Take back the magic, p.20
Take Back the Magic, page 20
We’ve all been here before. But we do not remember most of those lives—just as we do not remember most of our days within a single lifetime. We retain impressions from experiences both traumatic and triumphant, but of the vast epochs of ordinary being that have made us who we are, we can catch only the vaguest and most fleeting of sensations.
We cannot catalog or document all our past lives, but we can acknowledge our intimations of immortality. Behind us are vast mysteries. Within us are multiplicities. This is true not just of ourselves, but of every being we meet. That child was once our teacher. This homeless man was once our child. We are all connected to each other in more ways than we can possibly imagine.
Have I only ever been a human being?
Probably not. Our long-ago ancestors seemed to know that they were always changing places with the other beings of this world. Our grandmother becomes the deer who feeds us. The bear returns in human form to become our lover. The trees have always been our mothers. How would we treat the many beings of this world if we knew that we might return to share their fate?
How do I metabolize the traumas of past lives?
With the gifts we have gathered across the ages. We do not just have horrors within us, but also memories of bliss and joy, love and healing, flight and song. When we begin to claim the long story of our souls—to open ourselves to the spirits not just around but within us—we can connect with inner resources beyond our imagining. A woman I know who was recovering from the suicide of a loved one began pouring out her sorrow into weaving—and found the whole experience effortless, as if her hands had always known how to move the threads through warp and woof to create beauty. David Crosby wrote his famous song “Déjà Vu” after going sailing for the first time and realizing how familiar it felt to be on a boat. A number of young herbalists I have met are clearly tapping into knowledge they have been accumulating for lifetimes. We all can do this—if we follow our inclinations and intimations.
How do I remember who I have been?
As modern people, we want the answers, the clarity, and the solutions—and nothing gets us into more trouble than this impulse. To embrace the reality of reincarnation is to acknowledge the great mysteries that surround us on every side. But it is within those mysteries that the magic happens. We may not know who we’ve been, but to know that we’ve been is to realize how much time there is for all our dreams to come true.
Still, we can tap into those mysteries through both our interests and aversions. There are some places we long to visit and others where we will never go. We are fascinated by one period of history and refuse to learn about another. We have fears and phobias, talents and yearnings. All of who we are has arisen from who we have been.
Present Entanglements
Many of us have had the experience of meeting someone for the first time and being absolutely convinced we already know them. Probably we have. A woman in one of my workshops described being in a dicey situation on the subway as a young woman, when a stranger appeared out of nowhere to escort her home safely. “I felt like he was more my father than my real father,” she said. Perhaps once upon a time, in another life, he had been. How many ways would we show up for each other, lifetime after lifetime, if we could? Sometimes as parents, sometimes as teachers, sometimes as momentary guardian angels.
How often are our mothers reborn as animals to feed us, plants to heal us, or trees to offer us shade? What if we could recognize how often souls we have known once upon a time are arriving to aid and guide us? How blessed we might feel by all that is.
Why do bad things happen to good people?
The most honest and helpful answer is that we do not know. We do not see the big picture or the long story. We live inside the mystery. To assert that some people are punished for actions in past lives, while others are blessed, is a kind of karmic fundamentalism. It assumes we can understand and explain why everything is happening and, usually, we can’t.
But how does it work? If someone I love is dead but also reborn, why am I praying to them as an ancestor? Where are they?
How can an electron be in two places at once? How can a place in a dream be both one location and another? We don’t really understand time or consciousness. What we can experience and claim is love.
Future Possibilities
I believe many people, when they hear about the various impending climate emergencies, secretly console themselves by thinking, “Well, at least I’ll be dead by then.” But, in fact, we will all be returning to a world devastated by our species and its insatiable demands. Every being on the Earth will be reborn to face challenges the likes of which we have not encountered for millions of years. But within us are storehouses of wisdom from ages past. Even now, we are gathering the memories of long-ago lifetimes in preparation for the ages ahead.
But what if I don’t want to come back? I’m sick of being alive.
Here’s the thing. While we will live again, we don’t live the same life. Or at least we don’t have to. Perhaps we need to ask how to be released from certain repetitious patterns in our soul stories or how to claim unrecognized gifts and talents that might give us joy. If the thought of rebirth burdens us, we need to explore more deeply the life we are living.
In Groundhog Day, one of the slyest and wisest films about reincarnation, a meteorologist is condemned to relive the same interminable day over and over again. He moves through a variety of reactions to this curse. He rails against it. He decides he is a god who can do whatever he wants. He becomes suicidal. Eventually he surrenders and, realizing he has all the time in the world, takes a single piano lesson. Thousands of days later, thousands of lifetimes later, he is a virtuoso who has won friends, love, and joy and wants to stay where he is forever.
What would we do today if we knew we were stepping onto a different path going forward? What would be our first piano lesson in this lifetime?
Do we have any control over where we are reborn?
