(by Alisonn Rose)

When I was around 7 or 8, a feeling would come over me, more of a question, really: Who was I before this?

The question wasn’t more defined than that, but it would cause such “hard thinking” that I would almost give myself headaches. A smell or a sound would trigger these questions, or sometimes, someone’s smile, laugh, or voice. I know I was someone else, it’s important to remember, I would think … and then a veil would slide over the thought.

I remember that the veil was a bright blood-red, covering everything like a velvet curtain dropping down after a show, except it was dropping at the beginning of the show. It was frustrating. I always felt that if I tried hard enough, I would be able to see through it, so I would try again and again but it never worked. Looking back, if the veil had had a voice, it would have said, No, not yet, it’s not time.

Of course I didn’t know anything about past lifetimes, Atlantis, Lemuria, Higher Selves, the Goddess … I knew there was a magical world of Other and I slipped into it as so many children are wont to do but I didn’t have words for it or really recognize it for what it was.

Now, at almost what I hope is more or less the halfway marker of my life, another veil has come. This one is white. It slides down, shimmery and translucent, over so much of my past. It’s as if there is a new life opening up and it is important to shed the old one, to say goodbye to it. It’s not that I am letting go of people I love, but I can feel pieces of the past sliding away as if they never happened at all.

It is like looking at faded pictures under glass. Was that my life? I wonder. 

Yes and no. Yes, it is the lifetime I entered into, the one I chose with my Higher Self and Soul, weaving together all of the details of emotional blockages and freedoms, the challenges, the hurdles, the timelines. I needed to believe that was who and what I was.

But also not because this new veil comes along in order to remind me of my childhood quest: to remember who I was before this lifetime.

I am not losing my memories. They are as sharp and as clear as they ever were. I still remember snippets from my first birthday.  But what I am losing is the mattering of those memories. I smile at the memories as I would smile at someone else’s child playing on a playground: they are sweet, but they are not mine. As the veil slides over my past and produces that filmy, faraway look over it, I hold on to the hands of my child and adolescent, who are so relieved that the red veil has finally been lifted. I look back over my shoulder and I say goodbye to old notions of myself with a sense of nostalgia, and I continue my journey.

The catch is, it’s not only the painful memories that are far away now but some beautiful ones too. Mattering is shifting. So is time. But more than anything, there is more of a budding that is taking place, not just in me but in everyone, I think. The question of who we are is blossoming into something beyond a philosophical question or a fun thing to ponder, in part because it is so necessary now.

Now one veil drops and another one lifts. Now it’s time, the voice of the veil finally says.

The entire world entered various states of cocooning with sheltering in place in 2020. There have been shifting levels of reflection, connections, mattering. In this time of the Great Pause, each person decides for his or herself what matters, what they are going to gain from all of this, but the one common denominator is that the world has changed for everyone.

Metamorphosis is messy. Entirely new beings emerge on the other side of this process, not caterpillars who have simply had a rest in a cocoon.

One night in the midst of my cocoon, I felt an intense desire to listen to whalesong. I listened for hours and it was still playing when I drifted off to sleep. I wept that night because I was remembering my choice: No, I will not return when Lemuria has finished, I will go on and I will see this through. I will be a part of this experiment.

Not long after this time, I could feel lifetimes of mine from Atlantis very close to me, almost as if they were poking me physically. Similar patterns from some of them emerged, and again, I wept.

The choice to come back is close. The pain of Atlantis is also close, but that means that the opportunity to heal that pain is also so very close.

The bright red veil has lifted and I remember now why I came and why I am here.

The filmy white veil dropped across my past.

Someday, that final veil, the black one, will come. But not yet. Not for a good long time now. I am not finished with what I came here to do. The work of this lifetime — the culmination of many lifetimes — awaits.