In an upstairs bedroom of a lighthouse on the breezy southern shore of Wales, an astrologer pronounced me "psychic."

With a toss of her platinum hair, she tapped my computer-generated natal chart and declared, "Jupiter in your twelfth house." Then, in the high, lilting accent peculiar to the Welsh, she said, "You must pursue this."

The lighthouse, the West Usk, is a nineteenth-century beacon turned into a combination B & B and New Age healing center. While I learned about my destiny, my friends had their feet examined by a reflexologist, their spirits lifted by an aroma therapist, and their energies explained by a kinesiologist. Some even spent a solitary hour bobbing in a saline solution in a lightless flotation chamber. Then we clamored down the spiral staircase to the Victorian parlor, where we sipped our afternoon tea and giggled.

We thought it strange to find this kind of metaphysical smorgasbord in the rolling green Welsh countryside. Folks here seemed to live simple, homespun lives, eating hearty breakfasts of sausages and laver (seaweed) bread and taking brisk walks in sensible shoes. Faced with the harsh realities of farming, and grim memories of the not too distant past when coal mines tunneled beneath the hills, who had time to think about biorhythms or clairvoyance?

But when we stepped outside, our laughter faded into wonderment. The moody sky had darkened and a full moon hung low over the boggy banks of the Severn Estuary at low tide. Two cows in the lighthouse yard let out eerie moos. I remembered the astrologer's words with a shiver. . .

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