Some spiritual adepts—Tibetan lamas for instance—believe that we do. Before they die, they leave behind signs that will help their fellow monks find their newest incarnation. All of this involves a great deal of meditative technology and is designed to ensure that the religious riches are maintained within a carefully guarded system.
I suspect reincarnation is both easier and messier than all that. Love guides us to where we belong, but sometimes it can be hard to figure out why we’ve ended up where we have. I do know that I ask the dead for help guiding me to parents in my next life who will recognize me for who I am. I pray, too, each day, that Clark and I will find each other again and that my children and I will always be close to each other.
May we all be reborn into families we love enough to return to. May we all find lovers with whom we long to eternally reunite. May we all be reborn into a world to which we want to return again and again and again.
13
The Long Story Is Always a Love Story
we will all be reborn into the world we have made. This is both my terror and my hope. We will come back to the fires and the floods, the dying oceans, the crowded cities, the war-torn wastelands, the poisoned mines, and the radiated landscapes glowing from nuclear debris. If hell is a possibility, it is the one we will have created for ourselves out of our very denial of the eternal return.
But it is also true that we will carry forward the healing, the connections, the wisdom, and the love we have found and cultivated in this life. Nothing is ever lost to us. What would we do today if we truly knew in our bones that we were coming back? Whom would we reach out to? What actions would we take or not take? What messes would we clean up? What prayers would we send forward into the future that awaits us?
Just before the Lady showed up, Clark founded a group with a ragtag collection of spiritual friends to ask questions like these. Many of them had instigated Occupy Wall Street and found themselves on the other side of that experience not sure what to do next. Excess Anonymous, modeled on a twelve-step format, was dedicated to finding some sober response to a culture hell-bent on ecocide. But even though everyone recognized the imminence of climate collapse, no one was really sure what sobriety from extractive capitalism really looked like. People wanted to limit their use of electricity and their shopping. The younger members discussed dumpster diving. But in truth, none of us was convinced we had the answer. An alcoholic in recovery doesn’t drink. While difficult, the actual prescription is simple and clear-cut. But every decision we made—our work, our eating, our housing, our living—kept us entangled in civilization’s ongoing catastrophe. And even if we did find some way to sober up, it would mean nothing unless entire nations did so as well.
Clark wanted to go on a pilgrimage to Dorset, Vermont, because it was the point of origin for Alcoholics Anonymous, which he had been studying in depth. He was fascinated by the group’s nonhierarchical spirituality and potential to transform our fundamentally addictive relationship to civilization itself. Since he’d left the monastery, he’d been searching for a religious model that didn’t privilege priests or gurus. AA fit the bill. Many people have written about how it evolved from a spiritual community called the Oxford Group. Less well known are its origins in the participatory democracy of small-town New England life. Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, had grown up in Dorset, and his best buddy, Mark Whalon, had been a big proponent of the power of the Vermont Town Hall Meeting, in which every voice was heard. One eco-activist we knew felt that the communities most likely to survive the radical social disruptions of climate change were those that had maintained traditions of self-governance. Clark wanted to see Bill Wilson’s childhood home in Dorset, which had been converted into an AA museum. Dorset is a tiny town on the edge of the mountains, with a picturesque village green, old white clapboard houses, and the feeling of being largely untouched since the nineteenth century.
In a strange coincidence, I’d spent a summer in Dorset during college, at a little theater where I interned as an actress—painting sets into the middle of the night, sewing costumes between scenes, and memorizing lines on beautiful lawns under old oak trees. It was an enchanted summer in many ways, with much laughter and a little romance, but one that often found me, inexplicably, in tears. At the time I had simply attributed this to the general exhaustion of it all.
Still, I was happy enough to return to Dorset with Clark when Sophie was accepted into a teen writing program up in Vermont. We dropped her off at the mountain retreat and, rather than drive home, decided to spend the weekend at a country inn. Clark and I were both thrilled to have a weekend on our own together. We drove along winding roads, chatting away happily about this and that. I had a map open in my lap—this was in the days before phones told you where to go.
“We take the next right up ahead, I think,” I told Clark. “There should be a county marker for Rt. 30.”
“It’s just beyond the red house,” answered Clark.
“What red house?” I asked, peering ahead to see what he was looking at.
“The county marker. It’s just beyond the red house. That one!” said Clark, taking his hand off the wheel as we came around the bend and pointing at an old building.
“How did you know it was there? I thought you’d never been to Vermont before.”
“I don’t know,” said Clark, rubbing his eyes. “I just did. The road’s going to twist a bit up ahead. Then there will be some kind of roadside store. I don’t know. It’s like I’ve been here before in a dream.”
“I drove one whole summer on these roads, and I don’t remember any of them.”
The rest of the weekend passed uneventfully. We collapsed at the inn and were so happy with a respite from parenthood that we never made it to the Bill Wilson House. But the next year Sophie was accepted into the same program, and Clark felt the same sense of familiarity as we drove into the village. We didn’t make it to the museum that time either.
