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The waxing gibbous moon came in the window of the tent, from between trees, as we were settling down the night. The whippoorwill made a mad blast of sound a time or two and stopped again. Lying on the ground so close to earth and seeing the firmament above stretched my back into an alignment along my back.

I caught a dream last night, could see it and then not see it. I felt like my dreams are coming back in. In the morning I tried for a while to puzzle out the fading out dream before concentrating on coffee. It was well smoked from the fire. Smoked coffee like that, we found out from the camp manager, is called “devil’s coffee.”

We brewed up more water and covered the (now black) pot with tinfoil to make more water and new coffee. It was much better but it was my second dose, trying to get it right. I worried about sleep later when I went to bed.

We found an old oak stamp to burn on the fire. We blew that fire aflame and wondered how many hundreds of years old the old red oak stump had endured, since that block was an acorn, pushing down into the ground with a root from an acorn and putting out two little leave to the sky to reach upwards. This stump had come to the great destroying part of its life.

Soon that cavernous part of the stump on the underside was totally lit up with red coals and the light thereof. As night settled the pointy part of the root was lost in the darkness above. The milky white stars were flickering out and the lightening bugs came around our camp to see our fire, the flames lit up the pointy top which gave us ancient faces male or female, depending where on the stump you looked.

I opened a conversation about past lives and ended up talking about episode in this life that seemed like “past lives.” They were so different from the present life, the here and now life. A long log, like a leg with a bended kneed was added to the fire.

As it straddled the flames, I stared and it was as if the log was one of my legs and my imaginaation brought me to a vision from thirty years ago.

At that time, over three decades ago, I was deliberately trying to access my past life. In my effort to go back, my inner eye was activated, and I saw my self in the flames.

I was living in a “bedsit” in Phibsborough in Dublin, Ireland. We were gobbling up materials on past lives, books, Edgar Cayce materials, and were part of a “Yoga Group” who were insisting that the leader was a reincarnation of a great holy leader from the past and the rest of us were his followers. I have to smile when I look back now.

However I think that effort on my part was genuine. I meditated first and then this is what I remember. I was looking at a girl that was familiar to me. She had on knitted wool, “argyle pattern” sweater. It had yellow red and orange triangles woven into the lines. She was standing in the fire, which made her sweater light up even more.  The heat simmered up between the observer and the observed, a little blurred by the shimmer and the smoke. I did not feel the heat at all. Her eyes were open.

This remained as a past life remembrance over the years. I understood why I was being burned. Other possibilities for past lives that came to me at that time was of being a monk, in a mountainous town in Switzerland. I was wearing a brown habit as I came over the hill into a beautiful view.

Perhaps that last life above was the same one when I became alcoholic as I had charge of a wine caller under the castle. The picture was of an unhappy face, standing in the doorway of a small door in a great wall. That one was a dream. The monk was covered in an old brown habit.

Another possible past life was of druids, walking around in a circle, throwing hazel sticks in a certain coordinated pattern above our heads to bring about healing. Sometimes my mentor/dream interpreter would name such dreams past life dreams.

My dreams brought past lives to me, a pattern of religious life, healer, and carrying other challenges of one sort or another.

All of the above came to me because of that staring into the fire, the knee of the tree, standing in for my knee, the feeling of observing my own knee, being burned and at the same time, being outside of the vision.

Being emulated, whether voluntarily of against one’s will, brings the possibility of leaving the body and being an observer, now or back when it all happened.

It is nice to sit back into the consciousness of all of who we are- so relaxing the fire and the feeling of sitting upon a past that is many and varied, not just the fun of this life but the light, a little glimpse, of olden other days too.

The log sat in a good bed of coals and burned all night long, leaving enough coals under the ashes to make some more coffee in the morning.

I went off to the lake in the morning to do some yoga exercises and to lay facing down under some tree, on my mat to meditate. There were some  people about but enough room to feel the quiet and the permission to invite in other, the sacred.

Thank you for reading, I will pray for you and you can pray for me. Like if you do, comment if you wish. I always love to hear from my readers. Love from Rose.