of helps with is you can go back and look, oh, wow, they had interesting lives. And boy, am I lucky to live in 2025 because life has not been easy up until now. And we think we have it hard, but it’s actually a lot easier than it used to be.

Psychic Medium Scott (16:08.43)
Yeah, you know, and think, I mean, to the year 300, that’s it. You know, don’t, wouldn’t want to go back that far. I don’t even know how you go back that far in terms of genealogy. That’s amazing.

Jo Taylor (16:17.682)
So I had a little bit of luck in that one, my dad was super interested in it. So he worked for years, I, my, sorry. My grandmother’s first cousin was Martha Graham, who was a famous dancer. And so Martha was interested in genealogy and she could hire someone to go to Europe and do all the research. And she did that. And so she got a lot. So that was in the, know, fifties and sixties. She got a lot of that done.

for her. so that’s, and then my dad published a book in 87, I think that is our genealogy. So I have it for sure written down and then we’ve slowly tried to put it into ancestry because he did it all on word.

Psychic Medium Scott (16:59.022)
out.

Amazing, amazing. Yeah, so you had that little edge. You didn’t go there and have to go back.

Jo Taylor (17:06.236)
Yes. no, no, probably it’s going to be very easy now with AI helping because it’ll make connections on all the different platforms, the GED files and be able to show you what about this, what about that, what about this. So, yeah, it’s going to help a lot. And for the book that I’m writing, Mimi and Maurice, were nobodies. I hate to say nobodies because they were amazing and fantastic people.

Psychic Medium Scott (17:17.901)
Yeah.

That’s interesting. hadn’t even considered the whole AI aspect to it. Yeah.

Jo Taylor (17:35.036)
But they weren’t famous. She lived in San Francisco most of her life and there was no articles written about her. She just worked as a secretary. I found two pictures of her on the internet. found through ancestry, I found her whole family tree, all her addresses. It’s astounding what you can find on the internet. And that was without that was a couple years ago that I did that research. So no, the story came to me because a friend of mine

Psychic Medium Scott (17:51.502)
You’re kidding.

Psychic Medium Scott (17:58.222)
Were they family of yours? I mean, no, nothing.

Jo Taylor (18:04.86)
her grandmother was a hospice nurse for Mimi. And Mimi died without any errors. And so the grandmother found this box of hundreds of letters and like read one or two of them. And she’s like, I can’t, these are valuable. So she gave them to my friend to maybe write. And my friend’s a physician and she looks at me and she goes, there’s no way I’m ever gonna have time to write this. Would you consider writing the story? So it basically fell in my lap. So then I transcribed.

200 some letters.

Psychic Medium Scott (18:36.14)
they will become I mean, I to use I know what you mean, I to say the word nobody, but I you know, we’re differentiating between people who have household names and people who don’t write some of those are very, you know, they were they were somebody and they were very valuable in their own right, but not just in terms of a notoriety. But they will gain their notoriety posthumously through your writing, which and their writing, you know, because it’s their writing. So it’s wonderful.

Jo Taylor (18:43.986)
Correct, yes.

Jo Taylor (18:51.08)
Correct.

Jo Taylor (18:57.03)
Yes. Well, and Maurice is partly an amazing, I’m going to have to put this in the afterword of the book, because he’s the reason I discovered I was a medium. So I’m typing away, right, Miss Dory, because I have to kind of fill in there’s there’s what’s written in the letters, but in order to novelize it, you have to tell the rest of their lives. And we have all his letters to her. But all of her letters to him were burned by the SS in Germany during World War Two. So all of her letters are gone. So I kind of have to make up her life.

Psychic Medium Scott (19:23.201)
my gosh.

Jo Taylor (19:26.416)
And I’m typing away and I hear Maurice say that’s that’s not how that happened. And I’m like, okay, I’ve had psychic experiences before, but that was a little bit much. And he kind of starts talking to me and I smell a cigar smoke and he kind of kibitzes me about, okay, this happened this way and this happened that way. And he gave me a couple pieces of history that I then looked up and that was correct. That’s what happened. So I’m like, okay, but I don’t believe you. You have to prove to me that this is true.

Psychic Medium Scott (19:53.134)
Yeah.

Jo Taylor (19:54.938)
And he says, okay, I’ll send you a picture. Okay, you died in 1989. How are you going to send me a picture? Well, on Facebook, I was part I had subscribed to a page called Everyday Africa. And Everyday Africa just posted pictures of all over Africa. And I had been there in 2000 loved it. And the next day, and I cannot prove it was the next day, but it was very soon after that, I’ll send you a picture.

They posted a picture of a Congo warrior and he wrote constantly in his letters about how he loved to take pictures. And he especially loved to take portraits of the warrior in Congo. And I look at this picture and it has his name at the bottom as credit. And it resides in the Belgian museum. He took that photo in 1954. And he sent it to me. like, okay.

