Concern for a friend on the other site has kept me away for a bit. Also my Prodigal Son returned home yesterday for a brief stay, and we've all been wallowing in family happiness. I took the time to apologize to my son, the babe of the family, for my part in our falling out 2 months ago. I told him what I believed I had done wrong in those heated moments. He didn't need me to, but I wanted to. I wanted him to hear someone owning up to their mistakes. A parent that can admit being fallible. All is good now.
I promised to tell the origin of Astara, and so I shall. In 1992, my mother and I both made an appointment with a traveling artist to do our past life portraits. The artist's name was J. Lee Hall, and she hailed from New York. At that time her living was made by traveling the New Age bookstore circuit doing these portraits, which are pastels on velvet paper. She had photos in albums of previous portraits, all beautiful containing multiple faces, and usually a central figure that was most representative and relative to the person in the present. My mother was first, and I have to say that the entire time I felt the strangest "light headed" excitement as I saw hers unfold. It felt like my entire body was "buzzing", alive. Typically, J. Lee told us, an average of 5 past life faces show up. There were 10 in my mother's portrait, and the one in the middle ,J.Lee said was my mother's guide, an unusual occurrence.
We were all a little stunned.
When it was my turn, I sat in the chair, and J. Lee knelt before me, touching my hands with her own. She was silently meditating with some music in the background. The energy I'd been feeling within was so heightened at the time that I thought I would explode. After a few minutes, J. Lee stood with her eyes focusing on something other than me. She turned to the easel where the paper was tacked, picked up a white pastel, and began smoothing cloudy,powdery circles all over the paper. AT the point she was satisfied that she had covered the appropriate area, she began marking the whites of the pairs of eyes that she was beginning to see. She filled in various features as she saw them occur, with the different shades of pastels, and the tears began to roll from my eyes. I had no control over this. The more faces that appeared, the more the tears poured. ONe strong solitary thought kept filling me over and over as I sat there, watching..."Verification". That was the source of my tears, validity was given to me, something I had always needed deep within the depths of my soul.
10 faces also appeared in my portrait, and in the center was a crescent moon and a dove.
The faces appear in a clockwise fashion, and as information comes to her, she tells it or writes a date and/or a name with the face. The face in the first position represents a lifetime, but it also reflects the beginning of my current incarnation. My first face was a woman, with a white streak in her hair, date 1200-England, and an angry expression on her face. My first validation. I was angry about having to incarnate again in this lifetime. It's always been true. The face though, the incarnation it showed, was a woman who had been misunderstood and branded a "witch", and subsequently put to death for it. It was this incarnation that was karmically connected to my mother. She had been one of the accusers. Which explained my early resentment of her as a child.
And so it went down the line, each face/incarnation representing a relevent period in the progression of the present life....A Black Cherokee...a runaway slave hidden by the Indians; Olum, a scandinavian sailor; Marcello Giovanni, the boisterous vineyard owner, who saw everything in black and white; Kerlin, a 15 year old Korean girl who died in the war; Tony, a young boy in the Roman Boy's choir who died of some sickness; 1857,a male Italian opera singer (these explained my love of singing though I'm not gifted with that talent in this lifetime); a long,dark-haired face representing the incarnations when I did not possess any extraordinary talents, but always wishing for more; The wizard of Naples....so powerful, that he split his soul, which the crescent moon and dove represented...split his soul to become Olum, the scandinavian who became lost at sea in a storm, and was guided home by the wizard...the wizard who knew everything about his neighbors. 3 lifetimes spent in Italy that explained my obsession with everything Italian at a young age. The wizard was an extraordinary lifetime, who could hope for such an experience? But J. Lee told me that wasn't my grandest lifetime. That was Astara. The last face. The one that looked a little surreal, the one I was afraid she was going to tell me was a prostitute, with her flowing blonde hair and lovely green eyes. Astara lived in Atlantis, and she had all the gifts, she practiced all the arts, ...singing, painting, astrology, numerology, teaching...she did it all. And she represented what I was supposed to become in this lifetime. The achievement of this lifetime. It is Astara that I think of when I want to rise above the heavy negative things in life. It is Astara that I try to attune myself to when I want to be more than I am at any given moment. It is Astara that gives me hope for all things good. It is Astara that I aspire to.
I'm not there yet.
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exanimate
hopeful
artistic