Past Lives

Do you believe you had a former life? I do. I'm always thinking about what I could have been in a former life.

There was the time when I was 17 years old and went to London for the first time. I had been dreaming about London since 1964 - Mary Poppins, Beatles, Petula Clark and others from Swinging London perhaps shaped my longing for the place. But it went deeper than that. There was a familiarity about the place I couldn't put my finger on. I wasn't familiar with all of England - not Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Cornwall, etc. London called to me. So when I hopped into a cab from the airport, he couldn't find his way around. I told him "I think you go up that way and turn a right". And when I was right, I actually freaked myself out enough to write Hans Holzer - the "former lives" expert living in NYC a letter. He wrote in scribbled German-English that he wasn't going to do a case study on me, unless I had recurrent dreams about a place, which I didn't.

How far back does one soul go? When I lived in New York, I hung around African-Americans and they'd nod to each other - "she think she black". I often wondered if I had once been a slave in the deep south.

Here in Israel I am constantly bumping into Franciscans friars and monks. A Jewish woman sang St. Francis' Dolce Amore which brought me near tears. Did I once know the man?

Was I once living in the time of the first temple, which intrigues me more than the second temple?

Why did the border between Pakistan and India feel so familiar to me when I was there last year, watching the people of Pakistan file back into their fields at sunset one Friday night? The feeling was almost magical. Did some of the lost 10 tribes not travel in this direction?

Why do I have such a strong desire to visit the Silk Route - Bukhara, Tajikstan, Turkmenistan, Samarkand - and not France, Denmark or the exotic Fiji Island. Not even the Bahamas. Was I once there, living in a hut or living in a palace?

If you believe in past lives, do you come back to rectify what you didn't complete in the last few? Is my constant battle/struggle with money and cravings for the good life a sign that I once was rich? Perhaps stingy rich and miserly - not giving any charity? Did I have to come back as me in this life to learn a lesson or two?

And do we have to rectify in this life the biblical feud between Sarah and Hagar in order that there be peace between their two sons?