But Where Was Me?

Grandmothers should be wise.  It’s one of those archetypal attributes of the crone, isn’t it?  So when I fall short in the wisdom department, it bothers me.  

A little over a year ago, my grandson and I were chatting about the first house he lived in – a place he dimly remembered, having moved away when he was a toddler.  His younger sister was confused.  She insisted they had never lived in a house with two huge trees in the garden.  When her brother pointed out that this was before she was born, she became almost hysterical.

“But where was ME?” she demanded, her eyes filling with tears and panic.

That was when I fell short in the wise grandmother stakes.  I knew my answer to the question, but I would have struggled – when put on the spot – to find the words to explain it to a tiny child.  Even if I had managed to leap that hurdle, I was anxious about straying into the sphere of beliefs.  I’ve spent a lifetime as a teacher carefully and meticulously respecting a wealth of different creeds and cultures.  I knew my grandchildren were being brought up with a nominally Christian belief system.  Christianity has plenty to say about an afterlife, but is curiously silent on before life.  It talks vaguely about dust and ashes, which, I felt, wouldn’t help much.  Did I have the right to impose my own beliefs on those they were being brought up with? 

So I failed.  I gave the child lots of comforting cuddles, chatted to her about how excited we’d all been when she was born, and generally distracted her without ever answering her very important question.  And it has bothered me ever since.

When I came to write my children’s novel this year, I decided it would give me the opportunity to revisit the events of that day and to provide Ruby Rose, my fictional toddler heroine, with a fearless crone figure who is more than happy to address her question head on and provide a suitable response.

It was one of those parts of the book that quite happily wrote itself, while I obediently pressed the keys.  Interestingly, Misty often took control of me, as well as the situations in the story, when she appeared in the pages!

Misty waited for the girl to settle down and for the pounding of her heart to slow.  “Now,”  she began, finally.  “That was a very sensible question you asked, my dear.  I’m going to answer it for you, but you will need to listen very hard.  Can you do that?”

Ruby nodded miserably and Stellan sat on the grass at Misty’s feet, because it had never occurred to him that there could be an answer to that question.

“Before you were your mama’s little girl and Stellan’s little sister, Ruby, you were living in the Dreaming Place.”

“What’s the Dreaming Place?” Ruby asked, sitting up.

“It’s a place you know very well.  Why, you go there every night, while your body is in bed, having a rest,” Misty replied.

“You mean when we have dreams?” asked Stellan.

“Exactly.  Haven’t you ever thought how odd it is that your body stays in bed, fast asleep, while you are off doing all sorts of other things?” …

“That is strange,” agreed Stellan, who had never really considered it before.

“So,”  continued Misty, in the same calm, gentle voice, “while we have bodies like these,” she tickled Ruby Rose gently on her arm and the child giggled, “we live in them for most of the time and just put them down to rest at bedtime.  Before we are born, though, and after we have died, we spend all our time in the Dreaming Place.  That’s where you were when Stellan was a little boy and Bella the cat lived with him.”

Both children were silent for a moment, while they considered that.

“Weren’t I lonely without my ma and my pa and my brother?” Ruby wanted to know.

“Not at all,”  Misty replied.  “You were having too much fun!  You see in the Dreaming Place, you can be whatever you want and go anywhere you like.  You might have tried being a fairy or a brave explorer or even a dog or a cat.  What do you think you would have been?”

“A fairy who could fly in the air and do wishes!” Ruby announced.

“Well that would be quite splendid, wouldn’t it?”  Misty smiled.  “But after loads and loads of dreaming, you decided that what would be even more fun would be to become a little girl with a body.  You see, in the Dreaming Place there are things we can’t do.  We can’t feel happiness or pain or full up with delicious food or the softness of an animal’s fur when we stroke it.  You decided to find yourself the most perfect family for your new body to live with.”

“How did she find us?” asked Stellan. 

He couldn’t decide whether this was some kind of made-up tale to calm his sister and cheer her up or whether Misty believed all she was saying.

She smiled at him.  It was a serious smile, not the sort of winking smile grown-ups give when you and they both know they are pretending.

“As I said, in the Dreaming Place, you can go anywhere you want just by thinking about it.  Once Ruby Rose had decided she wanted to slip into a body and find a family in this – Waking Place, she travelled all around the world, deciding which would be the very best family for her to live with.  Eventually, she chose the family she wanted and when your new little sister was born, here she was!”

“I was very clever to choose my nice family, weren’t I, Misty?” Ruby smiled.

My grandson is reading The Glassmaker’s Children at the moment and maybe, when she’s a few years older, his sister will do the same and find a belated answer to her question.  

 

A Small Step for Me-kind

What is me-kind?  Well in my philosophy – gleaned mainly from the Seth Materials and backed up by the intuitiony bit inside that says, ‘Yeah, that feels right,’ – the overarching personality that I understand as ‘me’ has had/ is having/ will have many lives or incarnations.  These all, obviously, take place in different historical times and geographical locations.  I’m reasonably sure I have, for example, had ‘past’ lives in Egypt as a slave girl, Europe as a survivor of a Viking raid, Atlantis as a teacher and Glastonbury as a mage and Ice Age chieftain’s daughter.

I’ve encountered these alternative ‘me’s in dreams, past life regressions and psychic readings.  I’ve discovered individuals who play key parts in my present life cropping up in those lives too.  All this is fairly standard reincarnational theory as it tends to be interpreted here in the West, in metaphysical circles, at any rate.

