By Anna Von Reitz
You must understand that I have lived most of my life in a shadow realm, and for most of it, I haven't known who I am. I had relationships. I had a Mother and Father and pets and friends, all the normal happy accoutrements of life --- but in my early teens things started to depart from the normal world.
If this makes your skin prickle a little, it should, because we are all in the same situation. You don't really know who you are, either.
People have told you who you are.
They have given you a name and claim to belong to a particular family. They presented you with an age, a race, a religion. You have built up a history and formed a knowledge base, so that you have, over time, acquired an identity and accumulated evidence backing up your story line.
But it is a storyline.
Feel lucky if you have that distinctive chin or that nose or that wavy hair that identifies you, for sure, as a MacGregor or a Findley or a Pratt, Johnson, Lindhurst, or whatever other family....but none of that was true for me. I was different from my cradle, endowed with different capacities and a different look all around, apart from anyone in my family.
By the time I was thirteen, the long grinding process of discovering myself had begun. I was enlisted in a program.
And now, I give you permission to let your skin crawl, because, well, being "in a program" has meaning.
Young Justin Knight is in a program to teach men to be competent and hopefully, caring, husbands. Bathsheba has been in a program to discover everything that can be known about breasts and breast milk and lactation.
Once you are in a program other factors come into play, other purposes and meanings attach, you acquire a cadre, and you -- in one way or another -- enter the shadow realm.
I call it the shadow realm because nothing is ever exactly the same as it appears, ever again. Your own experience makes you view things as if you were looking at life through a prism or perhaps viewing its reflection through the pieces of a shattered mirror. The words "through a glass and darkly" come to life and you know exactly what the Apostle was talking about.
A few of you have accused me of "writing a steamy romance novel" the past few days. I can assure you that is not my intent and not the way I look at it.
Is it romantic when two people you love have been kept apart, used and abused, for forty years ---- and are still paying the price of their parts in a dying social paradigm? I'm sorry. That doesn't count as romance to me.
For me, and for them, for Uriah and Bathsheba, even for the Piper, it feels more like being on a torture rack for no reason and the circumstance of our lives as we have been forced to live them, has been imposed on us, quietly, steadily, almost imperceptibly by largely unseen forces.
Was King David a fetisher, a madman, who abused his wife in a truly bizarre and despicable manner, or a hero who fought back using British history and the model of an older social paradigm to save lives and create new knowledge? And what part does science and the "Mrs. Pams" of the world play in all of this? Mere tools in subjection, or part of a ready infrastructure all too prone to manipulation for purposes both good and evil?
And how do I judge that? What is true is true, and yet, sometimes the truth alone seems to flicker like a candle, shedding insufficient light. My friend, Bathsheba, would willingly walk across burning coals and would find the courage to do it, if it meant saving a baby's life. I know that about her. I am absolutely sure of it.
But would she consciously choose the life she has had, if the choice had been set straight in front of her from the first, and not been insidiously and slowly imposed on her?
I don't know the answer to that. I only know that in the end result, she has accomplished more --- in a practical sense of having improved and directly saved more lives --- than I have.
As for Uriah, was he a coward who failed to save her from such a fate, or a man who survived against the odds, and won through to be here at this time?
I don't know the answer to that one, either -- I am just glad to the foundations of my soul that he made it, and that he's here now for her and they both have a late-life chance at happiness.
The shadow world has taken its toll on all of us, on James and I, too.
James was sodomized so severely at a prison camp that his entire rectum had to be surgically reconstructed. It's a miracle he survived that physically, much less mentally and emotionally. He was still a good man in spite of that horrific abuse and he still had love in his heart for humanity. And for me. He still managed to be a wonderful husband for me, and a beloved father for his children.
How did I get my nickname, "Old Iron Pants"? Because I killed fifteen men who were trying to do something similar to me. I killed them without a second thought, though I can still see their faces in my dreams.