Just after that Our Lady showed up, and Excess Anonymous morphed almost effortlessly into a rosary circle where we followed the mysteries of life, death, and rebirth while we prayed for our hearts’ desires. In ways that were hard to articulate, this felt like a more genuine answer to our questions about climate change and how to navigate the coming catastrophes. Amid all of this, and despite still being ill, Sophie began looking at New England colleges. And so, for a third time, we found ourselves driving through Dorset. We stayed with Sophie at what was now our favorite inn before her interview the following day.
The fall foliage was at its peak, and the inn was crowded. After dinner, we settled down, turned out the lights, and were just about to all fall asleep when a baby began to cry in the room next door. The child was inconsolable, wailing and howling. “Just bring the baby into bed with you,” I whispered to myself. I felt sorry for the young parents, but I was worried about Sophie, who had a hard enough time sleeping. An hour passed, and finally I went down to the front desk and begged the innkeeper for a different room. “Our daughter is sick,” I said. “And she has a big college interview tomorrow.”
“I don’t have another free room.” He shook his head, studying his roster. “I could make up a couple beds in the room above the old stables. It’s not very nice, but it is quiet back there.”
“Perfect!” I said, relieved.
Blearily, we packed up our stuff and headed out into the night, past the cottages and the pool house, until we came to a ramshackle old building on the edge of the woods. We climbed a rickety staircase to a room that was, thankfully, clean enough. Sophie soon drifted off to sleep on the pullout couch. Clark and I lay in bed, trying to settle down with our rosaries.
Clark was clearly agitated, so when we were done, I asked him what was the matter.
“Every time I shut my eyes I am traveling back and forth on the roads around this town. Up over the mountain, back down the mountain, around this bend, back into town, up this driveway, down that road. I’ve been here before. I know I’ve been here before. But what kind of person drives round and round all day long in circles?”
“Is it some teaching about the rosary?” I wondered. “How it maps the same story over and over again, always bringing us back to the same places?”
Clark shook his head, clearly irritated. “No. It’s not a metaphor. And it’s not a teaching. This is real. I’ve been here before in another life, and I’ve traveled these roads so many times that I know every bend and turn, like I could feel them with my feet.”
In the dark beside me, Clark gasped with a great inhale of air that seemed to silence the room. “Oh.”
My whole body was prickling with goose bumps, and I could barely breathe.
“A postman,” he said at last.
“What?”
“A postman travels the same roads day in and day out, winter and summer, year after year.”
“What are you talking about?” I couldn’t help but feel concerned.
Years earlier, when we had first moved to Woodstock, Clark had gotten it into his head to apply for a job as a postman. He was adamant about it. This was just after he had sold two spiritual books, at a time when he was in big demand on the workshop circuit. He insisted that it was because he liked to walk, and as a postman he’d be free to write poetry all day long as he rambled around town. I wasn’t at all sure about this rural postal fantasy. But he dropped the idea eventually, and our life of writing together continued as it had before.
In what felt like a cosmic joke, however, everyone in our little town began mistaking Clark for the local postman who, apart from also being tall, looked nothing like him. “I told you, I should’ve been the postman,” Clark would laugh, especially when our finances were precarious.
“I was the postman here in Dorset,” Clark announced with complete conviction.
“Okay…” Our lives were always taking strange turns, but I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with this one. “So you used to be a postman. Does that mean you are going to try and apply for the job again?”
“No!” said Clark. “Of course not. Why would I do that?” He leapt out of bed and pulled his computer out of his backpack. “But I’ve got to check something. I’ve got to find out when Mark Whalon died.”
“Mark Whalon?” The name was only vaguely familiar to me at that point.
“Bill Wilson’s best friend. He was a lifelong mentor to Bill, but while Bill went off on all his adventures, Mark never left Dorset. He was this ordinary local guy. He was the postman.”
Clark began searching, and I turned on the light. “But why now? We’ve been here so many times before.”
“It’s this room,” Clark said. “I’ve spent a lot of time here. This room above the stables was the key.”
A few minutes later Clark had found an old LIFE Magazine photo essay about one of the first postmen to deliver mail by automobile. It was all about Mark Whalon and his route… up and over the mountain, in and out of town. Whalon was clearly a real character—a postman who didn’t just deliver the mail but wrote poetry along the way. Poetry he published regularly in Yankee Magazine. He’d even written a little book about rural life and published a small volume of his verse.
“He even looks a little bit like you… at least, a lot more than our local postman does. He sounds like an early twentieth-century Vermont version of a haiku poet. And the stables. We are in the stables. Before he had a car, I bet he kept his horses here.”
Clark was still researching. What he wanted to find was an obituary, which he did a moment later. He paused for a long time before telling me what it said. Whalon had died in September of 1956, exactly forty-nine days and nine months before Clark was born. That forty-nine-day period is considered in Buddhism to be the time a soul spends in between one life and another, in a liminal realm called the bardo. Of course, the nine months was simply the length of a pregnancy. Between Mark’s ending and Clark’s beginning was just enough time for the soul to move from one body to another.
“And look at when he was born,” said Clark.
