When it happened, it happened big. It's amazing how two-thousand pounds of Detroit steel changed my life, forever. Or at the least changed my perspective on it. There I was connected to tubes and snaked to life support machines in Good Hope Community Hospital's ICU, and hovering over my body. My mother was at my side drawn into a grief that preludes the possibility I would never wake. If I had in fact died that day, I never realized it. And I did that day; at least that's what I was told. I wanted to reach for her and let her know I was ok. But there was a barrier I couldn't cross. I was frightened. But there was a peace that calmed my soul. My chi, my life energy was in a transitional state. My original soul was being vacated and I was under new contract.
I would have never known this, if it weren’t for the conversation I had with Serena. She said that she was a trance medium. I saw in her eyes that there was more to her than I realized as I paid her fee for the reading, a woman who tossed away the stones from the hill of Esquiline that helped destroy an Empire. She held secrets and they were mine. I wondered at that moment, did her runes have something to say about my history? Did the tarot cards spread on the table have something to say about the Donner party, as angels or their likeness came down from the heavens to offer ultimatums? Near deaths, they considered their options and resorted to cannibalism. In the end, all it got them was an extra pair of socks to cover blackened feet.
"You are a walk-in," she said, her gaze confident, with my truth.
So there I was in Good Hope Community Hospital on that fateful day, when earlier, I thought it would be cool to borrow my friend's bike without asking, and then stepping in front of destiny, something I couldn't comprehend. I listened with baited breath ready to hear more than the mystic art of reading fallen arches.
"You actually left your body...you're not the same soul as before."
So there I was thirty years later after the theft and paying for it big, sitting with a woman that knew things. "Are you sure?" I said.
"Yes." Simple as that.
I couldn't say that my ruminations were the same as Frank Kafka's ability to morph into a fly. But her explanation made sense. I had always felt different from others since that day my mother's wish for a miracle was granted. But why couldn't I have been lifted by that force to sail over the Buick Skylark's hood, untouched. Instead going into the windshield head first with the last thing I saw. The woman driver's gapping mouth in a horrified scream, and able see she had a tonsillectomy. Don't get me wrong-I'm not insinuating that women are bad drivers. We were just unlucky.
“It was my destiny, as it was before,” she said.
"My destiny?" I said, drawing off a smoke to calm my nerves as I looked into her eyes.
"The soul," She paused. "The soul proper's energies can reincarnate. You are the Traveler now. By decree, you are destined to serve humanity, in this life. You're a giver of energy, as you were before"
A servant of humanity? I thought, as I rubbed the stains off my coffee mug, feeling closer to the truth. My truth. Perhaps, in the same way the Son of God did knowing the Roman's would eventually finish him off, and knew that they would overlook the fact what they were about to do with the spears and things would make him a martyr. I'm sure the simple Shepard’s mother didn't want that, but saw in her son's eyes the power to engage the populace, for the good of the many, and change the Romans’ view of life. It would never be the same.
The Traveler. Me? Just leave the spears at home. I don't want to be a martyr, I thought. Being there in the crowd was enough.
Serena's purposeful turns had me question faith in the Father and the energy of the soul proper that had allowed my lives to flow through non-linear forums across centuries, in a brand new suit. Eventually, I helped bring the suburbanites in the posh district of Esquiline, one of the Seven Hills of Rome (that comprised the Capitolium, the Palitium, the Caelium, the Aurelium, the Cispius, and Fagutalis), in 70 A.D, to an understanding that if a citizen uprising against my employer and master, Emperor Vespasian, were to happen, at the very least the revolt would produce devastating results in futility. As a slave to Vespasian, I was also his tutor and confidant. I was the one who helped lay out the negotiation's subterfuge to cite emanate domain, so that the Colosseum could be built. I had recalled that it was Serena’s intent to cause me bodily harm when she stooped to pick up a stone to bludgeon me for the treachery of my actions. You see at the time I had no choice. But in the exchange, under the wings of Minerva goddess of warriors, poetry, medicine, wisdom, for the moment untaxed commerce, crafts, and music the Temple of Minerva Medica was built to honor them for their forfeitures. A place where the populace was able to form a guild of artisans and philosophers.
