Jumping (25 page)

After a few minutes of wandering around, I can see that it has a back opening. I go into it, figuring that if anyone was going to come out and meet me, they already would have. I'm a little disappointed. I find myself in a winding tunnel with a faint light at the end, which gets brighter and brighter as I walk. All of a sudden, as I round a curve in the tunnel it opens out onto a large, beautiful beach, on a stunning day. The beach extends into the distance in front of me to the edge of the water, which is clear turquoise-blue and gently rippled with small waves. The beach is strewn with gigantic rocks, some grouped, some separate. They're as big as buildings, and they have all kinds of interesting crevices and formations where the wind and the water have been at them in artful ways. Gulls wheel in the sky, calling, and some are scattered on the beach in the far distance.

It's a moment before I realize those are people in the distance, not gulls! People! I start to run. “Who are they?” I'm wondering. “And why am I running?” But I can't stop myself. I'm so happy to be running to these strangers on the beach! I feel as if my heart is pulling me and will leave me behind if I resist. I'm glad I've been exercising, because I don't think I've ever run this fast. I can't seem to run fast enough!

The people ahead of me haven't noticed me coming, so I have a chance to try to look at them as I get closer. But as I approach the group I realize it's only one person I'm really looking at and running towards—a tall, thin man in long, flowing white robes.

“It's Philip!” I think, wondering who Philip is. I run through the small gatherings of other people, not even looking at them, until I'm only a short distance away. Suddenly, I'm so overwhelmed at seeing him that I drop to my knees, unable to go further, and I sob with the abandon of a broken-hearted child. I can't seem to understand or control my own behavior. I've never felt so vulnerable and without defense. I know how Duncan Robert felt about the people he met in the Void and how hard it had been to leave them, but what I'm feeling seems beyond that. This man is my heart. The feelings I'm having for him transcend any I've ever felt for anyone on Earth. They transcend any notion of love or soul mate I've ever had, making any other connection seem paltry, stingy, limited, fearful. I couldn't hold this back if I tried.

I sit there collapsed on the beach and cry without will, without desire, feeling as if I've always cried, that crying is my natural state, like breathing. I can't imagine stopping. Yet I've never been happier. His presence surrounds me and the essence of me moves in and out of it. I don't know how else to express it. He is not man, I am not woman, we are filaments of the same strand of soul. I feel him move closer, and I look up. He bends down and takes my hands in his, and I stand, feeling weak as a kitten. We embrace, and I can hardly breathe. Every question I have ever had has been answered, every need tended to, every prayer acknowledged. I'm complete. I'm home.

He laughs. He knows what I'm thinking and feeling. He tells me that this is how we all feel about each other, all of the time, when we're not Earth bound. And we always forget that when we leave here.

“A great thing to return to, yes?” he says, with a slight British accent. I'm still incapable of stringing two coherent words together. I want to ask where I am, why I am, but it's hard to care in his presence. It doesn't matter.

I feel so vulnerable, but I know, at the same time, we're meant to be living vulnerable—that's our natural state. How else can we change and grow and progress? It's the only attitude that makes real learning possible. You have to be open. A plant doesn't grow clenched, protected; it hurtles itself into growing. It may seem slow to us, but it has the plant's utmost commitment and attention. “It has no fear,” he says to me, hearing my careening thoughts. This stops me in my tracks. It so resonates with the feelings I had on jumping with Miles into the Void. I just hadn't known what having no fear felt like.

Now, in this moment, in this place, I know it's the most natural thing in the world for me to love Miles. And I do. I'm filled with an absolute certainty and an absolute happiness. At the same time, I can't help but realize we love so much bigger than that, so much bigger than the love of one person. Here with Philip, I can understand how we do it—how it's possible for us to hold so much love.

