these past lives

Despite his highly urban upbringing, I think the SO was a country boy in a past life. He's discovering he likes twangy country music, wide open plains with grand mountains in the background, and now gun shooting. There's something in these things that resonate with him. He also thinks he may have been Caribbean at one point, noting his love for plaintains.

I don't really know if people have past lives or not, but my guess is that they do and that somehow the knowledge of those lives before, the things we like and are attracted to now are clues to that past life. Well, in any case, it's a fun game and as a writer, I like making up stories about who I was before and where I might have lived.

In Laura Esquivel's "The Law of Love," she brings us to a future where everything is about your karmic returns. Your jobs are determined by past lives. Objects can speak through devices of their own previous lives. You are stuck with your abusive husband if they find out in a past life you killed his whole family. Are the people in our lives simply reincarnations of a cohort we've met lives and lives past? In her book, the greatest saints in the current day would have been at some point the most diabolical.

I don't think this is my first time as a Filipino. I think I was one of those seafarers who travelled the ocean currents. Sitting on boats, going over the waves, I'm home. I'm attracted to the swords and the cloth. I can learn to tie knots in a fishing net. And scuba diving brought me to a place I felt I had been before. Perhaps I was one of the original balanghais that supposedly populated much of the south pacific.

The SO and D love going to the antique fair in Alameda. They're attracted to the turn of the century items and photos and gadgets. I don't find them too interesting. I wonder if they lived then. I don't think I ever did.

I think I might have been a farmer as well. I like dirt. I like planting and growing things. I spent a vacation day in Hawaii pulling weeds out of a taro patch instead of lounging on the beach. Go figure.

There are a few people I've met who seem like, this is their first time around the block. I would say those extreme adventurer types or those ones you know who experimented with every drug known to man would be on that list.

So, if indeed, we had lessons from a past life, then the question remains, what are we to learn in this one.