By David Malcolm Rose
Many years ago, I went up into the Ozark Mountains to have my fortune read. The seer sat in a chair facing me and scanned my aura by holding her hand up, palm outward, and moving it in a hypnotic circle in front of me. She punctuated nearly every statement by saying, “Don’t ya know.” It was not a question but an observation.
She revealed that in a former life, I had been a Bedouin. Not a Sheikh, but a run-of-the-mill, working-class Bedouin. I was relieved. Everyone else I knew had been princesses or potentates. My circle of friends was not large, but I personally knew a guy who had been Alexander the Great, a woman who had been Helen of Troy, and two Cleopatras.
There was one other thing the oracle told me that made little sense to me at the time. She said I would be occasionally overcome with great heaviness. This, she assured me, was not something for me to fear. That heaviness was merely a prelude to a rush of creativity. Some work of art waiting to be born.
I have come to know and understand the nature of that heaviness; the clinical term is depression. It’s the default setting for most artists. Van Gogh said there was, inside his head, a voice that told him he would never be a painter. The only way to still that voice was to paint.
For me, it’s more like a dog I must chase. The dog runs, I run – I stop, the dog stops. At the end of the day, the dog follows me home and sleeps at the foot of my bed. I chase him every day because if I don’t, he’ll howl outside my window all night.
Lastly, the seer told me I was as detached from money as anybody she had ever read. “Don’t ya know.” She then detached me from $20. A small price to pay for such insight.
David Rose, of Hot Springs, is an author and artist.
