Stargazing

Reflections on the transmigration of the soul and parenthood

I am alone in the broad volume of heaven. Cold and dark, its vast emptiness grows. Somehow I am aware of it and I know I am drifting in the direction of its expansion, toward an outer boundary so remote it may not exist at all.

Photo by Ray Gao on Unsplash

My thoughts depart without meaning, as smoke fades into the air. There is so much nothing that I am beyond fear. Beyond memory. I become dust. I am folded into the indifferent fabric of this great place, where time stretches out beyond experience and perception.

The sun cries out to me, lost among the uncountable number of cold lights. I do not hear it.

But I sense a presence in my soul. A mass pressing against my belly, holding me back from dissolving into the cosmos. I become aware of it and I feel its small but powerful gravity fixing me to this point in space, this moment in time. I exist.

She exists.

My awareness of her reverses the cosmic hypnosis which had taken me. Closing my eyes, I am no longer a pilgrim adrift in a sea of stars. I am a father.

The warmth of my child radiates out from the blanket wrapped around her. From my lap, she observes the stars for the first time in her young life. She has descended into a profound quiet that is not her habit.

I open my eyes. Her expression is of solemnity, recognition, remembrance. Her face tells me that she knows what she is seeing. She knows it better than I do. She has been there more recently than I have. She is grieving. She is glad.

Perhaps it is why she evades sleep, her dreams mixed up with the thoughts of her new life and memories from the place of creation, where is heard the voice of the Omniscient Unknown. Perhaps these things are true.

The years of our lives, filled up with noise, are now far away from the Infinite Plain of being. We have forgotten it, haven’t we. I have forgotten.

Almost.

But when I look on the face of my daughter, my expression is the same as her own in this moment. I recognize her. I remember her. I miss her.

As she looks on the stars with grave familiarity, seeing some truth that is closer to her than to me, I cannot but sense that this is the first time we have looked at the stars in this life, but not the first time we have looked at them together.

When I see her, when I am present with her existence, I recall the full map of fate which is drawn onto the fabric of space and time. This map unfolds itself, revealing the many paths we have taken together, and which I have glimpsed in my dreams.

---