Things Could Be Worse

Reincarnation is a popular idea in some circles. I've written about past life regression before, most recently back in July and further back in 2006.

Just a brief reminder: I read Tarot cards. One of the things I can do in a reading is explore who you were in previous incarnations. I've done this for others and myself, coming up with stories of lives lived in other bodies and places. We can change gender and culture and time periods.

We break away an essence of ourselves from the collective soul or spirit when we need a certain experience. We manifest a body, test our fortitude and then go back from whence we came.

Unlike so many people I've met, I was never Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth or King Arthur. People like to think they are special. It seems I've never been famous or important although I have thrown a wrench in other people's plans.

In dark age Britain, serfs were tied to the land. They were born, lived and died in the same small place. A serf's role in life was fixed and ridged and people knew where they stood. You did what your father and his father before him did. If your grand-father tilled the soil, you tilled the soil. Very few people broke the mold.

Around the year 900 AD, in Saxon England, I was a male serf born to a family of cow herders. While my grandfather and my father milked cows, father flaunted tradition by naming me Nod. Even so, I milked cows. I herded them to their pastures. I followed the plan until I saw the falconer at work when I was eight. From that point on, I got in trouble for ignoring my tasks in favor of watching the falconer. I even managed to assist him on occasion. I had a gift, a talent, with the birds.

Our Lord loved falcon hunting so much, that when the falconer died unexpectedly of a fever, leaving no son or apprentice, the Overlord raised me up. I was thirteen. I was in heaven.

Until three years later when I met the Lord's daughter, Leofflaed and we fell in love.

She, like most daughters of the time, was betrothed to an older man in furtherance of her father's ambitions. I was drunk on my success in rising above my station. I could do anything. I could save her.

We made plans to run away. Neither of us knew where exactly we would go as we had never been beyond the borders of our manor. We packed food and clothing and prepared to escape on foot. We left one dark night in June. We were quickly caught.

Since she was defiled, she was purged, then sent to a cloistered convent where she died in childbirth. My son became a rather important priest.

I was dragged back to the manor, strapped to a large log with a hawk caged on my stomach. I was pecked to death over the period of four days as an example to my fellow man.

* * *

LEOFFLÆD - f (Anglo-Saxon) Beloved beauty.
NOÐ - m (Anglo-Saxon) Bold, daring.

who do you think you were

~ click image to make biggerer ~

Gilded Tarot by Ciro Marchetti

I just took one of those fb quizzes. It was going to tell me what I was in my past lives. Seems I was a warrior. I’m thinking they are on to something⸮

When my daughter was young, I was in my second round of college. One of my professors offered me a job which I took. This job consisted of ten years of struggling with the polar opposites that have always defined my life. He was a religious, married man who had a girlfriend who turned out to be someone from my past. She was my age (he was 10 years or so older), from my parents’ social circle and we went to high school together although we never associated with one another at that time.

The girlfriend and I became friends. Not really but I can’t find a better word for what we were. I tried to mold myself into that concept but ultimately it didn’t work out. I think I’m friendship incompetent, illiterate, dysfunctional, disabled. I’ll look for a better word for that later.  

Anyway, my boss’ office was located in a small town in the pine barrens of New Jersey. One of those little eclectic touristy places with small shops and unique businesses. Around the corner was a metaphysical bookstore. The owner gave classes on different things. Girlfriend wanted to learn how to read Tarot cards. She fancied herself esoterically inclined. She was afraid to go alone, so she finagled me into going with her. Since my great-grandmother on my mother’s side read cards for her village’s witch, I decided to go along for the ride.

Girlfriend lost interest after about three classes as she so often did. I continued on. Seems I had some skill with the process. I went on to read cards at the shop on weekends for some extra cash. None of this really matters for the original point of this little ditty.

One of the things I learned to do was past life regression readings. None of my past lives were very glamorous. I wasn’t anyone famous or important. Like the one woman who insisted she was Marilyn Monroe in a past life. We couldn’t convince her this wasn’t possible because she was born before Ms. Monroe died, though. Maybe she was anticipating the alternate universe craze. Anywho…

In one life, I was a girl born into a poor family during the middle of the 14th century in central Europe. I had a mother and father and an older brother and older sister. It was during the Black Death and we were on the move, walking, carrying what little we had on our backs, in search of a better life and running from the sickness.

Since I was a girl (not the pretty one) and the youngest and puny and rather quiet (which translated into not too bright at the time) and resources were scarce, my parents decided to leave me behind so the rest of them had a better chance at survival.

I awoke one morning to find my family had snuck away from me during the night.