(I wrote this in draft form on Saturday morning.)
I wasn't going to write today, but some early reading broke open something that I still cannot fully explain, even to myself, but I need to try.
I am reading Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that I have developed a thing about raptors, and, silly me, I somehow thought this would be a feel-good story about raising such a bird. Instead (and I'm only about halfway into it) it is a grueling account, with parallel stories about English writer T. H. White and his own experience with a hawk. At one point, she speaks of the moment when the life you didn't lead meets up with the life you did, and interestingly enough, this comes only a few pages after a brief descriptive reference to a Cambridge college dining hall. Immediately, despite the early hour and my hot night bleariness, I had an epiphany.
Over ten years ago, I unexpectedly sang choral evensong with the mixed choir of King's College, and then was invited to the dining hall afterwards. But the jolt I felt just now did not derive from that specific experience or from the year eating in Royal Holloway's somewhat less glamorous dining room. It felt like a true window to a past life. I've always assumed that many of my lifetimes have been spent in England, specifically at cathedrals or Cambridge or Oxford, and I have alluded to this. Clearly I've been priest, choral singer, choral director or composer, academic, and perhaps even royalty or nobility. In a way, it doesn't matter. What matters is the energy of the place and the daily spiritual ritual and focus. In this lifetime, though, this little girl from Schenectady could never settle into New York City, or Duluth, or Burlington, or Helena, or the Capital District, because of literally dozens of previous lifetimes spent in Britain at the heart of whatever milieu was central to the era's spirituality. In distant pre-history I was involved in honoring the Goddess (as "Beryl"?), and then must have morphed into Druid then Christian modes. And in this lifetime, the segue back (or forward) to the Goddess again.
As hard as it is to finally accept it (and I've been teetering on the edge of this for a long time), it becomes very clear why I could never have been British in this lifetime. Over there, I would have become even more identified with this (still) mostly-male set of traditions, and it would have been much harder to break loose. And I didn't "take" in that world, because it knew that beyond my femaleness and Americanness, I was the "other" in an even bigger way. At heart, I was not on the same page, theologically. (I sobbed all the way home from England at the end of my MMus studies in 1981, with airline stewardesses checking in every half hour or so to see if I was "OK". No, I wasn't OK, I was being physically wrenched from my home of thousands upon thousands of years, and I must have known deep down that in this lifetime, I would not get back permanently until late in life, if at all. On the short flight from LaGuardia to Plattsburgh, I looked down from the plane at upstate New York's primeval forests, feeling overwhelmed by wilderness on every possible level. In nearly 45 years, that feeling has never completely gone away.)
The odd thing is realizing that I am centered in my current spirituality in much the same intense way I have always been in those earlier lifetimes. And if we have entered the Aquarian age, as I believe we have, then (I'm very sorry to say) those cathedrals, colleges, chapels, choral evensong services, classrooms and dining halls are no longer the center of "it all". They are not power hubs the way they were for so many generations, at least not the institutional structures above ground. However, Gaia is establishing new power centers around the world as we speak (and unveiling forgotten ones) and many of us may be drawn to them. Whether there will be rites and rituals, or whether life itself will be the only ritual, remains to be seen. Consistent with my post the other day, it isn't either/or. I will bring all these influences forward with me into the new era. I finally feel more at peace with paradoxes and varied threads of experience.
The life I might have led crossed the life I did lead this morning, and it was energetically extremely powerful. There's much more to process about this...I may not publish this post for a few days.
