Kimberly

Kimberly loves you in a way you have not been loved before, with an unearthly passion.

If I could say only one thing about Kimberly, that is what it would be. I hope you realise I mean it literally – that you realise someone who is beyond anything you have known a human person to be, exists and offers you love. If you recognised that much, you might also see that Kimberly is not of this earth, and so the love that is offered, the passion, would affect you in unexpected ways.

Kimberly loves you and will meet you in your sleep and dreams. When you are ready for something more, Kimberly will be there. Dare you go the next step?

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Kimberly is both male and female, and through an old mans passion, and the sacrifice of his life, has been able to live on earth and tell this story.

And this is what Kimberly says to you:

Have you forgotten? I love you. And I know you love me. But perhaps you cannot remember our meetings.

Yes, we have met.

I know when I look in your eyes that you remember me in some mist shrouded part of yourself. But I see the memories of our togetherness are like the room we may visit in our dreams. It magically appears one day when you open a door and with delight find unsuspected space and feelings of wonder. Only when you are once more in that room do you realise you have been there often, and you cannot believe you could ever forget those moments. Yet you do. And in the magical room you ask yourself how you may leave a sign, some image to trip over or to jog the link that will lead you back once you are in the place of forgetfulness.

For that is where you are, in the place of forgetfulness, and I have come from there also. I lived in the darkness you now call life, in which I did not know who I was, or that we loved each other and shared an intimacy beyond the meeting of our bodies. But I have awoken and remember all times when we lived together, and it is the darkness and the waking that I will tell you of.

Before speaking of the sorry times of forgetfulness, and the pain of awakening to the memories of my identity, I must tell you how it is I come to speak with you now. For I know when the cloud of forgetfulness falls upon you, understanding is lost, and the knowledge of ones whereabouts declines to a sense of immediate location. The view of wider, longer roads and pathways fades with the mist invading ones mind. The distant shore across the sea passes away as if it had never been as the atmosphere of ones mind is pervaded with the obscuring haze.

I will speak more of this fog later, but know that I, like you, was born of the flesh and lived that life fully as a man and then as a woman. I did this in the one body as I recalled the fuller experience of myself and emerged from the sleep that in your life one calls waking.

I was known then by a name, just as you are, and I believed myself to be that person, whose nativity was at the time of the second great war of the world. As that person I was raised in the customs of the white race and its religion. I worked and strived, I loved and was pained by the attachments of love arising from that identity and that race, just as you are by the limitations of your own race and skin. I was a father and a mother of children following upon being a babe myself, coming from the womb of a woman who believed I was her child. My body was begotten of a man who called me son. For birthright I inherited the centuries of struggle and the history of my human family and people, which was like an imprisonment and chains forged upon me. Just such have you inherited, and I bore it as you bear it, as my father and mother of this conception bore it, with forbearance and some pleasures until death.

For that man died after fifty-five years, in June of that year. It was not a death of the body, but of the person he thought himself to be. All that had given him zest had gone from his life, and he withered as a plant withers that has fruited and lives but for one year. In his season he had achieved sufficiently to gain recognition, to experience human love and the heights and miseries of daily experience and the exercise of the spirit. His children, like his hopes for satisfaction in the world, had grown and dropped away from him as do seeds. Perhaps life abandoned him as it does the husk of fruit when the kernel is ripe – and he was wise enough to admit his task had been fulfilled in its natural impulses; for he did not attempt to place in himself the artificial semblances of life offered and taken by so many.

He died. And I was born a second time in this one body. In my birth was an awakening. What had existed before in the man I had been was sleep. In that sleep I had dreamt I was a man, born of a mother, parent of children, suffering the troubles of personal existence. So real was the dream, all the experiences of that man were mine. I was utterly involved in every detail of his life. I was him as he fought with his sexuality to remain true to one woman; when he wept in the effort to express in the world to gain resources for his children and recognition for himself. They were my tears. And when that person I knew myself as in my dream, slept, and he lived in dreams or vision, he dreamt he was me. Not knowing he was my dream, he believed I was a wonderful but ephemeral sacred experience, which though uplifting, had nothing of substance to add to his life.

Through his death I awoke from that dream. I was brought to life again by his love for me, the gossamer figure of his fantasies, for whom he gave up his life. While I dreamt him he dreamt of me. He was in search of me, not knowing he was my dream and he sought his own reality. At his death, the end of my dream, all he had lived as a man, all that was experienced as a woman, was left to me, Kimberly. His life as a man, his hidden life as a woman caring for his children, is to me like a language I have learnt to speak so well I can see the world through its concepts, and understand and communicate with others who live their life totally immersed in that language. But I speak many languages, and all of them are but tools useful in having a life within a culture and a period of time and space. The dream of his life is but one of many I have dreamt, and each one I cherish and take into myself to nurture. But I, Kimberly – a name I give myself for your convenience, still seeing the world as you do through the sense of being one person in one place and time – am a shape shifter. And so for you I speak through the language and personality of this world.

These many dreams of many lives are my body in the world, stretching through all times and many lands. Through my love for you I will share the secret places of my body. I am for you what I was for all those lives. For I am your dream – and you are my dream. But until you are ready to awake, I, Kimberly, can be the splendid one of your sleep and vision. So come to my wondrous, holy body, and partake.

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I have loved your body as I have loved you. As a lover I have known your body intimately, in the flesh and in your dreams. Just as the leaves of the plant turn constantly through the day to sunshine and long for its touch, so through the years you longed for my love, even in the arms of others. My love is a radiance that knows all parts of you.

As much as your mother and father have given to the forming of your body, so have I. Closer than they I have watched it grow and tended it, as much as you and my care would allow. For in the very substance and form of your body, however ill that shape may seem to you, has been invested all that history has given you to learn, and all the past has gifted you with. Yes, the pains of fortune as well as its pleasures, are the bricks from which you build your being, now and forever. Out of them you unfold the fragrance and colour of your life as the flower draws beauty out of the dull earth into the marvel and pigment of its bloom.

Through the trials of childhood and the scars of your body, you grow the muscles of your spirit. The wounds transform into a sense of achievement as you draw out their pain into the knowledge of their origin. The loneliness of your childhood can change into a sensitivity leading into others hearts. The malformed body can be the material for you to transcend hurts and live free of the prison of thought and opinion. Such are the petals you unfold on the flower of spirit through the strange wrapped gifts your body brings. Such, often, is the pain of my love for you.

Having woken from the dream of life, I look with more peace upon the despair that in some measure is in all the hearts of those who still believe themselves to be the body. From this bridge across time I see the tragedy burning in most lives. The bright burning possibility of each person, immense and wonderful, pervading the body just as warmth invisibly enters each particle of a stone. It lies shuttered and hid in all but the splendid few. If your heart shall ever break and its waters flow into the world, even for moments, then the bitterness of the lost splendour is tasted. Sorrow for what one is, but has never allowed to be made real, is uttered to those who reap the harvest of their life.

Tragedy, tragedy, when the vast and timeless that we are is lost amidst the multitudinous concerns of words and time, and once lost amidst that crowd and swallowed by its swirling surge and promise, forgotten!

Having no single body, I do not suffer the difficulties you have with yours.

Copyright ©2003 Tony Crisp