Mother Nature Meets Father Time

Nine Lives

Some say a cat has nine lives. Christians believe they are born again. Do you ever feel like an event of your past is so far behind you, it was in another lifetime?

I was watching Memoirs of a Geisha today, and she had made the comment, "that was in aother life". How many times, especially when we start to count our lives by decades, do we refer to a distant memory as being in another lifetime?

What constitutes a new life? I would say this is when the very essence of who you are undergoes significant change in moral beliefs and convictions, and how we respond in defense of such beliefs, or fail to respond in spite of such beliefs. So what constitutes a significant change?

When I was around five years old, my parents divorced. This changed my belief that my parents would always be there to take care of me, and that my house would always be my home. I know those were sheltered beliefs to have, but I was five, and those were my beliefs, and they greatly affected how I lived my life and the choices I had made. Up to that point, personal responsibility did not honestly mean anything to me. That was what my parents were around to do!

When I was seven, I was hurt very badly by those whom I trusted the most. I was removed from my new home, and placed in foster care. I had not only undergone physical pain, but also starvation, and emotional distress. This changed my belief that anybody was trustworthy. I thought nobody who said, "I love you," could be trusted, because immediately following that phrase, was some kind of torture. Yes, my beliefs changed drastically, and not for the better at all.

I continued to encounter similar forms of extreme changes internally and externally as I progressed through adolescence. Then I married and became a mother, and had finally settled into what I had always believed to be a "normal life". Then my husband left me, and took my children with him, as he left with my cousin. Once again, my belief system was shocked into a negative tailspin.

I would say that my latest changes, although of a more internal, private, and spiritual nature, have helped me through the confusion which halted the immediate post-adolescent disaster my life had become, and progressed me into a mature adult.

I have still been betrayed by souls no longer deemed trustworthy, and I still lack some focus of a "home" to which I will ultimately return; I have been stalked, and shot upon, harrassed, and emotionally tormented. I have been physically injured and sick, and pushed beyond all my limits, but somehow, in this "new life" these things are so little and irrelevant to how I live my life, and the choices I daily make. There is a peace about me in the worst of times, and those fears of the past are so far away. I do not know how may "lives" one might say I have lived, but I am fairly sure I am on the last one now!