Philip shares my thoughts as I have them. He tells me this is the meaning and purpose of life for everyone, all of the time—to be open in love. When I feel drawn to another, like Miles, it is to build structure with him—routines, habits, patterns—to ensure time and place for our spirits to co-exist, to learn from and work with each other, as well as sustain each other. I know we are together due to a pre-contract or agreement to do this, in this place and time. In between lives, we agreed to help each other, and we've probably done it before, in different roles in other lives. We do it until we don't have to do it anymore.

As I look up into his face, I know Phillip's energy lifts mine to a level beyond what I can ever achieve on my own, on Earth. You can't be in a bad mood here, I realize. You can't not like yourself or anyone else.

He takes my hand and says, “Let's meet the others, shall we? They've been waiting.”

I look around. The others are focused on us, though it hadn't looked like that initially.

“Who are they?” I ask, though I instantly know what he's going to say.

“They're your cohort, along with members of a few other cohorts who have shared lives with you. They want to celebrate your being here. It's a huge step, you understand. They've not seen anyone else do it.”

“What exactly have I done?”

Philip looks at me with seriousness. “You have bet your life, my dear. By jumping, you have bet your life that you can make change for yourself. It's why you jumped. It takes such courage because everything in your lives is so programmed to prevent change, to maintain the status quo at all costs.” He smiles now.

“You're their hero,” he says.

I have to laugh.

“Well, I've never been accused of that before!” He laughs, too, and I wonder if I have.

I turn to meet my cohort—the parts of my original entity who are all living lives on Earth now, too, when not between lives. Some of them are on the beach, and I meet them face to face, maybe a dozen of them. Young, old, men, women—not like Duncan Robert's group, who seemed all to be around his age. I can tell from their faces they have had different kinds of experiences and have different kinds of knowing. Or maybe that's just part of the telepathy that seems always in operation here.

One of them is a woman I saw once, in Tasmania. I'm surprised to see a woman with whom I have had only one encounter, and we never even spoke. I remember being in Launceston, the second largest city in Tasmania, for a conference where I was invited to speak. I believe everyone else they asked had turned them down—it was so far, so expensive, and no one was exactly sure where Tasmania even was. Africa, they thought? Even I had to look it up, not realizing it was an island off the southeast coast of Australia, one of Australia's five provinces, just adjacent to New Zealand. I loved it, and will always remember the magic of seeing wallabies spar with each other, like miniature boxers, in the twilight on the grounds of the Cataract Gorge Reserve, a wild place just minutes from the heart of the city.

I look at the woman, who looks strikingly like me, and remember seeing her in the crowd of evening strollers along the pier one night, on the Tamar River. People were checking out the restaurants and each other, wandering into the shops, thinking about taking rides on the water taxi. I felt so strangely drawn to follow this woman, knowing there was some sort of connection, and hoping the woman knew it, too. She was older, and walked with a younger couple, who looked like a daughter and son-in-law. She had put herself under their protection and seemed fragile somehow.

I tell Philip, “I think she was afraid of me—she noticed me, but only peripherally, and wouldn't look at me head-on. I was a little freaked out—I kept thinking, knowing, she was
me
somehow, some other version of me. I wanted to see her and have her see me, as validation of something. At the same time, I felt as if something irrevocable would change, and I didn't know if I was ready for that. I think she felt the same way.”

He says nothing because the woman approaches.

“Babe, this is Hardin,” Philip says, just as I'm thinking the name in my head.

“I know.”

Hardin and I hug. And Hardin, laughing, says, with a distinct Australian accent, “Of course, I did see you. I'm an aspect of you and you of me. It was my first time to ever see such a thing. I wasn't well at the time, and I thought seeing you meant immanent death!” She laughs again, “I know now that's not the case. And I'm sorry to have missed the opportunity, but I was a frightened little thing in that life. Not like you!”

“Oh, I was scared, too!” I assure her. “It feels so good to meet you now!”

We hug again, and I turn with Philip, Hardin following, to meet some of the others on the beach.

