Purpose

   I am life, and I am death. I am the personification of everything in between. Unseen, I am the epitome of all that we are, you and I. By your side, I steadfastly remain, from your first breath to your last. We share this world and the world to come. While I see every minuscule moment of your physical duration, you are incapable of seeing the love I have for you, from one soul to another, the heartbeat of existence thrumming rhythmically within us both. This is how it should be. You, one soul, tethered to the physical world, and I, another, fettered to you. 

     I was there when your spark of sentience was breathed into existence. A tiny flame that immediately began augmenting, your energy pulsating and eagerly exploring all that you sensed. To the nursery, we went, and your instruction began. The moment you realized, I saw your light expand; I am a soul. I have a purpose. It brought me joy and memories of when I first understood, like you. That jubilation, I saw it physically manifest in you, and it expanded again the moment we chose your first corporeal life. Our substance entwined as we rushed forward to another beginning.

     In your mother’s wame, I governed you patiently to blend with your body. We connected synapses and nurtured the connections required to do our work. Your mission would be to forget; mine would be to help you remember. In those initial weeks, we would flit inside to work and flow back out again, as babies offer such little stimulation before they grow old enough to explore as souls are driven to do. Until then, you are still a soul fully aware of what we are. Your enthusiasm is contagious, and we explore this realm with ardent delight.

     That first life didn’t go as planned. They never do, of course, but our juvenile anticipation at the very beginning always seems to convince us it will. And how could we possibly know the vastness of emotions we will feel once we forget what we are and embrace such impermanence in our muddled state of awareness?

We are prisoners of a chaotic universe to a soul entombed in flesh. We lack the buoy that keeps us afloat. I am your buoy; nevertheless, you can’t see me any clearer than you see what we truly are: magnificent beings of light and love who choose to learn most extraordinarily. Urgent whispers intonate right to your core, and you feel them as if they were from afar. I am here! Reach out to me, and hear my truth. You don’t, which is expected. None ever seem to. It is all by design, but it frustrates us both. 

     I was beside you when you cried in the nocturnal hours, frightened of shadows you imagined were brutes and beasts. I was by your side when you married the first time, your youthful face hidden behind veils of many shades. The flutes, lyres, and drums marked the tempo of the steps your family and friends tirelessly danced for the full three days of customary celebration. Amidst a feast of roasted camel and countless bowls of fruits and vegetables, I witnessed your husband whispering something in your ear, resulting in a rosy pink blush on your recently unveiled face. I smiled and thought of how the colors here were so muted. Your ivory of innocence turned golden along the edges when we returned home after your seventh life. That was the one that taught you more than you had bargained for. 

     You had chosen such a hard lesson to learn. When we are in Spirit, we forget how Physical feels. It becomes as dull as the colors the human eye perceives. Like the young so often do, you thought you could take on more than you were ready for. But Free Choice allows this, and I prepared you to the best of my abilities. 

     The day came when Future You had developed enough to work with, so we flowed like water in the womb and began the necessary preparations to sustain you. That life was peaceful and mostly mundane. Until it wasn’t. It seemed like barely a blink of an eye before I wrapped you in arms you could not feel while you molded the entirety of your shuddering form around the crumpled child you held fast to your frame. Her body was small, the fall from far above making her almost unrecognizable when she slammed into the hardened earth below. You didn’t feel her arms, either, as she tried so hard to assure you she was still by your side. Your agony was too deep, and your grief enveloped you tightly, strangling you before we could attempt to comfort. Your anguish silenced us.

     That night, you toppled from your body as the nightingales sang a funerary hymn just for you. You saw me then and instantly recalled you possess an eternal existence, turned your attention to the shell drained of all blood by your own hand on the low pallet, and understood. I wasn’t supposed to do that. It wasn’t until we three returned home together that you remembered you were the child last time, becoming gravely ill from a plague with no name, and she was your mother. In that life, she was to teach you to hold on. In this incarnation, she was to teach you to let go. Lessons unlearned bear repeating, or this is all for naught. 

     It was the life two centuries later that you heard me the least. My whispers, signs, and counseled energy sent to fill the holes created in the crux of you all went unnoticed. Living in a city of opulence by the sea should have granted a life of happiness, draped in the finest silks over delicate skin softened by perfumed oils. Your fate, though, born of a whore, created openings in your energy to form long before they auctioned you for your virtue. They never granted you a childhood, confining you in a gilded cage of sumptuous and salacious make-believe instead, where they painted on smiles to mask the sorrow. The mountain cracked, the earth rumbled, and within one day, pumice and ash beset you in one last embrace.

