By: Brian Michael Barbeito

they didn’t record the time of incarnation, of birth, so no natal chart can be cast. I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t matter. I wonder sometimes at what time. Osho said after the awakening to call the astrologer for him, because now astrology won’t work for him, now he is free. and he says the astrologer was cowardly and wouldn’t come back. that is his story anyhow. yet I see it differently, meaning if you are just w/no self, then you are free but not. you are in a way not free at all because there is no self to be free, therefore you can’t have it both ways. In true freedom, there is no freedom at all. the body-mind just responds to what is going on, like light or outward stimuli and social situations are just an extension of that though we would like to think differently and have more self importance than that. I don’t know though.

I was brought home in a cab from somewhere, and that’s that. but I had an uncle that walked me to the parks later. I would see these white houses in the distance. I think they were row homes, or apartment buildings but really maybe two stories. now they were quite distant as I said. We always turned right far before them, but I watched them. I don’t know why. I wondered what they were and what they were like. We lived in a home, even then, and so it wasn’t some longing, not that way anyhow. I just had an intense impression of them for some reason. I could have gone there a thousand times later, but I didn’t. one day maybe, if they are still there. I write this an hour away from them geographically. I should go there, don’t you think?

What else was around there? Dogs barking. The sun. A wheel you sat on in the park and people spun it around. That was a small park. And there was a larger one, a bit further, across a big street. Sometimes, we went there. It is just the regular world, so why did it seem so alien, so strange, so intense? Hard to say. I wasn’t w/a peer group. I don’t know why. I went to schools there, then moved from the area, then went to affluent areas and schools, but I went back to that area in high school. I was a star hockey player and popular, and I went right down to the guidance office and got a transfer and left and went to school in that old area. My spirit kept being drawn to that area. Nobody else would go from a good area, to a basically bad area, but I did. Two kids called me over in the cafeteria. They said, ‘ Hi, we are having a disagreement and a kinda bet…this girl says you are the kid from our school a long time ago, and I say I just don’t know, so we figured we’d just settle it by asking you.’ And it was me, and I told them so, and one of them smiled and said something like, ‘I knew it.’ So I had come back to this area of the white houses.

Well that uncle. He took me to the science centre. I remember that. I like it around there, though I don’t know anything about science. and there was a wedding there, which doesn’t make sense to me, but someone had a wedding we all went to there. It is on film. I wear a blue suit, and am happy, genuinely happy. Osho says that people don’t actually have a golden childhood most of the time, that it is rather with a few good moments yes, but what comes later is so bad, that it appears golden. But I did in large sense because I was left alone. Osho says nobody ever interfered with him. I resonate with that, ‘resonate’ being a term of nonduality neo-advaita and also new age people use. So I was happy and my mother took me to the washroom, walked me there, because she was and is good, and that’s safe, a safe bet. There is no responsibility on my part. I am free.

Well, I much later discovered a book by Mother Meera, which is interesting because she is a divine Mother and didn’t speak or write then, but answered a few questions briefly. It was called simply, ‘Answers.’ Well you know, I couldn’t go to Germany, where she lived then, to receive her blessing. But then years later she started travelling the world, and guess where she came to when she came to my country. You cant write this, right?- cant make this up- …she came to the science centre. I guess its mysterious and not, because they must have had a contact around there, and also meeting rooms or something. So I went of course, for she is a real Divine Mother, and I wouldn’t miss it, and I received her gaze.

Well, I drove out of that area and went home, to the north, further away, and I thought about things a bit. The two kids in high school that recognized me. The changes of address though the years. The rich area and the poor area, the absence of the natal chart, of Osho, a helper on the way certainly though poorly received by many, – of origins and worldly time and light, plus otherworldly, metaphysical timelessness and light. And of I thought of the white houses distant. I remembered looking at them. Sometimes my grandfather was with me. I might make a mistake, touch a bright black pickup truck, – and the owner came out and yelled, ‘Don’t let him touch that truck! That is a brand new truck,’ but my grandfather who was quiet and religious and inward, yelled back at him and stuck up for me, declaring, ‘He is not troubling anything!’

I was protected by spirit and by people. I had a double crown. Some say that is auspicious. I mean an actual double crown on my head where your hair can be parted either way but really unless it’s quite long it just sticks up.

A funny sort of blessing, no? Yes funny, if you ask me.

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Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian poet, writer, and photographer. Recent work appears at The Hamilton Stone Review and is forthcoming at Press Pause Press and The Rathalla Review.