“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

After the holidays Jane worked on several small acrylic paintings of flowers that friends had given us for Christmas. She wrote a few notes and tried some poetry; her handwriting continued to be unsteady; she still made many errors typing. However, she also began to occasionally manifest an upsetting new development—a slight tremor in her voice. I then realized that each time I heard that certain agitation her speech slowed down slightly. We thought the voice effects were connected to her hearing and vision difficulties, which also fluctuated to some degree. Jane was concerned and not concerned, and once again I saw in her that innocent acceptance of the reality she was creating—the one I often had such trouble understanding [as well as my own participation in creating it!]. Not that she uncomplainingly welcomed this physical challenge, but that she overlaid its arrival with a frame of mind in which she kept going as best she could. I tried not to alarm her as we talked, while mentally I speculated about whether the vocal changes could be a further sign of her withdrawal from the world. Before we held the private session for last December 1, I had admitted to her my fear that she was gradually cutting down on her communication with the world.¹¹

4. I first mentioned what was to become If We Live Again early in the Preliminary Notes for the Preface to Dreams—those leading off the private session of September 13, 1979. By the time I wrote the opening notes for Session 886 in Chapter 2, three months later, Jane had decided the book would contain “some of the poetry she has dedicated to me over the years since we met in February 1954.” Seth agreed. Rather immodestly, I present below the first verse of a love poem Jane wrote for me on November 5, 1965. It’s in Section Two, which section bears the title of If We Live Again itself. Jane often reworks her poetry, but for the book she changed only two words and added one in this verse which she wrote over 16 years ago. She was 36, and we’d been married for 11 years:

I like that entire poem, of course—but in a different way I like just as much the untitled poem Jane wrote on a different subject almost 15 years later (on August 25, 1980). She was 51. I borrowed this poem for the opening notes for Session 920, in Chapter 9 of Dreams, and urged her to give it a title and present it in If We Live Again. Jane did so on both counts, in Section Six: “Strange Liberty.” She also changed the format of the poem, but not the words of what I consider to be one of her best creative insights.