ponderings from an 18th century past life

I can feel the marks left on my soul from all the hands that have ever caressed my skin before; in this life and the lives that have come before me. Because I do believe in past lives. It might sound a little woo woo and like I'm on some of my serious hippy-dippy bullshit, but I’ve dreamed it and I’ve felt it. I believe that our souls can choose to come back into this earthly realm, I believe that some have been journeying here for millennia and that maybe some are still fresh; those who are ancient and wise, and those who are reckless or silly or selfish. Earthly baby souls inhabiting a human for the first time, and old souls who have mastered the art of reincarnation.

I believe that there is one big collective sitting outside of this earth, a big ol’ heaven if you will. Except it is just a cloud, a dust, a mist, an ever-knowing presence sitting in the space within our atmosphere. It is the place where all of our souls live, young and old, animals and humans alike. It is the energy of the aliveness that inhabits our planet. It is all-knowing. It is the past, present and future all rolled into one and it is ever-present in our daily existence. Watching us as we fuck up, celebrating us in our wins and shaking their heads at our constant amusing behaviours. They live in the clouds and in the wind, in the atoms that exist within everything, and in the space that exists within atoms. They are pure energy. Pure fucking energy. They are all our ancestors, and all our past lives, and all our future selves. All our animals and all our reincarnations. They watch us we play out our lives, they weave destiny within our own free-will, they guide us and course-correct us or maybe push us into the deep end. They can communicate with us if we listen, and sometimes even when we don't. They are our guides, our angels, the very essence of the multi-dimensional universe we live in.

And though I believe in destiny and that everything happens for a reason, I do not believe that everything is set in stone. There is a certain degree as to how much of our life is pre-determined. But there is also an element of free choice weaving within all that. The way I see it is like there are a certain number of paths that we can choose from, that we may walk; not just one one set path that has been chosen for us, but instead multiple paths that are put in front of us. And these each have multiple different paths leading off from them too, an inter-weaving maze that we are allowed to make choices within. The whole freaking map itself is pre-determined, but it can change and it can move - like one big gigantic kaleidoscope. Maybe there are spots within the maze, that no matter what you choose, they overlap and interlink, forcing you to go through a certain challenge. Maybe you have a choice between left or right, maybe you have a choice between 50, maybe you make a choice and the map completely changes. It is an inter-weave of destiny and free-choice. Every single universe, every single dimension, ever possible, exists at any single point of time. If you chose to go left, there is a universe where you chose right. In. Every. Single. Choice. That. You. Have. Ever. Made. That is what makes up this ether, this map, that I speak about.

And these souls within our ether watch us as we play out within these mazes, changing it and moving the paths as we go, re-directing us and maybe chuckling to themselves when they put challenges in front of us. It is the maze of life and the end point is always the same.

You die.

And maybe you go back into the ether of the all-knowing, ever-present nothingness. And then maybe after a while you get thrown back down to earth and you get to do it all over again. Maybe you never come back down and stay in the ether, or maybe you never stay in the ether but just continuously get thrown into earth again and again until hopefully you learn something. Maybe you get reincarnated as a bug. Who knows? Maybe I'm completely wrong about all of it!!

Either way, I'm starting to waffle so if you've made it this far ~ congratulations! I swear I have a point to all of my rambling. Because if there is such a thing as past lives, and a multi-dimensional ether full of all of our souls, then we are all just playing a giant simulation until the moment we die. We are given the chance to explore this earth that we have created. This dimension was only created so that the ether could see itself, could create a physical representation of itself, could see itself, through consciousness, through humans, through the eyes of us. Experience love and happiness and delight and joy and heartbreak and hurt and every single emotion under the sun - through us!

And for me ~ that means love. A whole lot of love. It has always been my destiny to find love, to experience it in every single moment and in every single form. Love is what my soul reincarnates in this world for, every single fucking time. I seek it out, I crave it, I search for it. I get lost within love. It is my home, it is my journey, and all of the things that come along with it (pleasure being one of my favourites). That is where my 18th century past lives tie in here. Because I have journeyed through a multitude of past lives where I have been the romantic, the 18th century damsel in distress. The young girl on the prairie in the white dress with the flowers in her hair. I have lived lives spanning over centuries where I have fallen in love with gentleman, where I have been wooed and I have been swooned. I have fallen in love in paddocks exactly like the scene from 'To All the Boys I've Loved Before'. I have skipped through fields of flowers with a boys' hand in mine. I have worn the petticoats and the dresses, I have seen myself dance along palace floors and I have had my picture painted during the Renaissance. I have been the peasant and the pauper and found love within it, even when the world told me I couldn't. I have been the princess who has found her prince.

