Introduction

One evening early in the new year, my ten-year-old confided that she was worried about something. Between the demands of school and the dynamics of friends, let alone all the changes dawning around and within her, I wasn’t surprised to learn she might be nervous about something. But her fear caught me off guard.

“I’m scared of being reincarnated.”

“Reincarnated?”

“I’m scared of coming back to the earth without you and Daddy.”

Because of my own fascination with the afterlife, and the life of the soul, my children have gotten used to me asking them questions like Do you remember when you were born? Do you remember anything from before you were born? Usually, they indulge my curiosity with snippets and fragments: I cried when I was born because it was cold in the room. There was goop in my eyes and I didn’t like it. Details corroborated—or, more likely, planted in their imaginations—by photos they’ve seen, stories they’ve heard. But once in a while, we’ll strike what for me amounts to conversational gold, like the time my son explained that he had been my father in an earlier life, and my husband before that. For reasons I am aware are specious, it pleases me to have my own spiritual view of the universe fed back to me by my children.

But it wasn’t the migration of souls that was bothering my daughter that night. When I questioned her, she explained, “I’m scared of coming back all by myself and having to live with people I don’t know in a world where all the trees have been chopped down. I’m scared of having to breathe polluted air. I’m scared of war.”

I believe she is most frightened by the specter of each of those things here and now in this lifetime, as am I. But that night, in the new haze of the dawning decade, we let ourselves hover awhile in the soul realm.

I’ve read that souls tend to travel in groups. It consoled my daughter to have this notion explained to her. That despite a host of potentially terrifying conditions and variables, somehow the soul retains choice in certain matters. Did she also gather, as I surely did, the sense that there is some onerous duty riding upon this migration of souls? Did it occur to her that there must be some work so unceasing as to necessitate the span of multiple lifetimes? What have I gotten myself into? I often ask on behalf of my beleaguered soul.

I don’t know what portion of the mammoth human work—a work tied up in epochs of karma—our species will manage to nick away at in this lifetime. But I know the most urgent work ahead—for my daughter and for me—lies in striking the balance between fear, hope, and the willingness to keep at it. That’s the conversation we must choose to dwell in. The one where my fright—at all the very same things that worry a ten-year-old, and then some—activates not the flight instinct but the impulse to dig in and keep trying.

That’s the conversation—about what we fear, and what in light of our fear we must do—in which the many writerly voices gathered here seem to be engaged. How can we give honest voice to our daily (and nightly) worry? How can we greet the differences between us as cause for awe, reverence, joy? How might we become devout in our love even of ourselves? How best to minister to the natural world? It’s a conversation carried on in myriad voices and at multiple registers. One that never stops—how can it? None of us can afford to drop this thread, not in this life or any other.