In 1986, I travelled in Saudi Arabia with members of a
business roundtable. Two of our members were former Ambassadors and, through
their connections with the King and Crown Prince, we were given the opportunity
to visit a seldom-seen abandoned city in the desert east of Mecca and Medina.
It is very similar in style to the ruins at Petra in Jordan and may well have
been built by the same civilization. It was a stop on the ancient trade routes
that carried goods across the Arabian Peninsula.
Meda’in Saleh is an impressive sight, rising up out of the
desert. The buildings were all carved by slaves out of rock mountains and huge
standing boulders. Many slaves probably spent their lives carving these
structures.
As we walked among these ruins, I felt a strange attachment
to the place…like I had been there before. I wondered if there might be some
truth to the idea that we all have lived past lives.
When I returned home, I wrote the poem Past
Lives which was published in Riding
in Boxcars in 2006. There is also a photo there of one of these ruins.
The voices that spoke to me that day in Saudi Arabia did not
speak of easy lives. If there is any truth to the view of reincarnation, most
of us would have spent our past lives as slaves or victims of the many wars
that have comprised much of the history of our civilizations.
Freedom has come slowly to the world and at a costly price.
And even when some of us finally were able to rise from a sea of subjugation
and became rulers of our individual worlds, it was easy to see it all disappear
again.
I realized that all of those who came before, whether they
were slave, soldier, mother, father, rebel, ruler, black or white, helped
define who I am today. The voices that spoke to me that day in the desert were
part of me, either through my genes…or, perhaps, through a soul that has been
reborn from the blender of past lives.
Glenn K. Currie
Past Lives
I helped build the
pyramids,
And died beneath one.
Bore a child,
On the Plains of
Abraham,
And was lost in the
desert.
I was buried in a
mass grave,
That fertilized the
cotton fields,
Of the South.
And I rejoiced
In the Resurrection.
I shed my blood for
my enemies,
Grew old while
growing young.
Sank into the sea,
And rose again,
In a sharks mouth.
I ruled the world,
Was betrayed by a
friend,
Touched the edge of
the universe,
From a black hole,
And then began again.
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