Because the fight is between life and death, sex unavoidably gets boiled up in it, and if you are too prudish to deal with it, you won't get far and won't survive well. I am just telling you the way it is, as I always have, like a Dutch Grandma.
Sex is meant to be sacred, but seldom is in this world. It's meant to be private, sacred, and cherished between two people mated for life, knowing each other in all ways, loving each other in all ways. That's what Justin's program is aiming for, to create men who value that ideal and who have the knowledge, skill, courage and acceptance to embody being a husband in real life. And women who will match them as wives.
It doesn't mean that Justin and his cohorts will all succeed, but at least the goal has been presented to them, and a pathway forward with skill development as a means to achieve the goal is being given to them.
All I can say for them and their odd little consummation ritual that seems familiar to me, is God bless them and keep them, God raise his face upon them and grant them true peace and happiness. May they be like seeds to grow a new set of values and models to show the world what marital love and familial love could be.
Because that is certainly one vital thing that this world needs --desperately -- to remember.
As for the Piper, he has his own story, too. He's a harlequin, and not really human, so things were a bit different for him --- slightly different issues of life and death, but nonetheless life and death issues.
He lost his whole family. He is the only one left. No doctors can cure his illnesses. Nobody can guess his age. His origins are lost in star charts from the Age of Taurus.
He remembers when people worshipped Hathor, the Egyptian cow goddess. He attended ceremonies hosted by Roman Emperors devoted to Mithras. He swears that I am the reincarnation of the Hindu goddess "Durga", the Great Mother, and that I am here to "settle accounts".
I don't think he is talking about my work as a Fiduciary. He means that I have a role in preserving life itself.
Please notice that William of Normandy's Farewell Sonnet is relatively recent reading material for the Piper.
I mentioned in passing that he picked me up like an infant and carried me, a stout grown woman, to the couch in his study --- even though he is "much older than me" and I am about to turn seventy.
I also told you how much the Piper hates the cold. He is leaving his house in Somerset because he is sick of Somerset's "cold and beastly climate" -- not because he expects to die soon.
The Greek Isles, Venice, and the South of France are much more like his native habitats.
And I don't even know if I will accept his gift. Without Jim, I don't have much need for a large house. Without Jim, I don't have much need for anything in this world.
The truth is that I passed this marker many years ago, when Bathsheba and I were both young. She had all the wealth in the world, the estates, the yachts, the country houses and I had nothing by comparison. I was like an unaccountable flea on a dog and we were talking one afternoon.
"I suppose I should be jealous," I said, and I really, logically, rationally meant that. I should have been jealous of her wealth and beauty and all her worldly possessions, but I wasn't. I searched my heart and realized that I simply, inexplicably, wasn't jealous of her at all.
Even I didn't know why at the time, but the fact remained that I couldn't raise the least little bit of a single twinge of jealousy.
I already knew myself well enough to know that I was better suited to life on a farm or a beach bungalow, somewhere simple, with open skies and stars at night.
I was and am a Country Mouse and I am content with that.
Yet Bathsheba and I could look at each other across the chasm of social classes and money and everything else, and still see each other's souls. Being an American meant I didn't matter, though everyone always hoped I'd turn out to be the daughter of an American tycoon.
At least, I could have the good grace to have a pile of money.
That's what the Piper was bemoaning and muttering about nobody taking care of me, and regrets that James and I hadn't -- frankly -- been more successful financially. The Piper is, of course, aware of the sacrifices we made for the cause of American Independence. He knows why we were never able to become rich in our own right, but that doesn't change the fact of my non-existent bank balance.
I think that accepting the house might be considered an "emolument" from -- if not a foreign government, a foreign source -- and would require an Act of Congress (one more pleasantly disposed toward me than the present one) for me to accept. I am not an officer of the Federal Government, but am an officer of the Federation of States, and we may assume that the limits our Founders placed on their employees applied even more strictly to themselves and to us.
Granna
