Connections.

I was going to keep on reading Children’s Past Lives by Carol Bowman last night, but I was a bit tired. So I looked around the nearby bookshelves in one of my new flat’s rooms, and a WWII encyclopedia caught my eye. It was a two volume book with a lot of pictures, so I decided to flick through. I instantly knew why it is something I avoided my entire childhood. Though I haven’t been especially “past life moody” in the last couple of weeks, I felt a strong emotion just seeing the complete outfit of a Wehrmacht soldier, just like the one my boyfriend wore in the 30’s. But the worst came when I saw a collection of military medals used to decorate soldiers and I felt pure rage. I am always surprised how past life emotions are always there, hidden, but ready to come out again if you only let them. Another thing that surprises me is I have always seemed to be more affected by Johann’s death than my own. Maybe this is because that is what killed me, not the bullets. 

Rage. No medals were awarded to him, but he died anyway, just one more of the many victims in a senseless war, like all wars. I still wonder where he is buried, whether his family knew or not, I wonder whether he is remembered by someone else than me. I always tell myself it doesn’t matter anymore. He died as Johann, but he is still alive. I died as Katrina, and she is still living inside of me. Death means nothing. And though this is good, perhaps it is the real problem: she still lives, so her pain is real. Maybe he is mourning too, somewhere. If he is incarnated, maybe he remembers too.  

When the letters were beginning to get blurred I went to bed. I don’t take this as a real memory, as I was half asleep, half awake, but dark images of my flat in Cologne, during the 60’s, appeared in my mind. I wondered about my thoughts about Nazi soldiers back then, when I was a young man in Germany and I also felt so angry about things happening in my country: the denial of our past, the attempts to make us forget about Nazism and the war we had lost. My grandfather getting old and being forgotten even with all the medals he did win (not sure if this was during WWI or WWII). He deserved so much better for being a war veteran. A word stood out so clearly in my head: shame. We were so ashamed of our past, but how could we be? I was smoking in the dark, as always. I saw the drugs again. I saw a paper in my hands. But what made me so anxious? I thought maybe I got to read news about the last Nazis who escaped and made it to other countries, I wondered what I used to think of them... I don’t know. But I do know there was already so much anger brewing inside of me, probably a consequence of my German soldier’s death (whom I might have felt as a coworker then, if I had remembered) and my suicide. What would have happened if we had survived the war? Johann would have ended up dead anyway, possibly in France too. And I don’t think my fate would have been much better, maybe I would have died in a bombing, or even raped, or sent as a prisoner for collaborating with Nazi soldiers. Instead, there I was, now one of them (the German people), but in an invaded city, where I had to be faithful to Americans, my pride trodden down over and over again, and an infinite darkness still in my heart.

And so we are connected in the great Circle of Life.

Then I was back in the present and the words “Life’s a circle, I recall” were in my mind. They are from one of my all time favourite rock bands, called Barclay James Harvest. A beautiful song that now seems to be clearly related to reincarnation. Or, at least, to the way things are: no matter the events, no matter how you feel, but you always have to carry on. And so, I find myself here, watching pictures in books and thinking “Life is so strange: I know all these people are reincarnated now and with some of them I have had so close connections... It seems I already had them in my latest life, who knows if I stared at their pictures the same way I stared at their avatars on the Internet a couple of years ago, feeling an unexplained attraction, still half aware of what it all really meant. The world keeps spinning on and on, and we have changed bodies, but nothing else changed”.

Awareness makes things a bit easier, but sometimes distance still feels insurmountable.

THE WORLD GOES ON

See the gambler make a stand

Holds a lifetime in his hand

Win the game or lose control

But the world goes on forever 

Life's a circle, I recall

Shadows played upon the wall

You pay the piper to call the tune

And the song goes on forever 

And when all the words have gone

There's the thought to carry on

Just like a bird that sings

Leave it all behind and spread your wings

You can leave it all behind - spread your wings 

Lay me down

Saw the road move on before me

Times when I was tired and lost my way

Looking at life and strangely for the first time

Thinking that I could stay here

But the world moves on forever

And when all the words have gone

There's the thought to carry on

Just like a bird that sings

Leave it all behind and spread your wings

You can leave it all behind - spread your wings