We live! Again!

By Jing Villamil

 

YEARS ago, when her dawn was a bright star rising and dusk was but colours weaning, waning, waiting to burst out again – Emmanuelle wrote a poem on déjà vu and it went on chirpily:

Known you before! Before this birth, a death; and beyond that death, a previous birth. So the cycle went. And goes.

As we lived in series, our paths touched, crossed. Change never ceased. But the soul mirrored in your eyes, it is one the same.

Been here before! Life is timeless, and the timeless in me lives “in yesterday that is today’s memories, and in tomorrow that is today’s dreams”.

I have walked these parts and the scene remains. It is one the same.

Felt this before! From the haze and maze, misty forms roamed so dazed. Mismatched pairs and missing halves of fate gone crazed.

Listen. “To each season, a reason; to each half, a fitting half” an old sage prophesied. Therefore, to have joined then, join hence. We are one the same.

See you then! To breathe our last is to breathe too our first! What joy, what mirth to these endless rebirths!

Lost, missed you this turn. But wait! Our fates had been writ! Count not the years. We’ll be back, cross my heart. We shall be one the same!

It has always been a subject of friendly scholarly discussion. Or of heated street- smart-alecky contention. If there is truth in rebirth or reincarnation, does it mean death is never the end of life?

That death merely opens the door to another life in this same world, but of a different time frame? Does it mean that man’s consciousness survives the death experience, then is reborn in another body, and undergoes a different destiny under different conditions?

How much does he retain of his previous consciousness to recognize people, places, events (from his former life) in his new life? Does he recognize them all at once as he homes-in for his second or umpteenth life? Or does recognition come back to him in bits and pieces? And sometimes too late to matter. As in the classic movie Somewhere in Time, whence Jane Seymour aged maybe eighty asks Christopher Reeve in his thirties: “Is it you?” And she clasps to his palm an antiquated time watch to remind of their past. She died that night. Her waiting had been a generation too long. She recognized him; he did not.

In this season of paying homage to our dearly beloved dead, I walked the long narrow cemented path between rows of grassy mounds, a monotony of names and dates of birth and death inscribed in marble rectangles. Once they lived for us, with us. Now, their history, their stories, their memories live in us – in our thoughts, in our hearts.

I would like to believe they danced, they tapped their feet, they waved as they floated on air. Their vagueness swirled, and they grasped the weightless others for a twirl, a whirling of flowy white pants and long skirts. They are happy their living ones are here!

I fling wide my arms to include them all. And to ask no one, everyone: “but, why haven’t you not moved on yet – to be reborn, to be reincarnated?”

Never the mind. See you here, see you there, dearies. More often than we dare. Promise me. Cross your hearts. And hope to live! Again!

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