Auri'An Lay

My friend, EK, has a very unusual mind.  Even after talking with her, almost daily, for eleven years, she still never fails to say something which drops my jaw to the floor.  She lives on a rural property and although it is not a farm, there are plenty of animals who also call that property ‘home.’

This morning she was looking after the animals as we were talking, specifically feeding the chickens and the ducks, and she asked this question challenging me to write a blog about it (she knows that off-the-wall comments are often triggers for my stories)! 

Why would a soul choose to return to earth as a chicken

So – here we are….

I was sitting in the bar drinking a glorious single malt scotch, when it suddenly struck me that I had absolutely no idea how I’d got there.  I looked around at the panelled room, the low beamed ceiling, the cosy fire burning in the huge inglenook, and above it on the mantelshelf was a human skull.  Hanging above the skull was blackened broomstick.

Ah! I thought.  I’m in the General Burgoyne.

For a moment I was satisfied with that answer, and I took another sip of this rather smooth scotch, and I nodded a greeting to the skull which, according to local historic rumour was someone’s witchy grandmother or that it belongs to the ghost of a young girl who wanders through the pub from time to time.  All kinds of funny things tend to happen in a place that was built in 1631.

Something tickled at the back of my brain…  I haven’t been in that pub in close on half a century.  I live in Australia and the General Burgoyne is a pub in a small village on the edge of the English Lake District.  It was my watering-hole when I was young.  They did great meat and potato pies with mushy peas and raw onion.  But…. How did I get here?   I know that long-haul flights can be boring, but surely, if I’d flown from Australia to England I’d remember it. 

The General Burgoyne is a very small pub.  We used to joke that if sixteen people left, the place would be empty.  I looked around again.  Obviously those sixteen people had left – I was the only person sitting at the bar.  I closed my eyes, savouring the scotch and when I opened them a few seconds later there was a man sitting next to me.  A whole empty room – except for the skull – and he had chosen the chair next to mine.  I was a bit miffed.  I was still trying to remember how I’d got here and his presence, so close to me, was intrusive. 

“You didn’t fly here,” he suddenly said with a strong Lakeland accent.

“Beg your pardon,” I replied.  “Did you say something?”

“Yes.  I said you didn’t fly here.” 

That was definitely weird.  I took another drink, just to give me time to decide how to respond.  Or even if to respond.  I decided to move to a table away from the bar, and the man.

He followed me.

“I’m here to help your transition,” he said, pulling an old-fashioned curved pipe out of his pocket.  He patted his other pockets and soon found his leather tobacco pouch.  He made a show of filling and lighting his pipe, and eventually he took in a great draw, exhaling the smoke right into my face.

I almost puked.  I just about coughed my lungs out and once I’d got my breath back under my control, I turned to him and said, “You know smoking those things will kill you?”  I wasn’t ready for the gales of laughter which came next.

I’d had enough.  I stood up, drank the rest of my scotch and went past the bar to the front door, intending to leave and, although I had no idea how I’d got here, I was hoping that I would recognise a car or a building or something else outside.    

I opened the front door of the pub and discovered that there was nothing outside.  And by ‘nothing’ I mean exactly that.  Nothing.  No Thing.  No road, no car park, no trees, no wind, no sunshine, no rain…nothing. 

That was unexpected, and quite a bit freaky.  This had to be a dream.  I turned and looked back into the pub.  The old man was sitting exactly where I’d left him, surrounded by a halo of smoke. 

“You won’t find nowt’ out there,” he said. 

“Why not?” I asked, more than a little bit disconcerted.

“Because you’re in transition.”

I was more confused than ever, and returned to the table he was sitting at, taking a seat on the side away from where most of the smoke still hung.

“Transition from what?”

“From your last life,” he said, matter-of-factly, “and to your next life.”

I decided to play along.  He was clearly off his rocker, but this was a dream.  It had to be a dream.   A lucid dream, and now that I was aware that I am dreaming, maybe I could take control of it.

“OK,” I said.  “I’ll play along.  If I’m transitioning from my last life, does that mean I’m dead?”

“Yep,” he replied, matter of factly and I knew I really was dealing with an absolute nutcase.  I am obviously not dead – I’m talking.  I’m sitting in a pub drinking scotch, and just to be clear I have zero knowledge or experience of recreational drugs – if you don’t count the scotch.  I had no idea what he was smoking in that pipe, but it must have been the good stuff. 

“So, what does this transition between one life and another actually involve?”  I asked.  “Do you sort of quiz me to make sure I fulfilled contracts or something?” 

“Nope.  Nothing like that.  We gather all the information as you go along.  All you need to do right now is tell me if you feel as if you achieved the targets you agreed to for this life.  Did you experience everything you wanted to experience?” 