Another older woman comes up to me and takes my hands in hers. She is shorter than I am, with long dark hair flowing in the wind. Her face is deeply lined and darkly tanned. She has on what I think of as gypsy jewelry, large hoop earrings, lots of bangles, and long strands of small gold beads around her neck. She's a strong and handsome woman. Her deeply set dark eyes exude confidence and good will. Her white teeth flash in her tanned face as she smiles broadly at me, waiting for me to know her.

I look down at her, into her eyes, and gasp. “I do know you!”

In half a second, both of us are crying. I look at the woman, keeping hold of her hands. “What I know is that we killed each other. We've died together, too, when someone else killed us. We've had intense relationships. I know, too, that only people who really love each other would do these things for and with each other. It takes planning and synchronization of everything from our births, to a shared geography, to a million other things, and a deep understanding of what it means for each of us, and for everyone else these acts touch, in terms of advancement.” I'm out of breath.

Laughing and nodding, the woman pulls me to sit with her on the sand, and I do.

“We burned at the stake together, our stakes near each other. Part of the Inquisition? We committed heresy?” I look at her for confirmation. The woman nods her head. “We were completely present to each other through the burning,” I continue, “joined in supporting each other. We rose together from that life, with the smoke of the fire.”

I look at the woman again, who nods and bows her head. I look up at Philip. “She beheaded me in another life. She was the axe man, or headman, as they were called, much hated and feared by everyone, near and far. The King's administration did their best to keep the axe men unknown, but people knew, and the men were ostracized, as if the evil they did was somehow contagious, so even casual association with them would pull you into a dark brotherhood. I had committed some sort of usury—making loans with high interest rates that pretty much no one could have paid. The King had made charging interest on lent money legal, within certain limits, despite the church's opposition. But this was what all the money lenders did, or they couldn't have made a living, what with the King's heavy taxation of all of them. I had been caught, though, in part because I was a Jew and Jews were generally hated, and in part because one family I was over-charging had some connections in high places.

“When I knelt to the axe man, I knew we had a bond stronger than life! It was just as Duncan Robert said—we'd played all sorts of roles with each other—mother, father, friend, now executioner.” I look at the woman again. “Until we know we're one.”

“I am Nika. But you've known me by so many other names, we hardly need names anymore. I use Nika because that was one of my favorite lives with you. It was in Russia. Do you remember? We lived in the city of Kiev, in the Ukraine, before it declared its independence. We were sisters, living with our parents, who ran a small tobacco shop, with our lodgings above it.

“One day our parents went off to a big buyers' market in St. Petersburg, something they'd never done before, about a two-day train trip each way. They never returned. We never learned what happened to them. We were about fourteen and fifteen, you were still in school. We just kept going—we ordered tobacco, forging our father's signature, we managed the books, we closed the shop for holidays and took ourselves on trips out into the countryside. We'd latch onto whatever group of adults seemed handy and were never questioned.

“Finally we were found out, by an unscrupulous man who wanted to buy the shop out, to curtail the competition. Once he found out, he wanted us to do whatever unsavory thing he said, or he'd report us to the authorities and we'd be put in prison for all that we'd done. We believed him about the prison, and saw it as a prison either way.

“One night shortly after we were found out, we slipped out of the house and went to the Nicholas Chain Bridge, the only stationary bridge across the Dnieper River that ran through Kiev and the countryside, all the way to the Black Sea. Bridges in Kiev, for hundreds of years, had been floating bridges, primitive affairs removed when the winter's ice began to set in. We considered the bridge one of the wonders of the world. It was known for its beauty all over Europe. ‘It civilized Kiev,’ we used to say, believing it somehow civilized us, too. We loved that river and knew its ancient history. Cossacks lived along it! It had been part of the Amber Road, a main trade route coming in from the Middle East. We thought the river was the most beautiful thing in the city, and the bridge was the second most beautiful. It felt good to become a part of that flow of history.”

She's beaming as she tells this story, holding onto my arm as we sit in the sand. I look over at Philip, who has joined us on the sand.

“You mean we jumped from the bridge into the river that night?”

“Yes. We wrapped our arms around each other and jumped from the railing, which was the highest point we could reach. Do you remember?”