A SOLDIER OF FORTUNE IN THE 30 YEARS' WAR   This life is one of the fragments I captured with Kay Ortmans at Wellsprings. In fact, I believe it is the first one that emerged, and it happened only after a long enough time that I had begun doubting that anything at all would occur. It is as though I fell asleep listening to the swelling music issuing from her loudspeakers set high in the corners of the A-frame building that was her studio as she was massaged me under the thick layer of blankets that were wrapped around me against the chill. I had come on a scene in which I was a young man, married to a lovely young girl and living with her in a small hut on the side of a trail or pathway that led up and down the mountainside. I believe I was making a living for us by cutting wood and selling it down below. But whatever I had been doing, in this scene I was saying goodbye to my young wife, and setting off down the mountain trail with my few extra clothes and a bit of bread and cheese wrapped in a cloth which I suspended from a stick across my shoulder. My mood was one of insoucient gayety, cheerfully waving and shouting my goodbye to her as I marched jauntily down the mountainside, off to make my fortune as a mercenary soldier fighting for the king. I had heard that soldiers were wanted to swell the ranks of that army, and had decided to escape the drudgery of making a precarious living by joining up instead of working myself into exhaustion for the rest of my life. Looking back, I saw that my wife was standing by the door, silent and stunned by the unexpectedness of my precipitate action. That's all I know of that life - except that the wife I abandoned so insouciantly in that one was my mother in this one! Back to My Past Lives page