Pilgrimmer

By: Rachel Murphy

The author and her grandmother picking blackberries.

I see her in my mind: a red-headed girl with freckles, carrying blackberries, walking in a field. 

Not just any field, the spot where my great-grandmother’s house used to stand. 

I know I have walked this Earth before. It’s the same creek where I used to catch crawdads with my brother. The exact spot where I’ve watched the sun rise and set, the leaves turn every fall. It’s so oddly comforting to me. So familiar. 

I take this journey - this voyage - every time I go home to those woods. Every time I walk barefoot in the grass and let the dirt under my feet greet me as an old friend. 

So lovely to see you here again. 

Maybe it’s a past life. 

They say it’s very common for people to incarnate into their same families. As the oldest daughter of an oldest daughter, I know what side of my ancestors I’m most drawn to. 

I see my mother’s mother in me. Grandma Fay. We look so similar. I recognize something in her that is so intrinsic, so intuitive. 

Maybe I am her mother…was her mother… her grandmother… her sister. And in this present incarnation, I am her granddaughter. What do I have to learn from her? What can she teach me? What themes did we agree to focus on in this lifetime to help each other experience?

~

I recently read The Midnight Library, which narrates the tale of Nora, a thirty-something-year-old British woman who decides to die as a way to cope with all of her life’s many regrets, only to find herself in an in-between space, a library where all of the books on the shelves are lifetimes she could have lived if she had made one different choice. While the clock is still stuck at midnight, she has as much time as she wishes to read the different books and fall into different lives as herself. 

With The Midnight Library, author Matt Haig explores how one small decision, like choosing to go to one cafe over another, can affect the rest of our life. For some people, this can lead to crippling anxiety. What if I am somehow making the wrong choice? It can be ruinous to think about all of life’s microscopic events with such significance. How are we supposed to live with this knowledge, this recognition that the multiverse of our lives are spouting off in infinite directions every single second, and that we have to choose which one we want to step into, each moment, for the rest of our lives? What if we make the wrong choice? Can we go back? That’s what Haig is getting at in The Midnight Library. 

But what about you? Do you time travel? The little voice inside me whispers, “I do.” 

Is it really possible? 

I mean, I can go anywhere I want - in my mind… But that’s what this all is anyways, right? 

What really is the difference between the present and the past? Isn’t time just a landscape? We can only see and experience our own small dot on the map, but it doesn’t mean other lives aren’t happening concurrently in a different spot on that same map. If that life is happening at the same time across the map, is it really in the past, even if it’s happening in 1840’s Ireland or 1920’s Pittsburgh?

~

I think of picking blackberries. This ancient practice that brings me deep into my bones, into my soul. It is second nature. I have done this before. I weave through the bushes, clothes snagging on thorns, eyes darting down to the low-hanging fruits, hands weaving through the leaves, searching for the hidden ones whose bright reds and purples haven’t yet attracted the birds and foxes. 

I have spent many, many lives awaiting the late June ripening of these delicious berries. I pick one, and the deepest part of my brain lights up in satisfaction. I taste one, still warm from the sun and juicy from last night’s rainstorm. I smile and look over at my mom, my aunt, my siblings, and my cousins. This is what it means to be presently rooted and simultaneously connected to All That Is.

In my other lives, I am also picking blackberries: as a child, as a young woman, as a mother. I always find my way back to this place. It’s stored deep in my soul - the bonds between the berries and I run deeper than the facade of the bodies I inhibit. 

I have spent lifetimes doing other things, too. We all have. Working in a fiber mill in the city, farming in medieval Europe. I’ve been female, male, brother, sister, mother, friend, rich, poor. I’ve died in a car accident, I’ve fallen from great heights, I’ve been hurt by a horse. But I’ve also traveled, loved, embroidered, read books, and listened to music. 

Is that all me? Or am I just on a journey to go back to Source? To connect, or should I say, reconnect, with that profound, gratifying, Oneness. Am I just traveling along the thread of the Spirit that runs through all of us? Or are those lives mine too? Is anything really mine? We are infinite beings after all, even if the part of “us” that is inside our bodies cannot fully comprehend what that means. 

The Universe sees us and knows us, desires our individual-ness to complete its whole-ness. My soul was created with a desire to worship the cycles of the blackberries, as another’s was formed with intentions to walk amongst the forests. 

I like to muse about these things, and I love to read books with themes of parallel lives, magic, time travel, and intuition. I think of my favorite quote from The Alchemist: “And when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” I think reading those words from Paulo Coelho might have been my first spiritual awakening (in this lifetime, at least).