The strangely familiar stranger

To a Stranger by Walt Whitman

Passing stranger! You do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me, as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me, or a girl with me, I ate with you, and slept with you - Your body has become not yours only, nor left my body mine only...
I am not to speak of you -  I am to think of you when I sit alone, or wake at night alone,
I am to wait -  I do not doubt I am to meet you again, I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

Source: imagekind.com

I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you. 

- Those words stayed with me last night long after I had finished a book in which this poem was quoted. What if the closest relationships that we forge in our lives are not with actual strangers but with people who were our soul companions in past lives? Have you ever experienced a feeling of instant rapport with a complete stranger and wondered how is it that you get along so well, when you barely know each other? 

Stranger still, when I was just 11 years old, I listened to a recording of a Bengali poem written by Rabindranath Tagore, which left an indelible impression on me; I was never the same afterwards. It spoke to me in a mystical language of its own, its words luring me like a snake-charmer's tune. By a curious coincidence, this poem been just been posted by Wild About the Written Word. It is a poem which, even to this day, I can recite by heart, in its original Bengali version.  I wondered, even at that young age, whose face would emerge from the mists of memory if I gazed into the fathomless past, as the poet says? Would it be some stranger's face looking at me with strangely familiar eyes? Have I lost someone in some lifetime who I'm eternally searching for? And I wonder still...

Source: astroblog.com

Years afterwards, I read a haunting book called Finding Laura by Kay Hooper. The main character, Laura Sutherland, is an artist with a curious hobby - she collects antique mirrors. It is slowly revealed that she stares into every mirror that she buys, hoping to see someone's reflection behind her shoulder. She knows that once she finds the mirror she is looking for, she will know whose reflection it is that she is desperately searching for. Laura eventually buys her last mirror from the Kilbourne family and looks behind her shoulder in the mirror to see her soulmate, David, and suddenly all her previous lifetimes with David flash by in the mirror. Sounds strange, doesn't it? Is it possible to unconsciously seek a person, sight unknown, who we believe exists somewhere? Is it merely a figment of imagination of writers and poets or do reincarnated soulmates truly exist? Some interesting thoughts on the possibility of soulmates can be read here. 

Source: etsy.com

One may choose to believe or not to believe in soulmates; but no one can doubt that the concept is truly intriguing. Do our souls somehow leave imprints on some other souls, by which we recognize them as our own, in birth after birth? Are soul vibrations continuously being generated beyond our five senses, which even at this moment are sending signals to someone we have yet to meet? Does every experience that we undergo in this life take us one step closer to the one we are ultimately meant to be with forever? Is it, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti says, like a "Sudden Light" that makes everything clear in an instant, revealing the soulmate unexpectedly:

I have been here before,

But when or how I cannot tell:

I know the grass beyond the door,

The sweet keen smell,

The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before,—

How long ago I may not know:

But just when at that swallow's soar

Your neck turn'd so,

Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.

Waiting for that veil to fall someday...