Overview

Many have noticed that the veil between this world and the subtle realms is thinner at and after times of birth, as well as at death. The English poet William Wordsworth worded this most worthily in his great poem Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1807): Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our lifes Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy. Almost as good is the little rhyme by George MacDonald my grandmother taught me: Where do you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere, into the here. Over the years, Ive been blessed to experience some of luminous and subtle dynamics inherent in the deaths of relatives and friends, in a phenomenally strange miscarriage, and in the conceptions, births, and early years of my partner Leslie and my children. These thinnings of the veil have strengthened my confidence in the reality of the souls journey. They have assuaged and healed some of the grief Ive felt when dear ones have died, revealing to me hints of the eternality of the Life which lives us all, containing both birth and death within its seamless oneness. The following is a bouquet of true stories and poems, which hopefully carry some of the fragrant, ineffable scent of that mysterious oneness.