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?

Something Happened That Changed Everything

Please see previous post – Why You’re Here -to ensure continuity.

Justin was born in the house next door to his grandparents’ home on Dean Street, Swindon, Wiltshire, on October 14th, 1946. The row of closely packed houses bordered the railway line of the Great Western Railroad. His early life was spent there and in Berkshire before the family moved back to Swindon.

His parents were teachers, and enlightened people by Justin’s account. Being raised in that environment would be crucial to dealing with what was to come.

Justin spent hours listening to his grandfather’s gramophone records, and he was entranced by the Anglican hymns he heard in church, fueling his love of music. But it soon became evident that he had been born with talent – God given some might say. He learned to play the ukulele and then the guitar, and was performing in professional musical theatre in his early teens. There was no doubt he was destined for a career in music.

And what a blessing that was, given the nature of the quest that would propel his life.

But life for Justin was progressing along normal lines, filled with girlfriends and gigs until his late teens, when something happened that shook him to the core. It charged his life with meaning and purpose, and, at the time, promised glory.

He had always been a sensitive person given to rare insights, but what he experienced in those moments spoke right to his soul. In an interview with Sammy Sultan in 2013 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGlij906ZsY) at 43:56 when Sammy asks why the opening track of Spirits of the Western Sky is called In Your Blue Eyes, Justin replied somewhat cautiously: “Yes. There’s things that happened to me in my teenage years and early twenties and people that happened to me that made a huge impression on me and……it’s just about……someone that……uh……that I hope is still there and sometimes thinks of me the way I do them.”

The bravery and resolve that took was visible on Justin’s face. So was the relief in saying it, though he knew the ramifications could threaten to topple his life and hurt the ones he holds most dear. The lifelong struggle between conflicting loyalties and responsibilities could be wrestled no longer.

What he had seen so long ago was the death of himself and his wife in his previous life. They were on honeymoon, after a long, close relationship. I will tell you more about that horrifying experience later, but he relived it in those moments.

It was perhaps then that Justin saw his wife – reborn as he had been – living a new life. He knew she was far, far away and very young. In fact she had been born equidistant from the place where they’d died though in the opposite direction, with a vast ocean between them. She was somewhere in the western sky.

Her face had changed, as his had, but the signature energy of her soul was unmistakable. He could see her, hear her. And as more and more knowledge came to him he realized that they had loved each other through many lifetimes – each with its own trials and separations.

This was not an ordinary love. Not a love born of physical attraction, convenience or mutual dependency. This was the love of the soul.

When trying to explain the emotion captured in Nights in White Satin, Justin has often said that he was at the end of one big love affair and the beginning of another. And this was taken at face value. In fact he had learned that love continues into death and continues to grow and mature there, ready to face the challenges of a new life. But that is not conventional thought in the west. “Some try to tell me thoughts they cannot defend.”

Out of that initial awe, shock, hope and despair came one of the most beautiful songs ever written. Anyone who hears it knows it comes from a deep, beautiful agony. Nights in White Satin stands as an anthem to that impossible love.

But who to confide in? Who would believe him?

And what to do? How could he find this young girl again? She had changed – so had he. Her whereabouts were vague, elusive.

He knew he had the perfect vehicle – music. He would write songs to her. He would work hard and become famous so that she would hear them. She would know the past just as he did.

And then she would come home to him.

Why You’re Here

Loyal fans of the Moody Blues and in particular Justin Hayward – those of you who have joined me here – have always known that there is more to the man than a beautiful voice and abundant musical talent. You’ve always known that there is something deeper – a mystery carefully hidden in plain sight – which has tortured him over the years. You have sensed the depth and beauty of his soul.

His is a story of devotion and fortitude – of overcoming pain, of bearing humiliation, of holding fast to his belief. He waits to be divested of such a responsibility, but he carries on because he knows what it will mean to the world.

The time to share this is now, so I will no longer be the “only other person to know.”