At one point, I was sure, I would feel the tip of the spear in the wake of the chosen carbon dating my remains, even though the deception worked out in the end. Would I have been with Serena that today we sat in the Blue Parthian as she cited my past, among bohemians spilling muses from an open-mike poetry slam? My one regret was taking from the one and giving it to another for the sake of the masses-or was it for the gluttony of the one. I came clean in my confessions, since the Roman Empire's demise, and thanked the spirits for not having me thrown to the mercy of the gladiators.
It was later, in my tenancies, as a monk in the monastic realm, in seventeenth century England that I earned my atonement for my actions helping Vespasian acquire real estate, and was granted a reprieve. But unfortunately, I found myself in another dilemma. I had to choose whom to serve. The commoners or Charles 1 of England. Not a choice I wanted to make. But I had to, as the Traveler; I was destined to be a mediator. What Charles wanted did nothing but cause problems with the Church and commoners. He wanted one unified church and introduced a new version of the English Common Prayer Book-that gave into a higher Anglican order. With that move, he pissed off the Scots, who rioted in Edinburgh. And I was in the middle of the may lay. It was my duty to serve the people, without question of my own needs, and gave them strength, even though it meant my own undoing. Charles 1 was nuts and iniquitous toward the Protestant mainstream. He really pissed everyone off when he courted and married a French Roman Catholic, Princess Harriette-Marie de Bourbon, without England's blessing.
To make a long story short, Charles led England into three civil wars. He was eventually convicted of treason, murder, and tyranny. On January 30, 1649, he was executed. The man's Chi or Ki had made full circle, since the executioner swung his ornately garnished axe and cleaved his neck at the C-3 and C-4 vertebrae. I believed that his soul was released to navigate the continuum, and giving to his demeanor would eventually reincarnate into another foreboding figure.
There was no puff of smoke that came from the grassy knoll that gave me instant gratification about my truths-it had to be learned, experienced, and accepted. I was told my lives as the Traveler weren't always traumatic or weaved in turmoil. My spiritual balances kept others on an even keel that helped nurture the energies for the next trip.
It's an awakening to realize that the moment I was jetted through that woman's windshield, I would learn the reasons why I experienced those disjointed moments being pulled from my skin and sent upward to surreal points with the angst of gravitational relationships between my predicament and Einstein's theories turning my stomach. I remember on this one occasion, I was hurtled above the booth in my favorite haunt, and was given a view of people milling about in Whinny the Pooh print pajamas who were sipping tea from White-bone China oohing and awing some kind of spectacle. The notable ones were mulling over marble sculptures of contorted nudes. The others in the group stood on the sidelines like ornamental frill pondering what they couldn't have, hope, the wanting, and the desire for exotica.
Now wait a minute, that wasn't entirely true. I did have the ephemeral twinges. It was during my time as a Mandan Sioux medicine man that on several occasions I would be in a sweat usually in an altered state of mind searching for the “White Buffalo”. But the rest of that story about the Whiney the Poohs was me reliving a childhood dream.
Now about rumors.
It was spiritual awareness and its energy that couldn't be contained by religion. Even to this day. People were burned on the stake for that knowledge. I know because I was there. The concept foreshadowed one question. Did man create religion to understand his place in the food chain? When we believed Jesus walked with us (after the Roman's had there way), dressed in his saintly robes, and offering direction and protection for the wayward in time of need, I rationalized that it was no different to me than Elvis Presley dressed in his flamboyant outfits walking with his own swaggering step-the signature of his Sainthood, along the Vegas strip, who looked at his flock, and said, "Thank you...thank you, very much!", as they dropped quarters into the collection basket paying homage to Graceland, and held the belief that their Messiah had returned.
THE END.
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