my name was gabriella, i grew wheat and olives

I had a past life regression session. It was interesting. I connected back to a past life in Italy in the 1600s.

My name was Gabriella and my family grew crops of wheat and olives. I had a vision of walking through a grain field, running my hands across the top of the wheat heads – and lots of activity in a big stone farmhouse – where I lived with my extended family. 

It was fairly vivid, and is on my mind as I write this. I’ve done a bit of googling, and the scenes I remembered line up with life in Italy at the time. I guess it’s kind of cool – really cool actually.

However…

There’s a cynical part of me that wonders if I just made the whole thing up - out of clips of things my brain has stored throughout the years.

But then that raises the question, where does creativity come from? From us? Or somewhere else?

I keep coming back to this talk by Elizabeth Gilbert. She says that creativity visits us like a genie, rather than arising from us. She mentions that musician Tom Waits sometimes has to tell his creative genie to come back when he’s not driving. And poet Ruth Stone has to run quickly to find a pen and paper when she feels a poem coming - and that sometimes she’s almost too late and she has to grab the poem by the tail and write it backwards.

So, according to that theory, my past life was either ridgy-didge, or a story idea delivered to me by my creative genie.

Who knows for sure. It’s a pretty fascinating rabbit hole to dive down though isn’t it.

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This is part of my Little Nothing Moments daily writing series. 

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Incase you missed it:
LNM #1: Did you Ever Notice
LNM #2: I Can Still Do A Handstand
LNM #3: I Whispered a Different Mantra
LNM #4: Adventures with Salty Water
LNM #5: I Flat out Lied to my Kids Again