“How do I know if I’ve experienced everything I wanted to experience?” I was getting a bit miffed at this point, and for me that generally means I start to become sarcastic.  “I mean… is there a list somewhere, that someone’s been ticking off for me?  Experience number 421 – live in Australia.  Experience 427, get scared by a huntsman spider?” 

The old man looked at me with one raised eyebrow.  He wasn’t impressed.  “Well,” he said.  “You made the list, not me.  I don’t know what you put on it.  My job is more about getting you to write your next list – and to make sure that anything you haven’t already done properly gets carried over so you get another chance at it.”

I sighed.  This was getting a bit silly.  I decided to play along for a while and see if I could wind this all up so that I could wake up in my own bed in Australia. 

“OK,” I said.  “So how do I go about this?  Do I just write it down in a book somewhere, chisel it onto stones that’ll be found in a thousand years and confuse everyone?  Seriously, I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, but if it keeps you happy, let’s do it.  Let’s have a bit of fun deciding what I want to do in my next life.”

Suddenly the old man was all business.  The pipe went away, and a notebook appeared on the table as if by magic.  I looked at him; I looked at the notebook on the table, “Might need a pen too,” I said.

“Ah yes.  I always forget the pen.”  A black ball-point pen appeared on top of the notebook.

“If you turn to the first page,” he said, “you’ll see a list of things that you wanted to experience in this last lifetime.  You need to put numbers next to them.  If you think you’ve experienced something on the list enough and you don’t need to do it again, you give it a number 1.    If the experience doesn’t feel as if you’ve completed it, and you might need to consider doing it again, you give it a number 2.  If you totally messed up an experience and you definitely need to re-do it.  That has a number 3. And if you went absolutely overboard and ended up causing suffering for someone, well that has a 5.”

I opened the notebook and looked at the first entry.  I can’t tell you what the entries are, but the questions really made me stop and think over my life.  I had to think about the times I’d been hurt by other people.  How I had hurt other people without meaning to and how, sometimes I had been deliberately cruel.  My dreams and ambitions were in there; regrets and sorrows, joys and achievements; loves….  So many loves.  I hadn’t realised.

I looked up at the old man.  He didn’t look quite so disreputable now.  I turned back to the book and steadily worked my way through several pages until I eventually reached a page where I discovered there was no more list.  I’d reached the end.  I looked up at the old man, at his worn clothes, his smelly pipe and he looked back with so much compassion in his eyes that I almost cried. 

“Now,” he said in a soft voice, “everything you have allocated as a 5 you will experience in your next lifetime, but you will experience it from the point of view of being the receiver and not the cause.  That can be tough, but it gives you an opportunity to learn, to understand how it feels.  Other experiences may also be repeated but at a level that is appropriate to your current understanding.  Some experiences will be considered completed.  Each lifetime offers you an opportunity for growth.  It’s up to you to decide how you will use this opportunity.   Your next step is to decide what form you are going to take for your next incarnation.”

I leant back in my chair and closed my eyes, considering his words.  Dream or not, that list had made me review my life honestly.  There were things where I know I had said or done something – mostly not within malice, but simply by not considering how an action or even just a word could be received by someone else.  I decided to think about that later.  Right now, I was tired and starting to get a bit cranky.  I just wanted this dream to be done so I could wake up and get back to normal.

“OK.  You are right.  That was tough.  What happens now?  How do we end this dream?  I want to go home.”

“This bit’s actually easy,” he replied.  “You know what needs to be worked on, all you need to do now is decide what form you want to take to do that.” 

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Do you want to be male or female?  Do you want to be human or would a life as something other than human help you understand better?”

“I don’t have go back as a human?” I asked, a bit startled.

“No, you can choose to be any one or any thing.  No limits.  You know your strengths and you know your weaknesses.  You are aware of what you need be next time”

And this is where my tired, sarcastic brain and my smart-arse mouth has a whole lot to answer for.  I opened the notebook and wrote in large letters on the next blank page:

I AM

And, on the next page I wrote

“CHICKEN”

What happened next? Did he reincarnate as a chicken? Or was he using the word to say he was too scared to make a choice. Or do you think he meant something else entirely? You get to take this story forward – but I hope you enjoyed it.

What do you think???

Thank you for reading my work. 

I hope it gave you as much joy to read as it did for me in writing it.

Note: The General Burgoyne pub does actually exist. So does the inglenook fireplace, the skull and the broomstick, but the story is totally fabricated from my weird mind!

This story is completely written by me – a human – without the input of AI.

I have, however, used AI to assist with the pictures

I am no artist and these really help bring the story to life.

Please leave a comment.