chapter
1

I'M SITTING ON THE PORCH OF MY NEW HOUSE OVERLOOKING Santa Fe, New Mexico. I'm moving in and I'm exhausted from unpacking boxes, putting up pictures, and ruminating about my life. I do a lot of ruminating these days, but moving into a new house is making it more intense than usual.

The house isn't really new (it's fifteen years old) but it is new to me, and it's a dream place for me.

A house is really a life…one you've had or one you want to have. A new dream.

Whenever I have a really good dream, I find it's usually about a house (my life) with new additional rooms (new chapters and adventures) for me to wander through.

Now, as I take a break and look out over the terrain here in the Land of Enchantment I find myself freely associating about my own "inner terrain."

It's a challenge for me to realize that I am older than I thought I was. I feel like a sage-ing "icon" (as the young people call me). I feel I must become a sage, or I can't deal with the reality of what we've allowed ourselves to become—me included.

At dinner parties these days the table falls virtually silent when I say something (anything) because the other guests expect a treatise on enlightenment. I'm told I predicted 9/11 and the erratic weather changes a long time ago. I don't remember any of it, but then I don't remember much of anything these days. The day I couldn't remember where I put my car keys was one thing. But when I finally found them and I couldn't remember what they were for, I knew I had reached the age for either sageing or an old folks' home. I picked sageing.

I've decided to believe everything I hear. Why not? It's all unbelievable anyway. I mean, most everything these days challenges what I grew up knowing and believing was a kind of sane truth.

Our president invades a country because Jesus or God told him to. Wow! And people think I'm wacky for believing in other lives and guiding spirits who channel through humans. Wasn't that what happened to W.? "I don't listen to my old man because I have a higher-powered spirit who got me off of heavy-duty 'spirits' along with drugs." Wow again! What should we honestly think about all that? Should we believe him? Maybe so. But who and what were his spirits and his gods?

Tomorrow I will start hanging family pictures on the walls of my new house. I remember that my father was a serial alcoholic who was intelligent and told the truth. In fact, I respected him for the reasons why he drank. He couldn't bear the hypocrisy he saw all around him.

He told me about the out-of-body experience he had when he cracked up the car. He said he went out of his body and met with his own father and mother again. He said he saw the light of God around them and knew that light was his real home. He wanted to go there—into the light—but something stopped him—a voice, maybe, who told him he needed to go back to his life on Earth and finish the work he had agreed to do. He said he had contracted to have his life with our family, and he knew he wasn't finished.

He never told anyone about his experience until I brought home my first metaphysical book which I read to him and Mother. (I always read my books to my parents before I published them.) He was glad to talk to someone about it. I knew how he felt—it had happened to me in Peru when I sat on a mountaintop in the Andes and left my body to witness the Earth below me. Was I crazy, I wondered, or was I liberated from limitations? Dad went on to tell me that he had seen his best buddy appear at the foot of his bed at the exact moment that he died in World War II. I remember asking him if he thought anyone ever really died. He looked at me with a quizzical expression but didn't say anything in reply.

Maybe death is as exciting as life. Maybe war is a karmic dance between the killers and the killees, and no soul ever really dies. If that is so, then what is the point of war? Is the real reason for war to teach us the karmic steps of the dance until we are exhausted by it?

My dad had as many questions as I did. He loved philosophy and psychology. Questions like: Are we alone in the universe? Why are we here? Why are we the way we are? What is energy? Is there life before life?

He always asked himself those questions and never stopped me from asking mine. He was kind of a hometown philosopher. I loved that about him. He had a hard time understanding why people behaved the way they did, with such subterfuge and hypocrisy. He would always tell the truth, even to his own detriment. For example, during his days selling real estate he would tell a prospective client that the water pump didn't work or a new roof was needed, then wonder why such disclosure blew the sale. He couldn't understand why truth was such a deterrent. He was an educated man who wrote unfinished dissertations on philosophy and psychology at Johns Hopkins. He never finished because he was ridiculed by one of his professors. I remember reading one of his papers on music. In it he said he could prove that notes had the same vibrational frequency as colors. He didn't know then that he was talking about the human chakra system, but he was. And when I told him about the seven notes on the scale corresponding to the seven rainbow colors of the chakra system, he welled up with tears. He was trying to prove something intellectually that he knew was true intuitively. He was very patriotic and used to cry at the "Star-Spangled Banner," too.

Mother was a Canadian by birth and Daddy loved showing her around the Washington Monument, the Capitol, White House, Lincoln Memorial, etc., while she was studying to become a citizen of the United States.

Mother didn't show the emotional passion Daddy did. (She was a Canadian, after all.) Her love was for nature and regrowth in the spring. She said that was why she partially understood the theory of reincarnation. Same soul, different life every rebirth. Same bush, different rose every spring.

Neither of them ridiculed my questions, my expanding beliefs, or my tendency to expound on such things in public. They used to say, "Well, it could all be true."

Daddy told me he secretly always wanted to run away and join the circus. He was a good musician who played the violin, but turned down a scholarship in Europe because he didn't want to study hard to become a professional musician only to end up playing in the pit of a Broadway musical eight times a week. Hence, later on, he became a real estate salesman. I think I'm good with the value of real estate because of him. My agent used to say that because of my investments in real estate, I have lived rent-free my whole life.

Copyright © 2007 by Shirley MacLaine.