KARMIC LIBRARY

--To Sage Sweetwater

I am a soul awaiting birth

Knowing that soon my time would come

To take flesh, wondering what form

And future that flesh would take.

I am taken to the Karmic Library

A vast building, awesome, high-ceilinged,

Bathed in beyond-white light

Brilliant, having no source apparent.

I am seated at a long, dark woodish table

With ever so many of my companions

Waiting expectantly for what---

I did not know but eagerly anticipated.

A book floated down from the nothingness

And opened before me, and I saw

Not words, nor pictures exactly

Or images, but impressions of a life to come.

Pushing through a dark nothingness

Into the cold bright of my new existence.

I was slapped, and squalled in protest

Separated from the oneness I had known.

I grew in stature and understanding,

Learned, sometimes joyfully, many times not

That most of what played out before me

Was beyond anybody’s ability to control.

As the image of myself aged and aged

What he endured became more intense-

Both ways. This was not the comfort and ease

I was used to in the Land of the Not Yet Born.

And I grew cold and fear seized me

Was this to be my life on the Great Outside?

If so better maybe not being born,

And living a life of infinite incompleteness.

That soul has, in time, become this one

The one who writes now so ineptly

Recounting things sensed, not quite known,

Or perhaps it was only a dream.

One thing this soul does know,

A thing as true as the dark, dark grave:

Images or not, library or not

A soul has no choice in being born

But to be born and live the life

Spread out before it: joyfully, sadly,

As best it can, as fully as it can,

As the Giver of Life has life has ordained.

-11/19/10

 Chip Bergeron