There is no place like the desert. It is the one place where you can’t escape your own truths. Where your beliefs are tested, your concepts are tried, and your convictions might be overruled. You come face to face with who you really are. It’s also the place where I just had to admit that soulmates do exist.
I never believed in soulmates, happy endings and the one. Then one day I met someone I instantly felt I knew for several lifetimes. A stranger I felt all comfortable with. A complete stranger I, the sceptic, the untrusting would have trusted with my life from day one.
Needless to say, I brushed it off and walked away from that feeling, simply dismissing it. Such things don’t happen. It’s nothing but a misfiring off nerves. But it kept hunting me. I could let go as much as I wanted, it didn’t let go off me.
It stole my sleep. It broke my heart. It tore me apart.
There is no such thing like soulmates I kept telling myself even after the one memorable night in New Orleans when a voodoo priest told me that there are two energies in my aura, mine and the one of my soulmate, fiercely connected.
Soulmates, the one… as if!
And it really means nothing that I often wake up in the middle of the night feeling a presence, nearly being able to see, feel and smell that one person, absolutely sure that the one is here with me even if not physically.
No, these things don’t exist. Energies of people don’t connect. There is no such thing as soulmates. Period.
Still, it steals my sleep. It breaks my heart. It tears me apart.
I needed to go into the desert. Not just for a day. I needed to sleep there. I needed to be alone with a night sky so full of stars and an empty horizon over endless sand dunes. I needed the quiet in which my soul could speak and my mind listen. I knew it. I knew it as hard as I knew that I don’t really know the one person my heart knows since a thousand years.
And in the stillness, the heat, the cold, the comfort of an oasis, I met a sheik. “Everyone has a soulmate”, he told me. “It takes many lives before you are ready to meet, and sometimes it happens, that the other one is not ready yet. But of course both of you know each other since long. You must have been torn apart in a former life. Since then you both wandered this world searching for each other. Until you met, connected and completed each other. You are obviously ready for this step, your soulmate may be not. It takes courage, courage to love and to let the other one love you. And I can see it breaks your heart. But be still, even if in this life you won’t be together, you have found each other once, you will again.”
I carry the wise man’s words and the desert in my heart. There is more between earth and heaven than we might ever be able to understand. And I hope one day my soulmate will dare to cross the desert, too.