“Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious.”
~ Ruth Reichl
We went to a neighbour’s house for belated Christmas drinks yesterday.
On a rainy summer’s afternoon we sat on the veranda talking and laughing and sharing stories. It was lovely.
And then it was magical.
One of my neighbours shared a memory of her early childhood. She thinks perhaps that she was about two years of age. She remembered being guided out of her body at night, and people would take her flying through the night sky. It was always such a shock when she would float down, down, down and back into her body again at flight’s end. She would lie in her body watching the room spin, and wishing she was back there, up in the air and free again.
How odd.
My skin prickled with goosebumps of recognition as she shared her memories. I have similar experiences, and have never told anyone except my husband. Her story validated my own.
Ben and I glanced at each other, exchanging knowing looks as my neighbor finished her story and took another sip of her drink.
What? What? she asked.
I told her then of my own flying stories, and of being in the remote Kimberley as a young adult, being finally able to recreate that childhood experience through meditation, and how my experiments drew some of the Aboriginal elders to me, so that they could guide me safely and appropriately instead of my unsteady and disruptive efforts.
Wow, she said.
Wow, I said.
(Yeah, Year of ME-ers, I know… finish my memoir!)
After which we both laughed, the boundaries dropped and each of us shared stories of strange and remarkable happenings in our lives.
The one thing I have learned as I have grown older is that I know nothing. My paradigms are constantly shifting. What I think I knew to be true is always being proved wrong, or challenged by things that must surely be impossible, and yet aren’t.
Our world and our very existence is so much more magical and mystical than we might realise.
I find that completely reassuring and delightful. Don’t you?
