Harvest Moon

"If you’re reluctant to weep, you won’t live a full and complete life."

-Ray Bradbury, explaining a rare departure in style after he wrote a short story about a young girl he met at the beach. She went into the water and she never came back. When he wrote about the experience and his reflections on death much later, tears flowed freely from his eyes. It was the first time, he acknowledged, that he had written a story that came from his innermost voice.

I began the Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique journey to my past lives in the middle of a scene of black and white. I first looked up and saw the towering skyscrapers and then, peered down to inspect my shiny new black loafers. I understood then who I was. I was a powerful male writer, a journalist by trade, and it was the 1950s. I presume this was my most recent incarnation, but I cannot say this with any great certainty. I know I exuded confidence in my writing ability and I enjoyed the various aspects of my job: I loved not only writing the “stories about all those people I saw out there” on the city streets, giving faces to the men and women in the bustling crowd, but I liked actually talking with these people. And, at times, I will admit, it even gave me a god-like sense that I could “create their stories” by melding their words with the connotations provided by my own. My position in the city, most likely Manhattan, though I am unsure--it looked so much sparser back then--gave me a chance to exert my influence over the lives of everyday citizens. I loved the feeling of power this left me with; however, it didn't last throughout the entirety of that incarnation. This would prove to be a common theme across all my lives; I experienced power in one way or another, but I would inevitably lose it each time. I either got old or got ugly. Or, just as often, I simply failed to recognize the power of my Self. I was also a writer in every incarnation. As the Writer this time, I ended my career with a note of bittersweetness. I was forced to write passionless stories about nothing that mattered to anyone, least of all me, due to the firm hand of corporate control and I spent far too much of my personal time writing about a woman from my past rather than cultivating connections in the present. As such, I died alone-but at peace-in a hospital room. I simply went to sleep. And I didn't wake up.

There was one exception to my mostly lonely life: my girl in the red hat. I can still see her face now as I type this… Up to this point, I had no visceral connection to the Writer’s experience; I simply watched his life unfold in black and white, with the detached observance and unsurprise of a lukewarm filmgoer. I've always felt a great kinship with men; I have resonated with their way of being, so being this man felt natural to me. Life was fast-paced, but it was invariably gray.

And then I saw her.

And she was in color.

And I--the me in the QHHT practitioner’s office in Texas--began to weep freely. My session facilitator interpreted this, I believe, as sadness or fear, but it was neither. It was love…maybe the deepest feeling of love without condition I have ever felt in my existence--so far, at least. She looked at me, the red hat she'd knitted herself keeping her short brown hair out of her face to spite the wind, with admiration and joy that I could only describe as “unclouded”. She seemed to see right through me as she stood there on that pier by the water. But, at that moment at least, she saw only the good in me. That was important; I don’t think I would have known it was there if it had not been for her. When she kissed me softly with her ruby red lips, I felt love, I was loved, and I was love. I knew that was enough. For that lifetime, at least.

But much like her presence in the Writer’s life, the elation I felt in my body soon returned to a muted gray detachment as I saw myself years later. I came home to an empty apartment in which, “the table with the typewriter [was] all that matter[ed]”. There was no one to greet me, no visitors, not even a dog or a cat to warm my lap. I could not even see the rest of my home beyond that typewriter. For me, there was nothing else that made life important, that made me important. I spent my time there typing out stories of the woman who had loved me and recalling the ways she had “made me feel young”. I did not write about her leaving. I never wanted to think about that. She’d returned to her husband, the man who wanted her to have his child. And, because those times were black and white, she had to go--even though she was always in color.

As a writer in this lifetime, I have always done my best work for or alongside a man. Frankly, I don’t think I can write anything worth reading without him. The words don’t come to me--or, if they do, they are far too cold and precise. When I am inspired by a man, imbued with love, I can do anything with my words. I can suffocate a man with their weight or I can starve him with their lack. So it did not surprise me at all to find out that I was a man in my past life. To understand something, one must be that thing, after all.