Seth takes it further though.  From a vantage point beyond physical existence, Seth takes time out of the equation.  Past, present and future lives, from that perspective, not only happen in the one, unfolding eternal moment beyond our Earthly concept of time, but affect one another.  A discovery in one life can and will affect what happens in another.  An intractable problem may cause us – with help from our soul family – to set up another life, with the express purpose of finding a solution.  Slightly mind-bending, I’ll grant you, but worth considering.

Auguste Rodin: L’Âge d’airain (The Age of Bronze), life-sized plaster cast, c. 1876.

Take my feet, for example.  Well don’t.  You wouldn’t want them – honestly.  They have been causing me grief and problems for many years.  There’s nothing physically wrong with them, but they’ve usually felt numb and icy cold, or they could ache and burn and the skin just felt too tight.  In recent years I haven’t been a confident walker.  I’m scared of slipping or falling on uneven ground; I tend to shuffle rather than stride.  Most of all – and this sounds terribly strange, I know – they just haven’t felt as if they belong to me.

 

Now over the last few weeks, I’ve been attending Reiki healing sessions with a lady who wanted case studies for her Reiki 2 training.  I’ve had some strange experiences during Reiki sessions in the past, so I wasn’t altogether surprised when she asked whether I’d ever broken any bones in my foot.  I hadn’t.

“It’s odd then,” she said.  “I had this very clear image of just about every bone in your left foot being smashed and broken.  Horrible.”

In the time between that and my next healing, she’d been back and discussed this with her teacher.  He’d told her not to share random visions and images with clients, as all sorts of things could enter the mind whilst giving Reiki.  He instructed her only to talk about them if they kept reappearing throughout the session and were particularly strong and persistent.

“But this one WAS,” she explained to me, at the end of our next session.  “This time I saw your feet bound – really tightly.  It was like those poor Chinese women, you know?”

I shuddered.  Yes, that would explain every one of the painful and uncomfortable sensations I’d had in my feet.  It would explain my difficulties with walking and my fear of falling.  ‘Past life?’ we both wondered.  It seemed very likely.  Seth talks about ‘bleed-throughs’ from one of our lives to another.  I needed more information.

As usual, I went to discuss it with Koimul, my ever present and patient Guide, whom I can reach via dowsing over a keyboard.  Here’s the discussion we had, partly dowsed and partly received telepathically:

Do I have a ‘past’ life in which my feet are bound, as in Chinese culture?

YES

That explains so much about the way they sometimes feel, but why are those pains bleeding through into this life? I’m assuming it has something to do with being controlled and dominated?

NO YOUR FOCUS IN THIS LIFE WAS TO BREAK FREE

And I’ve done it, yes?

YES

So why does the foot pain persist?

SO THAT YOU COULD RECOGNISE THE GREAT STEP YOU TOOK

And now I have done so…

YOUR FEET WILL BE FREE

Was D my husband in that life?

YES

Hmm. It explains so much. Can what I’ve done in this life help the ‘me’ in that other life?

NOT PHYSICALLY

But in her dreams she can know freedom and walk in my feet?

YOU HAVE UNDERSTOOD PERFECTLY

May I know her name?

XANG

Interesting, eh?  One final synchronicity:

I went to bed that night wondering about Xang and her life.  Just before I feel asleep, I saw a very clear image of a building with a low stone wall in front and a small dog running along outside.  It was so vivid, I was fully awake and wondering what it meant.  I immediately saw the same vision again.  The next day, I decided to Google bound feet.  The first link I clicked on was a video made by a lady who had travelled to China and found some elderly women whose feet had been bound as children.  The opening scene of the film was exactly the image I’d seen the night before.

And yes, my feet are feeling much better now.

 

 

 

 

Morning Glory – Memento Mori

William Wordsworth may have famously wept to see daffodils ‘fade away so soon’.  Lucky he didn’t grow morning glory.

This is the first time I’ve grown them – nursing the tiny seedlings, transplanting to pots and finally planting them outside.  All that messing around for plants that will vanish at the first frosts, never to return.  I don’t normally bother with annual plants, but that perfect blue drew me, and there was a bare archway in the garden in need of some cover.

The flowers, when they finally appeared, were certainly worth the effort.  They are perfect, stunning, beautiful, and very brief.

All through August, and still now in September I’ve opened the bedroom curtains each morning, eager to see how many flowers have appeared.  Sometimes only one or two, sometimes ten or more.  After breakfast I’m outside peering into the flowers, drinking in their incredible colour and feeling such gratitude for their presence.  By lunchtime, though, they are fading fast.  Visitors who arrive at two or three in the afternoon are told, “Oh if only you’d come an hour or two earlier, you would have seen them.”

All that remains is a crumpled stump of a flower, the petals turned in on themselves, as if ashamed of the toll time has taken on their beauty.

It’s an absurdly short life, isn’t it?  Half a day of glory and they’re gone.  Certainly there are more blooms to replace them the following morning, but still there’s something curiously poignant in the energy and perfection crammed into those short lives.

A bit like us, really…

I always rather liked the idea of adding memento mori  to portraits – the skulls, fading flowers, clocks or hour glasses placed on a side table or held in a hand, to remind the wealthy sitter that ‘this, too, shall pass’, that the fine body and sumptuous clothes are a temporary casing with a limited future.

Gloomy?  Perhaps you’ll see it that way.  To me it seems just fine.  I’m here, in this particular body and life for a few brief decades before moving on.  I don’t measure my value in quantity of years, but in quality of life.

So my morning meditation with my morning glory flowers is a mixture of gratitude for the beauty and perfection of this short life, of determination to make the most of every day – every half day, even – and a calm assurance that there will be countless more flowerings of consciousness to come.