From the dawning of human-kind, I have played out the scenes from romantic fairy tales (maybe that's why I was so obsessed with them as a kid). Romanticism and romance, sensuality and devotion, woven into the fabric of my being. It sounds cheesy I know but I believe it to be true, it is the only explanation I have for being the way that I am. For the sheer depth and capacity and ferocity that is my love. Because I have found it before. Multiple times. I have found it within the same souls, and I have found it in new ones. There are souls that have continuously made appearances as my lovers, souls that have been connected to mine, tied to mine inextricably. Souls that I have been destined to meet, to fall in love with and when it happens it feels like coming home. And for a long time, that was my experience - I found the loves I was destined for and it was easy. The men would chase me, would 18th-century-style wine and dine me. I'd get married to The One and I'd be incandescently happy. But then the modern age started to come around. There became an increase in the number of souls designed to challenge me, to break my heart and to hurt me, to help me journey. Don't get me wrong, they'd still happen in my past re-incarnations, but something happened along the way where my story of love and longing had a major hiccup.

Call it modernism if you will - I do. But society changed. The industrial revolution started and the world took on a bleaker meaning, no longer was I skipping through fields with the love of my lives next to me. Suddenly men were no longer interested in wooing me and in winning me over. It was the rise of sexism (albeit yes, it definitely existed before too in a major way but you get what I mean). And consequently it was the rise of feminism. It was the period of time in my timeline of life, where my soul started to get hurt, get rejected and get refused. It wasn't a fairy tale anymore, it was heartbreak. But it's okay - because it was the moment I became a suffragette, when I stood up for women's rights and for myself. It left it's scars on me don't get me wrong, but it turned me into the independent feminist baddie that I am today, the I don't need no man type bitch that you all know and love. It was a big time of growth for me, of re-evaluating probably everything. As much as I still craved love, there was something bigger I needed to do and that was the fight for women, for my own kind, to stand up against the rise of hatred that had occurred within men and within the world. Because these men were no longer the souls of my lovers, and past me knew that. The world had changed, it lost it's magic and it's sparkle, it's remembrance of it's incandescent capability. It turned dark and it turned bleak, not just for me but for a lot of people.

This period changed me. It made me the person I am today. It gave me heartbreak and distrust and a whole heap of different lessons and struggles, it gave me a new motivation not just to find love but to continuously find myself. I became the combination of the 18th century romantic and the modern day feminist baddie. An interweaving of the me that is so ridiculously devoted to the phenomenon of love, that dresses in white and wears flowers in her hair ~ with the me that shaves her head and wears nothing but ripped jeans and converses and puts her middle finger up at any man that even looks at her funny.

It's interesting where that leaves me though. What it means for this life though. I have my own interpretations and my own guessings but who really knows. The soul-deep lover I talked about earlier? I believe he's still out there searching for me just as much as I am longing for him. But the modern period has changed him too, left it's mark on his skin just as much as it has mine. The love we had through the thousands of years could not exist in this world, it had to fall apart to come back new. The kaleidoscopic map needed a period of darkness until it could be put back together. I believe in this lifetime we are destined to find each other again after years of having missed each other, of passing each other by and letting other souls love us (and hurt us) instead. But this is the lifetime where destiny gets back on track. Where the timeline of love gets restarted but in a new way, in a more complete way. In a way that has learnt from the scars of the past, from the modernisation of the world we live in and has settled into a new re-calibration of what that love will look like.

Maybe we won't go for picnics in fields or walks by the lake, or on horse-drawn carriage rides. Maybe instead we'll abolish the patriarchy and learn how to love again in a world that kinda forgot how. Maybe that is our new destiny. To find each other again, learn to love each other again, and to teach the world how.