Not only did I experience the masculine, I felt the loneliness of that sparse apartment with only my typewriter to speak to me and for me. I felt the unspoiled love of a woman who could never be mine, and I felt the cowardice of my own defeat to other men.

I have spent my whole life this time around fearing the wounds that the end of love can leave, afraid of someone seeing me for who I am, and of them “run[ning] off across the lawn with the mask and [having] no way of going to knock on [the] door and ask for it back” as Bradbury wrote about in Fahrenheit 451. So, I beat them to the punch. I hastily decided I would be the only writer this time. But I lost my grip on the pen. I wrote with my mind and forgot about my heart. In the pursuit of my own preservation, I decided I would ask the questions, just as she had. I would see through the men, just as she had seen through me, and, even though I wanted love more than anything else, I would run off with their masks. Before they could do any of this to me.

I suppose it was all of this, along with the uncontrollable, imbalanced nature of my rising energy, that led me to love and chase--and chase away two married men during this past year. I guess this part was written for me. I saw them and I saw their shadows. I grabbed them by their throats with my questions and I pulled the noose tighter when they became choked. I got pleasure from making them love me and, then, I made them run away. I loved making them feel young--and then making them suffer for their childishness. And I wrote to them all about all of this. I employed these invectives as arrows aimed in the very wrong direction, as a glare shot not into the mirror, but wrongly into the detritus of their broken hearts. I maligned their weak natures and--believe it or not--I never even saw my own.

Now, I understand. As the Writer needed me to know, “connection is important”. I needed my girl in the red hat to love me and, just as much, I needed her to leave me. I needed to die alone because I hung on to nothing except the past. I needed to come back and love these men and--I hope they’ll forgive me--I needed to hurt them as I had been hurt so long ago. I needed to do all this to do what I am doing now, to do what I should have done the last time, or the time before that, or five hundred years ago.

I needed to take off my mask with my own loving hands and see in my Self all the bad that’s there--and all the good, too. I needed to sit with it, to really, finally, say the “I” in “I love you”.

I needed to do this so that I can reach out my hands, steady and unwavering, and hand over the mask to my girl in the red hat. After all, he has traveled so long and worked so hard to find me. The least I can do is give him my Soul. I know this time, finally, we will be ready. Because this time, we are writing our own stories. Because this time, we know our own Soul. We know it is wrought of timeless joy and pain and of labor and loss. Of dull grays and of flaming reds. Just like our stories, it has been rendered with all the fire and all the ashes that make up our very best Self.

When the Harvest Moon came later that year, it felt like an auspicious omen. It felt like a beginning and, of course, like an end. And all the parts of it in between. I went back to the place where my soul kept taking me. I went to the beach, to reap my harvest from the seeds I'd sown at the ocean. To see him and to find me.

As I drove there, I passed the medical school where I'd been broken open and put back together so long ago. I thought back to that night and recalled its events like you might remember a war you'd fought in. I still wasn't sure whether I had won or we both had lost. I didn't even know if there was such a thing. I only knew that I made it out of there alive and I kept living and I never forgot about it and I never would. And I also knew that, though it was war and it was supposed to be brutal, there was a part of me that loved it. but I understood myself enough to know that my pleasure arose mostly from not being able to figure it all out.

I stopped thinking about that then because that was too much truth for that moment and it wasn't time for that yet anyway.

When I got to the beach, I saw small herds of people, gathered to capture the moment on their cell phones. To set aside the memory and think about it during the time they'd never have. The moon was to be closest to the earth at 11:33. The divine nature of the number was not lost on me as I sent him a message and told him to look at it then. Of course, I didn't have to tell him. He would or he wouldn't and it would all be the same. Our games seemed adorably trite now in our new understanding, but we kept playing them nonetheless.

I spread out my blanket onto the sand, lit a cigarette, and turned my eyes up toward the sky. I laughed internally as I thought about his teasing. He'd asked if I planned out a chant. I told him I'd say one that would conjure more of him. We laughed like it was a joke, but we both knew the truth in it, how exactly what I would have done if that would have been possible. He was the only thing, after all, that I ever really wanted.

