When I was in elementary school, there was a large bookshelf at the end of the hallway in the house where I lived. Before there was internet or cable television, people used to look for and purchase books that were interesting, so that they would have something to read.
On my father’s side of this bookshelf were books about rough weather sailing, navigation, rope & nautical knots, pirates, and books by Herman Melville who wrote about sailing in the South Pacific and Polynesian women.
On my mother’s side of this bookshelf were books about art, particular artists, dance schools around the world, particular choreographers, and I forget what else. There was one book that I took down and read titled “Yoga, Youth, and Reincarnation”. This book was written by author Jess Stearn in 1965 and was about his own personal experiences.
I read this book “Yoga, Youth, and Reincarnation” when I was about twelve years old. It was not at all stunning or mind-blowing to me at that time, neither the way that the author revealed his experiences, nor the subject matter that he discussed. It was all very calm and matter-of-fact, everything that he described.
My parents and grandparents were Methodists. My sister and I had been enrolled in and had attended Sacred Heart Catholic School which was adjacent to the convent and Catholic Church. Not a school day went by without instruction in Catholicism or a trip to morning Mass. Most of us children did not embrace any of this, we acted out in protest like convicts or prisoners of war, and we were beat by the Nuns for it.
At about the time that I was reading this book about reincarnation, I had asked my mother, and been told by her that she was an atheist. I was kind of disappointed in her for this, why couldn’t she understand and get with the program? See, I knew there was something wrong with my mother.
In my teenage years, I began trying to read the King James version of the Bible from cover to cover on my own. The Bible was a big disappointment and let down for me, as it was difficult to understand, confusing, contradictory, easy to misinterpret, and too long for not getting to the point.
Even as a teenager, I felt that it was wrong and a tragedy that the instruction book that we had been given on who we were, what we were supposed to do, and what was going to happen to us, was so confusingly written as to not be very much help. Even then, I could see that it looked like some of its content was a mere fabrication by men. Because it went way overboard in using symbolism and metaphor, in many instances who knows what it meant or was talking about.
From when I was about 4 years old to when I was about 48 years old, I had a very strong faith in God the creator, without having to question this belief very often. For me, I didn’t have to pick the God of the Jews, the God of the Christians, the God of the Muslims, or the God of the Mormons, there was just a God.
Because there is hardly anything at all to do in North Dakota where I have been living for the past seven years, just bleak, barren, desolation with no women, I have been left alone with my own thoughts and had no other choice but to contemplate absolutely everything there is.
Some people have traveled to the mountains of Peru or Nepal to live in isolation for years to allow them to contemplate and meditate all day without any distraction, whereas you are forced to do this in North Dakota, either that or drink or become a methamphetamine addict, because there is nothing else to do.
The other thing about living in North Dakota, is that it caused me to think about how I ended up here, what had I done wrong, where did my life go so wrong? No matter how many times that I thought about it, I had to admit that it was all of my own decisions and life circumstances that caused me to be here, it wasn’t any one foolish idiotic blunder on my part that I had to take the blame for.
Once I began to retrace all of my steps, actions, and decisions in life, I realized that I had made all of these choices and decisions myself, acting on what I thought and believed at the time, dealing with my circumstances at the time, so my current situation is what I caused it to be.
Not only did I take each turn of the path that caused me to be here, maybe I am supposed to be here. I do not think that there is any other place in the World that could have forced me to stop and think for so many hours each day, every day, for years and years, because of the absence of anything else to do.
Exactly four years ago to the day, back in 2016, I wrote three blog post articles titled “Bohemians, Romanians, Gypsies, And Reincarnation In Dickinson, North Dakota”. Back then I began to reach the conclusion that maybe I was supposed to be in Dickinson, North Dakota, for some purpose.
I began to realize, sense, and feel that I had met and lived with some of these people before, though I had never been to North Dakota before, not in this lifetime.
All of the thinking and life contemplation that I had done in North Dakota, an examination of my life and what was happening in the World, it became more certain to me that a person’s existence wouldn’t make any sense if it just consisted of a birth, short life on Earth, and then death.
In this particular blog post right now, I will not get into each and every interaction with people in Dickinson that caused me to feel that I had met them before, but to give you an idea that this has been going on for at least four years, you might want to read these three blog post articles of mine:
I could have written this four years ago, but I did not want to do so at that time, I did mention the Zastoupil women in the three blog post articles listed above, I was referring to them in a few instances, but I did not come out and say then that I think that Emily Zastoupil might be my mother.
When I first came to work in Dickinson, North Dakota back in 2011, I was 41 years old. Working at the Paragon Bowling Alley diner was Emily Zastoupil who was about 19 years old at the time. Emily was kind of goofy and silly acting, absent minded. She was friendly and talked to everyone without any discrimination at all.
Emily was nice and friendly to me, which was unusual for people in Dickinson to act this way towards people who were not from Dickinson. Emily did not seem to have any inclination to start out being hateful to other people. When I talked to Emily, heard what she was talking about, saw what she did, or learned what she did, she did not seem to be greedy, malicious, ambitious, scheming, plotting, or concerned about anything, which is out of the ordinary for women.
When I returned to Dickinson in 2013, for the next couple of years I saw Emily Zastoupil from time to time under different circumstances and occasions. I saw her and spoke to her at social gatherings, in downtown Dickinson or Patterson Lake when she was walking her dog, and near her apartment building where she lived downtown.
If I didn’t hear it from her when I talked to Emily, I heard from other people or saw on Facebook the things that had happened to Emily and what she was doing. I have never, ever met a person who acted more like my mother than Emily Zastoupil. Every time that I met or saw Emily, she acted just like my mother without fail. Everything that happened to Emily and everything that she did was just like my mother.
Emily looks and acts like my mother. It is more than just a similarity, or a whimsical comparison, I actually believe that Emily might be my mother, which is why I am finally writing about it.
How reincarnation works, supposedly, is that individuals are usually reborn into the same soul groups and family groups. Again and again and again, souls are reborn and have to live and work things out each lifetime with the same souls from previous lifetimes.
Emily may or may not be shocked to learn that she might be my mother. Rather than mess things up for her, it would probably serve to make her more aware of her self, her life, her purpose, and her previous lives.
If anyone thinks that I am making this up, and you know Emily Zastoupil, would you pick Emily Zastoupil to be your mother?
I might as well come out and tell it now, I think that Kira Zastoupil might have been my wife in a previous lifetime. I am not going to explain this now, though I don’t think that she has agreed to be my wife very often.
It would not surprise me if neither Emily or Kira will admit publicly to ever having been my mother or my wife, I never said that either of them were reliable.
Dickinson58601 
Nobody was your wife in a previous life. Except your right hand. And they even left.
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Mr. Downtown,
You need to work on improving your insults. This insult was much more embarrassing for you than for me, it was so weak.
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