This was the first major vision I saw of that life and I knew it was going to be dramatic from then on. When I looked at that photo I was shocked. That is all that I can say.
Some things carry through as memories. General George Patton recalled the positions he held when he walked out on ancient battlefields, just like in the movie. It was during the battle that every one of his senses were alive and his intense focus etched that memory into his soul. That is why he was such a great General. He had access to the memories of hundreds of battles and how men performed and degraded in their effectiveness in nearly every situation and over various periods of time. He even learned from his failures and that is something almost no soldier can claim since death is usually the result of mistakes in battle. Those memories are why he was so great.
Sometimes I remember a scenic view of the Himalayas from a past life or sometimes I am drawn to visit a place and I remember living there in another life. It happens often.*
About half my memories are of lifetimes that I spent in Tibet or Mongolia. My memory is often of what I saw repeatedly or focused my meditation on. I can remember strongly the steps into a monastery in Mongolia. It was a life spent in the practice of a Buddhist technique known a mindfulness. It's when you give everything you think of or look at your complete focus and concentration. Even when I looked at the steps of the monastery to see where I needed to place my feet it was a solid focusing of all my attention on the cracked second step from the top. It was repeated 1000's of times which burned that memory into my soul. Some times I see Buddha statues that I meditated at repeatedly. It's what ever you focus on most and see repeatedly that you can recall easiest. It becomes ingrained and it is not necessary for it to be of a religious nature.
What I saw strongest from the bards life 400 years was the scene in the above photo. I wasn't ready for that. It was actually the view I had of myself every morning when I was getting dressed. It was a fancier mirror than the above one which was made of small panes but a similar image of a woman is what I saw over my shoulder, in the mirror, thousands of times as I worked to tighten the links on the corset.
I used the mirror to make certain I didn't catch my hair in the corset. Otherwise you could get dressed completely and then turn your head and find out your hair was caught in it and then you had to spend about 15 minutes of undoing it to get your hair free and then another 15 minutes of redoing all the links.
If you were unlucky it would get all tangled up and you'd have to unravel it while looking in the mirror and everything was seen reversed and you might be able get one hand behind you if you were lucky to have you hair caught down low but not if it was near the top. If that happened you could end up crying on the floor after three hours of frustration. Sometimes husbands would find their wives on the floor after 10 hours still crying!
It would be worse than you could ever believe. This was the world's worst horror and the nightmare that all wives dreaded the most because a decent wife could never be seen 'undressed' (or half dressed) even by her own husband. It was shameful and you were disgraced if it happened. Sex of course was all done under the covers at night, in the dark, with your closed eyes. That is if you were a decent woman and above all things I was a decent woman then.**
I found this picture of the 'decent' ways a woman could have her corset stitched up by others in 1809. You can tell that there had been a great revolution in women's rights during the 200 years since the bard.
By 1809 an old man or even a small child could actually fasten a decent woman's corset. Do you notice one other vast change? Besides the fact that there were actual pictures of women in corsets in1809, your husband could now see you in your corset and you were not going to go to hell forever if he did.
Some women would get a knife and just cut off a foot of hair to get their hair free. Living where we did we had a church nearby. A woman could then bundle up and go to the church but only in a carriage with the blinds drawn. The nuns or even a priest was allowed to undo your hair but nobody else could ever see you that way or your reputation went right in the gutter.
So not wanting to ever talk to the priests I took great care not to ever get my hair tangled. I focused intently on my reflection in the mirror every day for years. That is how the scene got etched in my soul and that is why I saw it so strongly that it made me shake for ten minutes.
So you can perhaps see why I was a bit shocked the first time I dragged up these past memories and what I got were great tits and ass. And even more unbelievable and amazing was when I found out whose tits and ass they were. I realized it was a reflection of myself in a mirror and those were my great tits and ass.
My hair was longer than the woman's hair in that picture by 4-6 inches, and my eyes were set farther apart than are the young lady's.
And not to forget my breasts, they were larger, they were huge.
