“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane hadn’t shown me any of these poems as she wrote them over a period of some four and a half years. She didn’t keep them from me deliberately. In one way they’re like casual jottings that she left half finished and unseen in her journals, until I found them when I began searching for fresh material for the frontmatter of this Volume 2 of Dreams. In another way they contain deep and private insights, ranging from her free, marveling childhood yearning and intuitive knowing up to her present physically impaired condition—her arthritic-like “symptoms,” as we call them—and beyond to the final state of her work after her death. I found each poem to be a revelation, stirring sad and questioning wells of emotion. I can’t help but mourn as I write this piece; I tell myself that had I seen the poems as Jane produced them I might have learned a little more about her each time; I might have been able to help her more than I had over the years. At the same time, it’s as though she’s just finished the poems, so fresh and consistent do they seem to me. And as I reread them I understand once again that my wife is still teaching me about her courage, and about the ineffable, unending mystery of the universe that each one of us is creating moment by moment, separately and all together.

(In this poem, which she wrote just a year ago, Jane deals not only with her transformation of her work into its inevitable literary, physical form, but restates her belief that her individualized consciousness will live after her physical death. Yet, just as it had been in the first poem in this series, her death was still on her mind some four and a half years later. I see now that given the lifetime challenges she’s chosen, such thoughts will continue to play a prominent role in the reality Jane is creating for herself:)

I’ve always transferred my life to letters,
and one day it will reside
exclusively in written nouns and vowels,
clean paragraphs
distilled from mysterious life’s days.
Even before death’s event
I plan my mind’s resting place
as if there is a second life
in thought’s products that defies
the brain’s shorter span, and rises
sans blood, flesh, hand or eye,
self-contained, truly alive at last;
like some mental balloon
set on a safe course finally
through unexplored skies
when the hand that holds it
lets it go.