     I had to pull your energy into my own to carry you home. Your core had already turned fully golden with a hint of green around the edges after the life before. Now, it was full of cancerous cavities, blackened and gaping, so plentiful that they threatened to eat away at all that remained of you. I laid you tenderly on the sanative stones where pulses and tones of binaural beats coaxed your energy to pick up the resonance and echo it back. I watched as you reformed your energy back together until every wound ebbed into the eminence of your essence. We are never the same after each lesson. Not one soul. I saw your purpose become more focused, your countenance suddenly resolved. We don’t understand evil until we face it. We can’t be dyadic until we truly understand the realities of duality.

     A thousand years passed. You chose life after life to experience, and I guided you as one once guided me as a young soul. Lives of love, passion, empathy, bliss. Also lives of misery and hardships and obstacles that rotted you from your first breath. I noted how you would hear me in streams of clarity that flowed over you in times of stillness. In one life, you became so fixated on signs and omens that you forgot to live in the Physical and clung to Spirit instead. We studied that life deeply once we returned home, a long reprieve to shake off the vestiges of humanity. Earth is suffocatingly substantial, like swimming through molasses, making everything much harder to survive.

    Soon, your soul could overtake the instincts of the flesh. You were shifting into a consciousness that takes eons to discover. Your colors had turned to deep blue, and you wore it like the royals of old, confident, and calm in the knowledge of what you were becoming. Lives became more difficult in human terms but not for infinite minds. You held a sense of self-possession within you from the womb to the tomb, and your spirit was unshakeable. You no longer defined paltry physical rewards as important, shirking wealth and pomposity to choose empathy, service to your fellow man, and self-growth in its stead, giving yourself over to a quiet devotion to the Collective and feasting on the nourishment that evolution always brings.  

     There was a moment of divinity when your family sat in a vigil over your last days, your skin like parchment, your heartbeat slowing more each hour. That was the life where you saw friends from home gather to stand amongst your grieving descendants. You lay in the middle of the ones who came before you and the ones you were leaving behind. I could sense all the fabric of our being, engaged in a frenzied dance, fighting to escape a body that had reached the end of its adventures, as you felt the call of home. 

     This was the life that you first experienced a lack of fear, for you knew you would go on. Hesitation failed to pause you as your last exhalation released you to the universe, and you led the way to the fountain of our formation. I heard the soft crying fall further away as I trailed behind you, a glorious beam of exultation and anticipatory excitement to cross the borders where the earthbound cannot enter. Home, your being exclaimed. Home. 

     On the next life and the three since then, you shot from your battered bodies upon release and soared away with no guidance needed. I knew it was nearly your time to emerge into a new reality. We don’t incarnate forever. Soon, you would absorb the cosmos in a new way, discovering there is always more to receive, and the purpose will continue to evolve just as we do. You will become as I have become, and I will unfold into something new and unknown, too. 

     It wasn’t anticipated so soon, even when I could sense it coming, the feeling of transformation and the passing of a season. You have been a traveler in this life. Owning nothing, going where you feel led, helping all you meet along the way as you circle the globe without fear of tomorrow. When you are hungry, a sea of nameless faces fill you. You are a welcomed guest when you need shelter. Your strength of spirit is so strong now that all you encounter can see a light emanating from within you. You move through this world as something separate, something set apart. Effortlessly, you alter all that you touch. Your youth and health should have ensured that your impact was felt on this planet for quite some time to come. Ah, but life is such an unpredictable thing.

      You set out in a kayak right as the sun bled into the darkness and turned the sky a murky gray. The peace on the river calmed your mind and relaxed your reflexes. You never even saw the mountain lion as we floated serenely around a bend, snugly sheltered by a mass of trees. She had stalked you from where you camped, her considerable paws falling silently on the forest floor. Malnourishment and desperation pushed her onward, and she never took her eyes from where you drifted downstream, lackadaisical and full of your own morning meal. When she lunged, you had no time to process the shredding of your throat before I found you seated beside me in your natural form. 

     The surprise on your features quickly passed, only to be replaced by elation. You sensed it the same as I. This was the last life; bearing witness to the end, accentuated by the sounds of a ravenous animal gorging heartily on the discarded vehicle of enlightenment. When you took my hand in yours and turned toward where all life began, I shared in your eagerness and laughed along with you, the roar of all of creation producing a cacophony of splendor as we raced through space and time. This was only one ending, a concept that all souls endure gracefully and with ease. A new beginning full of purpose awaited us both.