“I mention reincarnation because some people are made nervous by the idea that they are somehow born again in another person, in another time.” Kathy laughed. “I guess if I thought I’d be reborn again with these big feet of mine, I’d be upset, too, but I have hope and faith that it won’t happen the next time.”
The audience broke into laughter. Jennifer leaned over to Eileen and whispered, “She does have a nice way about her, doesn’t she?”
“She’s wonderful,” Eileen answered, her eyes moist with tears.
“But how do we know that we lived before?” Kathy Dart went on. “That we might have been—as I was—a Barbary Coast pirate? Or as Shirley MacLaine has said she was once, a hardworking woman of the night.”
“We know,” Kathy Dart whispered. “We know.” She paused and swept her blue eyes across the room as she gently tapped her heart with her small closed hand. “We know in our hearts, don’t we? We know we have lived before,” she whispered, nodding to the crowd. Then her voice grew stronger and more confident. “We know because we have had that wonderful experience of turning the corner in some foreign country or looking at a photograph in a mossy old book and realizing, yes, we were there; we walked through those ancient streets, lived in those times. We, too, might have been a mistress of King George, a Christian tossed to the lions in the Colosseum, or perhaps a Cherokee princess, or an American housewife living the hard life on our western frontier. I mention those people in particular because they were some of my many former lives. I have lived and passed on. Lived and passed on again and again and again. We never die. Our spirits don’t die. We all know that, regardless of our religious faith. Our spirits, ourselves, our egos, you might call it, have always been, will always be.”
She paused and took in the audience. She had clasped her hands together as if in prayer.
“We know all this ourselves,” she went on slowly. “It is a secret that has been locked away in our subconscious, but how do we know? That’s the question.”
“Exactly,” Jennifer said out loud.
“Shhhh.” Eileen nudged her. Eileen was sitting on the edge of her metal chair. Everyone was leaning forward, Jennifer saw; they were all on the edges of their chairs, straining to hear every word.
“Let me tell you how I know,” Kathy offered. Her voice brightened and the audience stirred. They were going to hear a secret, Kathy’s secret. Jennifer recognized the anticipation. Despite her cynicism, she, too, wanted to hear the secret of Kathy Dart’s past lives.
Kathy Dart turned to the green satin chair and sat down. Even seated, she seemed to pull the audience close to her. She took her time straightening her long white cotton skirt, letting the audience adjust to her new position on the platform.
Jennifer glanced at her watch. She had been there for nearly twenty minutes. She should leave now, she thought, while there was a lull in the room, but the thought of standing up, of having everyone stare at her, kept her in her seat. It had been a mistake to let Eileen Gorman talk her into coming to this silliness. Jennifer glanced over and saw that Eileen was wearing a ring, and remembered that Eileen had married right after high school and hadn’t gone on to college. It had surprised everyone at the time. There had been some talk, back then, that Eileen Gorman had to get married.
“I was, I guess, like any one of you,” Kathy Dart began again, “just going along with my life, living it day by day, trying to get by, to be happy, to find someone to love.”
“I’m sure you have heard something about the power of quartz crystals. It certainly has been in the newspapers. Shirley MacLaine, in her wonderful books, talks about crystals and pyramids and how they have been important to her in reestablishing her past lives.”
“I didn’t know it at the time of my first encounter with Habasha, but throughout history mediums have used crystals to align themselves with spirits, to capture the energy of past lives.” She paused.
“I was a freshman at the time—this was in 1974—studying English at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota, and my older sister, Mary Sue, who was in Ethiopia with the Peace Corps, had sent me a piece of quartz crystal. She had found it along the Hadar River, a tributary of the Awash River in southern Ethiopia.”
“Some of you may remember that in 1974 Don Johanson, a paleoanthropologist working in East Africa with the famous Leakey family, found an early hominid and named her Lucy after the Beatles’ song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’”
“Lucy stood three and a half feet tall, lived at the edge of the shallow lake, and died sometime in her early twenties.”
“This all happened some 3.3 million years ago. But Lucy is very important in our lives—in my life especially—because she and her friends, all who camped and lived together on the banks of that Ethiopian river, proved that men and women had begun to bond, to share, to work together, to experience what we call human feelings.”
“I didn’t know any of this, of course. I was just eighteen years old; I had a paper due on Jane Austen the next morning and was secretly praying that the gorgeous boy I had met at Sunday afternoon’s mixer would call and ask me out. You know how it is!” She said, shaking her head ruefully. The women laughed delightedly.
Jennifer smiled, too, remembering her own adolescence.
“Anyway, I was trying to work on my Jane Austen paper and in the mail came this small quartz crystal from my sister,” Kathy Dart went on, fingering the clear quartz that hung around her neck. “I held it in my fingers, rubbing it slightly—out of nervousness, I guess—while I sat at my dorm desk.”
“It was a typical fall day in St. Paul. My window was open and I could hear kids on the lawn outside, and I was feeling sad that I was inside working on my paper when everyone else was having a good time—and then I heard a whooshing sound in the hallway. I glanced up and saw a brilliant blue-white light in the open doorway.”
“I raised my hand to shield my eyes, and it was then, in the midst of this beautiful white light, that I heard Habasha speak to me.”
She paused and looked down at her hands and the small quartz crystal. The room was silent. Jennifer realized she was holding her breath, waiting for Kathy Dart to continue.
“He spoke to me then,” Kathy said softly, her head still down. “I can’t say whether it was really words that he spoke, or if he just telepathically let himself be understood. But I did understand him. He said simply, ‘Are you ready to receive me?’”
“I remember shaking my head. I was too frightened to speak. And he went on, ‘I’ll come again when you are ready.’ That was all. Gradually the blue-white faded. Again I heard the voices of students on the campus lawn. Habasha was gone. I didn’t know his name, of course. I didn’t know why he had chosen me, but I knew something wonderful had happened to me.”
She paused to look searchingly at her audience. “I didn’t see him again for ten years. He was waiting. Waiting for me to grow up and prepare myself to be his host in this world. He was waiting for me to agree to be his channel.”
“I once asked Habasha why he had waited, instead of choosing someone else, and he explained that I had been ordained as his earthly host. Habasha and I are like runners in an endless race—passing each other and then stopping off somewhere, as it were, to spend a lifetime—and then in death flowing again in the endless cycles of the universe.”
“And that is how Kathy Dart, of Rush Creek, Minnesota, the daughter of a dairy farmer, the youngest of eight children, came to be the channel for Habasha, who was first on earth at the dawn of civilization, living on the banks of the Hadar River, in southern Ethiopia.”
“Habasha was killed on a sunny afternoon when a man rose up in anger and felled him with a blow of his club. His physical body died in a land we now know as Ethiopia, where my sister found a small piece of quartz crystal and sent it home to me. This piece of Africa that had once been part of Habasha’s world, that was linked to his spirit, his time as a man, was now connected to me.”