I'd seen a sign earlier in the week that read, "You're the only song I ever sing". I pictured it then as I stared up at the Moon and as I thought about his eyes as he laughed with me at our silly joke.

And then I thought about my brooding poet, the only boy I'd loved before the time I learned how to be afraid. The boy who left me for someone else and took half of me when he did. I saw the long black hair that he pulled back and tied up sometimes. He'd insisted on growing it out once he graduated high school. And I felt the mild discomfort at the thought of how people might look at him and judge him to be something he wasn't. But I also felt the way he didn't care. And I saw his tattoos, the heart he'd had inked on his chest with the phrase I couldn't recall. I smelled the smoke of his Camel Turkish Royal as he inhaled it in front of me for the first time. He showed me then that a man could be worshipped. And, also, that last drag he took as he stood in front of me and showed me the limitations of my reverence, crushing its last flaming embers underfoot. I felt the way he looked at me, the way he saw all the parts of me before that though. And the way each of us stared at the other unclouded. Just like the girl in her red hat and the newspaper man. And Shiva and Shakti, with all their many names and many lives together and apart.

Just like him and me.

I wondered then how many times he'd come for me. How far he'd traveled, how hard he'd worked. And then I wondered if I was him or he was me. And I couldn't work out who was the writer and who was the muse. And I cried because I was so happy he was there and so afraid I couldn't have him because I thought, maybe, I could never have my Self. But then I saw that there is no Self. But you only find that out when you get to it and lose it. And then I laughed because I felt so much love for a god who appreciates irony on this scale. Of course. This search for my limitlessness would lead me in a circle back to my limitations.

When I returned home, though, he showed me that it could be all ways. He finally answered all those questions I'd been asking him. He showed me that we can do anything. We can go anywhere we want and we have it all. Unbounded. And he also showed me that we must always remember what we are and why we are here. And why we make each of the choices that we do. Even if we never know the goal. We can be just as much in this world as out of it.

In touching his body with my own hands I saw all of this. I saw that there is no other I ever want to touch or to touch me. Because it is possible to both love all of us with depthlessness and to also love him, alone. It is not up to me to understand why so many opposite things can co-exist as truth. It is only my job to live them as fully as I can each moment and love the gray that we ourselves create.

I have since learned to stop asking so many questions. Not only do the answers lead to other questions, but that circle creates other ones, both big and small. At some point, our human eyes cannot tell them all apart. It all melds into one huge circle.

It's never possible to realize the entirety of your potential all at once. If it was, there'd be no point to having potential at all. A writer cannot write his story on the day he's born.

Though we are infinite, we cannot yet be infinite. The pursuit of infinity can weigh our souls down. It can lead us on a journey away from love, away from connection, away from all the things my soul has always known it needed. Away from all the things we all need.

So for now, I will be content with being finite, of knowing all the things I don't know and everything I do. I'll understand gift of ignorance and the bliss of knowledge and alchemize the two.

I'll keep healing the wounds of my past. And I'll keep giving them away and become part of someone else's. I'll keep learning my lessons the hard way. And I'll keep teaching them, too. And I'll keep loving through it all. Because my heart is vibrant, so loud and strong that he can hear it anywhere. It can reach across the world or time itself to find his as it beats and bleeds for me.

As long as we're together, we'll never be apart.

This is the truth of the matter, the easiest way I can tell you: Love and be loved. Open your heart to find your soul. Burn everything down so you can build it back up. Love differently. Love new. Love with hate. And rage. Love with pity. With indigo blue. With grief. And purity. With darkness. With ice. With a knife. With diamonds. With blood. And the tears of a thousand years of mourning for yourself and for everyone else. With scarlet red. And the chirping of the birds in the morning. With your head in your hands, tearing out your hair in madness. With the first time your child sees you. With a violet purple. With everything you have. With nothing. Nothing at all. This is not too much to ask. Because it is the only question. It is infinity. It is love, alone.