It was limited mobility that kept survivors alive.
But North and South America were fabulously wealthy in art, gold, rivers and land – things easily stolen from the natives.
In exchange, Europeans gave away smallpox, bubonic plague, measles, the common cold and lots more viruses.
Now of course this wasn’t done on purpose although it was done in pursuit of prosperity. As we all know, wealth is relative. Right now, for instance, an unemployed service worker might be thinking she was wealthy two weeks ago when she had an income.
Which brings us to a strange thing that happened 30 years ago and last weekend.
One Sunday, my friend, Janis, gave me a book. This is odd because she didn’t read much. I thanked her and put the book in a bookcase. It has been there since 1990.
Janis died a couple of months ago, and last weekend I remembered that book. I found and opened it thinking I still wouldn’t like it because it’s called The Book of James.
Why would she give me a book with such a drab title?
Turns out it was a book of automatic writing, which is when an entity who’s not on earth sends messages through someone they don’t know, but who is susceptible or capable of transcribing messages from beyond. A medium. The person who writes the words does it without consciously writing.
The Book of James actually is an explanation of the hereafter by philosopher William James, who died in 1910. He found a reporter in the 1970s who was able to receive his thoughts and put them in a book.
The first chapter is about how when we die, we don’t know we’re dead. Our body disappears, but our spirit, the real us, is still alive.
William James writes that the newly-deceased are still in the head space of being human. They remain at home or at work, doing what they always have. Suddenly they realize that they keep talking to people but nobody’s listening. Because no one can hear them.
Spirits, who are sometimes relatives of the recently departed or sometimes strangers who simply like them, start teaching those who died last week or yesterday about the spirit world. When we die, we might want wine or a cigarette or lasagna, and it’s provided. It takes us a while to realize spirits don’t need food, drink, air or blue jeans.
There is no such thing as time in the spirit world because there’s no need for it. So, there’s no pressure.
Yet spirits want to improve their eternal lives as much as we want to make sense of this one. They get really good at understanding what the universe keeps trying to explain.
Those who are new at dying have to learn the spirit world just as we had to start out as babies to learn the human world.
People who die suddenly, like soldiers or car wreck victims or even virus hosts, are treated with the utmost care and understanding because they just never saw it coming and they’re rattled. But not for long.
I still don’t know why Janis gave me this book, but I find it fascinating. And I’m only on Chapter III.
My favorite part of the story is that on the flyleaf was the signature of the original owner, Donovan Pedelty, a British journalist and humorist who died in Eureka Springs in 1989.
I keep thinking Janis knows all this stuff now while I sit here and speculate about viruses and Indians, wondering what any of this life is about.
Thus, the book. Thank you, Donovan.