The Hope and the Burden

Please scroll down and read the previous posts – Why You’re Here and Something Happened That Changed Everything – to get the story from the beginning.

Mike, Ray, John and Graeme did become aware of all this early on and supported Justin. It gave them a direction for their music that jibed with the mood of the time. Mike’s mellotron provided the haunting background needed. And because Justin had successfully predicted events they accepted his premonitions and revelations. A new, much needed, direction for their music emerged.

The hippie movement gave Justin the cover he needed to write songs about heaven, eternity and rebirth. Soon the other Moodies – all so talented – were writing in a similar vein and the band became known for their cosmic sound. The timing couldn’t have been better.

Their audience also sensed their knowledge of things beyond the norm, and though they couldn’t identify what those insights were, many looked upon the Moodies as sages.

Justin’s contributions to the first seven albums were fueled by the need to reach the young woman he had seen so clearly in his mind. He’d even heard her voice – “The sound I have heard in your hello – oh darling, you’re almost part of me. Oh darling, you’re all I’ll ever see.” (The Actor.) And “Listen we’re trying to find you. Listen we think we can see you.” (Dawning is the Day) Later (Nearer to You) “I see you so clear in my mind.”

The most extraordinary aspect of this is that a flood of love was coming back to Justin from this young girl. It wasn’t the adulation of the teenage girls in the audience. It was a deep, mature love – an unconditional love. It was a love he couldn’t escape – one which he didn’t want to ever lose.

Because of this, he assumed that she knew what he knew and would find her way home to him. The mixed emotions brought by this were difficult to maneuver. Every night wondering if she was in the audience. The angst of that is apparent in Leave This Man Alone. He expressed the horror and confusion of their death in Gypsy (of a Strange and Distant Time). But mostly he was hopeful that she would come back to him and this wistfulness permeates his early songs – Candle of Life (with John Lodge), Watching and Waiting, Dawning is the Day and so many others.

But as the years went by and she failed to appear, disappointment crept into his music.

Meanwhile he was a man, with all the earthly needs for love, sex, companionship and family. He couldn’t wait for someone as elusive as a vision. He married Marie on the 19th of December 1970. She has given him a wonderful life full of love and the home base so needed by someone on the road so much of the time.

He loves her still as she does him. But he couldn’t tell her about his former wife and their long history over the centuries. That secret remained buried in his music. He kept his writing largely separate from his personal life – It’s like a secret room that no one else can enter, he has said – and as a rock star he was supposed to sing about love so he was safe, and so was she.

It must have been so trying – praying each night on stage that his former love, and one who still filled his heart, would come forward – while feeling the need to protect his wife from any such intrusion into their lives.

And when Doremi was born, he had his daughter to protect as well.

It would have been a relief to just forget the revelation, forget the one who lived across the sea. But he couldn’t do that. It’s impossible, for better or worse, to ignore a directive that seems to have come from heaven. Besides, the love had been returned. Surely she wouldn’t forsake so sacred a love.

It was clear to him that he had been given a mission – to prove that love survives death, that we survive death and are born again and again. Each life a new chance to better ourselves and the world.

The world needs to know this. It’s his duty to tell it. “It seems like the world has been waiting to show us a secret it’s kept for so long.” (Crazy Lovers), and “…the seed that the garden requires.” (When You Wake Up). If two people who have never met in this life share the same information about prior lives together, that would be proof. How could he walk away from that responsibility?