The best 'nickname' I heard was 'two tonne Anne'. It was a nickname given to me when I was married and we did express shipping throughout Europe. That nickname belied my otherwise slender figure and was a twisted honor based on a play-on-words which I later became pretty famous for in my writings.
London was a shipping center and when people shipped, everything went into one of several piles on the dock, before they got put on board. There were piles of hundred weights and tonne's. Maybe there was a thousand weight pile for one kind of cargo and I think there were also ten ton piles. Anything over a hundredweight was an operation in themselves to put on board. They took several men with pulleys and wenches.
There were people with less to ship than the tonnes so they would put their cargo in 100 pound bags. That the bag weighed less than 100 pounds was based on trust. They were given a break in the price of shipping since the bags could be stored in small areas and one worker could carry them on board easily. If a man wanted to stay extra time and earn more money, or if a sailor arrived before his ship set sail, he could always earn some extra money by throwing 100 pound bags over his shoulder and carrying them on board by himself. (I want to research this because the thousand weights was specific for a certain kind of cargo. Whatever that was is what we mainly shipped. I can't recall what it was though. Probably produce or livestock.).
There were very few scales and people often packed up to three hundred pounds in bags sometime to fool us and sometimes because they were ignorant of how much a hundred pounds was. When our men would try to pick these sacks up they couldn't. They would simply complain with the words 'this must weigh a tonne'. These bags often wouldn't even be weighed. They would be put in the thousand weight pile and the person got charged for a thousand weight of shipping. They were charged this exorbitant amount since it took about ten times the amount of work to get these cumbersome bags on a ship or break them up into smaller bags and then we had to provide the bags and they were very expensive, etc.
I was a very respectable married woman then. The workers had eyes but the extent of their knowledge about my breasts were that 'they must weigh a tonne each'. Hence the nickname 'Two Tonne Anne'.
A lot of people say women were not schooled and that was true except for one fifty year period and only in England. When Queen Elizabeth reigned England jumped to the 21 st century as far as women's liberation was concerned. That lasted for about 50 years and lots of girls got educated. Whatever the queen does became a fad and that still seems to happen.
Annie was the counter point or opposite of the monk that I usually incarnated as. A monk who spent lifetimes often in silence high in Tibet. Each lifetime modifies the soul, the eternal part of our being. After a few lifetimes spent in meditation my soul gets depressed, it flags, weakens and loses it's vitality. Verbose, outgoing, rowdy, creative, ambitious Two Tonne Annie of London was the perfect counter point and absolute opposite of the celibate monk I often am. Strangely it worked out that her life averaged out with about three of those quiet lives to give a perfect balance to my soul. Similarly my lifetimes as a monk gave Annie a tremendous all knowing insight and wisdom that she spared on no one in the form of the Bards plays. Without those meditative monk lives she would have lived and died an obscure, unknown peasant in the countryside and there would not be any 'Shakespeare' for you to enjoy. |
**Until Queen Elizabeth came to power. Then we were liberated in certain ways. She first promoted girls learning to read and stated the most outlandish concept and that was that women could learn to read the scripture. If you were Catholic it was heresy to read the Bible if you were not male and clergy. Suddenly not only men were allowed to read the Bible but women could too! If everyone could read the Bible it provided an insurance against Catholicism ever returning. They could not twist scripture to allow such things as murder of the Aztecs and the Incas once people could read that it was not supported in the Bible. (Of course I am talking about the old form of Catholicism.)
It was amazing to have old taboo's of hundreds of years just broken with an edict by the Queen. Overnight everything would change. Men became afraid to tell women that they were not allowed to do anything because either the Queen did the same thing or she might the next day. We are not talking about just edicts. When the queen showed the value of women being able to read it simply made sense to the men to allow their daughters to learn to. Both for practical reasons and for patriotic support of the Queen. Suddenly women got a taste of 21st century liberation.
The church of England didn't know how to deal with it. So they went along with her and it made all of Protestantism strong.
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