So that started the whole rabbit hole of learning to be a medium. And I kind of discovered that I needed to do readings in order to write the story the way it should be done.

Psychic Medium Scott (21:02.84)
Well, and I’m telling you right now, I know this is kind of, we won’t think it’s weird because obviously you’re a medium. So the whole, everything we do is weird, but I do feel like I’m having this incredible deja vu moment right now, this story. And I don’t know why it’s not like this has happened to me. It’s but it’s as if I know the story and that is a very funny thing. And I’m getting goosebumps just talking to you, but it does happen sometimes that you get that feeling like I’ve.

Jo Taylor (21:13.916)
Really?

Jo Taylor (21:27.176)
Mm-hmm.

Psychic Medium Scott (21:29.548)
I’ve heard this. know this. I know this, but I don’t know why I know it because I really don’t know it. Very funny. Very funny. And, you know, I interviewed a woman on the show. Her episode hasn’t come out yet, but she was. She does. She writes. She’s writes books, but they’re all channeled. And I thought, well, how do you do that? Like, you know, I mean, I don’t know. You sit down and I don’t know. But you know, when you’re I feel like when you’re supposed to do something, they show up.

Jo Taylor (21:32.264)
All right.

Jo Taylor (21:57.0)
Yes, he 100 % he said, I have gone through all these machinations to get it to you, for you to write. And I’m like, Maurice, why, why, why do you want this story told? And he said, it’s about devotion. And he goes, people aren’t really devoted to anything anymore. And it will hit a chord. He’s he’s doesn’t want it for him. He’s already in the other side. But he said, it will speak to people. And so I feel very responsible to do it justice. He he’s actually

even more fascinating than she is. Sorry, Mimi. He worked with the United States Army. He was in the Belgian resistance. So he was underground during all of World War Two, but he spoke six languages. And so he was a fabulous interpreter for them. He received the Medal of Freedom from the United States government for his actions. He’s a war hero. so he’s this fascinating character. She’s amazing in her own right. And so I’m

Psychic Medium Scott (22:46.509)
Wow.

Jo Taylor (22:55.098)
It’s as much fun just writing this story and being with them a lot as it will be to put it out into the world.

Psychic Medium Scott (23:02.926)
That’s incredible. That’s incredible. All right. I’m to say something else to you. Do you know anybody else that’s ever won? Not one, but earned a medical medal of freedom. I do. I do. And this is what’s so bizarre about this conversation. I had, I worked for a gentleman, my first job in the funeral business and he was in world war two. So we’re going back to the early eighties, right? So he was in his sixties at the time and

Jo Taylor (23:11.664)
I don’t. I don’t know personally. I know… Who?

Psychic Medium Scott (23:30.89)
He was a commando that stormed the beach of Normandy. But I think what he wanted for is he was told to go onto the beach. This is before they actually stormed the beach. So he went onto the beach and his job was to bring back samples of sand. And he said, what am I doing that for? You don’t need to know what you’re doing it for. Just go bring it in. And he had to sneak onto the beach. like a spy, I guess.

Jo Taylor (23:53.688)
Psychic Medium Scott (24:00.226)
bring the sand back and because I think they wanted to know what the texture was so that the vehicles could get onto the beach. He stormed the beach and watched people around him get ripped apart, you know? And in fact, that’s in my book. So I feel like that is a real, he was a real part of my story because he’s the one that got me into the funeral business. But he won that medal of freedom and he got it for his actions in World War II.

Jo Taylor (24:06.375)
Right?

Jo Taylor (24:24.42)
Interesting.

Psychic Medium Scott (24:29.154)
So I think this conversation is really bizarre. It’s not bizarre in a bad way, but it’s given me goosebumps. You know what I mean? like, yeah, it’s like connections. And I just love this. And he was a hero and he was a great man. He’s also, you know, as well, but it’s just, it’s just wonderful. Speaking of heroes, speaking of heroes, your husband, a lot of your characters, your hero characters are based on him. So why is he a hero? What makes him a hero? Besides the fact that he’s your husband. Yeah.

Jo Taylor (24:31.388)
That’s interesting. No, don’t Connections.

Jo Taylor (24:54.856)
He’s my husband, he’s my hero. He will probably be annoyed that I’m talking about him, but that’s too bad. He was firefighter for his whole career and ended up as chief in Montecito fire. He was pretty instrumental his whole career as a leader. People loved him as a leader and he

Psychic Medium Scott (24:59.362)
no.

Jo Taylor (25:22.234)
risked his life many times. told him, please don’t tell me like two weeks after it happened. But he told me stories when he would risk his life to save others. And he said that it was so interesting when that decision came. You never know what you’re going to do. You think you’re going to, you okay, I’m going to go get that person. But you know that that risks your life. And he said, I was always happy that I made the decision. It was that small little calculation.

Like sometimes there’s no chance and you’re just doing something, sorry people, dumb, because you’re just giving your life for no benefit. But there’s always those times where, there’s benefit and there’s risk. And he said, was happy that I always made that decision quickly and smart and he’s still around. So that’s why I call him my hero.

Psychic Medium Scott (25:57.75)
Mm-hmm.

Psychic Medium Scott (26:18.254)
God, thank God. Yeah. That man I just told you about, his name was Walter and Walter, who got the medal of freedom, who thrown into the beach in Normandy, was also a volunteer firefighter. And he did that for years and years and years. And then when he stopped doing that, was, he was a civil defense director for the town that he lived in on top of being a funeral director all those years. So I don’t know. It’s interesting. Yeah. It’s so interesting. You lived on a boat, which I never did.

Jo Taylor (26:29.88)
Jo Taylor (26:38.566)
Wow. Boy, we have some interesting combinations of stories. Yeah. Love it. I did.

Psychic Medium Scott (26:46.85)
which I never did. But and it sounds romantic until you remember the reality of cramped quarters and unpredictable weather and all of that other stuff. What did did life on the water teach you about resilience and letting

Jo Taylor (26:57.006)
that’s yes, it’s probably that’s the biggest thing is about being resilient and just go with the flow. And yeah, as an earner, she kind of had to be that way anyway. But our son had just gone off to college and my husband had changed jobs to move to Montecito. And we we rented a couple houses around Santa Barbara for a while, but very expensive to live there. And he loved boats and he wanted to, you know, be on a boat. And I said, well, let’s just get a boat and live on it on the harbor. And

everything kind of fell into place and we did that. We lived there for five years. It’s about 250 square foot of living space. So we had nothing. And we had our dog too, our dog Abby who’s since passed, but she loved it on the boat. And it was, it was, you had to develop a different routine and you couldn’t be mad and storm off into another room. You could storm off for 10 feet. That was about it.

Psychic Medium Scott (27:40.206)
Yep.

Jo Taylor (27:56.872)
So, and I discovered some, I guess there’s some relationships that need more space, but we’re actually very good at being together. And then we’re very good at being apart because when he was a firefighter, he would be gone for weeks on a fire. And so in the days before cell phones even, he would be gone for weeks. And so I could tolerate that. And then when he’s around and on the boat, and it was really fun to do readings on the boat because being that close to water,

the connection was very, very good. So I loved doing readings on the boat. And then it just kind of lull you to sleep at night. So it was great. Oh, yeah, most of the time, but we were, San Barbara’s right across from the islands, San Barbara Channel, the Channel Islands. And so we would go across and stay at the islands sometimes. But yeah, most of the time we just lived in the harbor.

Psychic Medium Scott (28:33.742)
Were you docked most of the time?

Psychic Medium Scott (28:49.07)
That’s beautiful. So if you could send a postcard back to your younger self, what would it say?

Jo Taylor (28:56.508)
that everything that is happening is going to make you who you become. And you’ll like who you become. And so it’s OK. Good things, bad things, everything. It makes you who you are.

Psychic Medium Scott (29:08.974)
100 % agree with that, that’s beautiful. We are almost at the end and before we wrap up, is there anything, whether it’s a story, a poem, word of wisdom that you’d like to share with our listeners, something that only you could share?

Jo Taylor (29:26.104)
I think that if people could realize whether you’re on the spiritual path or just living your life, that we are all connected. That sounds like, know, woo, we’re all connected. But we really are. We come into incarnation here in bodies to discover division. So that’s why there’s racism. That’s why there’s countries. That’s why because when you’re in spirit and have no body, there’s no separation. You cannot have separation at all.

It doesn’t exist. And so what we are doing down here, good, bad, or indifferent, is we’re learning, discovering, experiencing what separation is like, because that isn’t reality. Reality is that we are all one.

Psychic Medium Scott (30:12.27)
Beautiful, beautiful. Joe, thank you so much for bringing your spirit, your humor, and your heart into the show today. And for everyone listening, you can find Joe’s books, postcards, collected poems, and short stories, and Margaret of Thibodeaux, wherever books are sold. And please make sure you visit her website at joltailorauthor.com. her name again, J-O-T-A-Y-L-O-R author.com.

And if this conversation made you laugh, think, or maybe even want to trace your own family tree, please share the episode. Leave a review and join us at mediumscottallan.com for more stories, events, and inspiration. I’m Scott Allen. Thank you for joining us on the Enlighten Life Podcast. And remember, sometimes the best stories are the ones that refuse to behave. We’ll see you next time.