Merlin passed 24 years ago on November 18, 1989.

As a celebration of Merlin’s inordinately ennobled life, I have created a new category entitled: Dreams of Merlin. The dreams in that category centrally feature Merlin – a most magical elfin fellow.

Merlin and I met, four years after I first dreamt of him, on Friday, October 1, 1982 in New York City.

Merlin was the godson of the actor, Lorne Greene, he loved: parrots, Glenn Gould, J. S. Bach, bandannas, musicals, magic, patchouli, reading several books simultaneously; one of which he concluded each night at bedtime at which point, he would share the book’s contents. Merlin was a great raconteur, a devastatingly funny mimic which most persons who knew him did not know as he only ever engaged this aspect of his persona at bedtime, after reading, he loved cats, wore a cowl whilst smoking weed and conceptualising how to direct a new play and pacing about our home at 20 Amelia Street, Toronto – which alas you can now see on Google street view – incidentally the black wrought iron fencing in the photo was begun by the neighbour at 18 Amelia Street – a fashion designer of note who was a snob and bore who took to sending us registered letters complaining about our ‘wild’ cats using his maple tree as a scratching post. Though Merlin’s registered responses were wickedly funny and penned by Julio, the only male of our four cats, as my bullshit threshold is readily engaged, I went one better and instead of mailing off the fourth registered response from Julio – hysterical though it was – got a five-pound bag of catnip from the Menagerie Pet Store around the Corner on Parliament Street – it is still there – and proceeded to sprinkle it on said snobbish bore’s lawn over several days… as intended, our then three cats and several in the neighbourhood fast-descended on his lawn wigging out, however, sure enough, they began pooping in the garden and on the lawn… soon the sprinkler system of said snobbish bore’s lawn and garden was kept on all hours of the day to ward off this sudden descent of cats to the prized lawn… alas, the sod was eventually replaced and a silly little fence erected, as though that could ever deter cats… of course, over time, the neighbours along the block would get matching black wrought iron fencing because, well, that’s what genteel burghers will do.

Merlin died on his mother’s birthday and she, in turn, would die on the anniversary of the day we met – 22 years after his passing.

Merlin was/is a seven level mature scholar soul; and the life when we were lovers for seven years in fin-de-siècle New York City and Toronto was his sixth life at 7 level mature and our 43rd life together.  That high incidence of lives passed together was because Merlin and I were/are Task Companions; it also explains why the dreams shared herein of Merlin and me are possessed of such heightened telepathy, love, communion and lucid realism.

Of course, our disparate races meant that some persons in Merlin’s life thought it unacceptable that Merlin should be with me; indeed, one such person – nothing more than a lost village idiot and a clown to boot – as Merlin privately referred to her – made it her campaign to evict me from Merlin’s life…  indeed, those who know nothing of love can act no better and they certainly know nothing of dreams; for dreams are the fruits that a great love affair bears, which is readily validated by the dreams of Merlin and me herein, long after his passing.

Of course, as disparate as Merlin and I may have seemed we were more bonded than was readily discernible.  Apart from the essence bond of being task companions – à la Michael Teachings – Merlin and I were also bonded in a way which he had hinted at.  It was a year prior to his passing and I had been to my father, Isadore’s, for dinner.  On my return home that evening, I brought a copy of a famous family portrait of my mother, Harella, and her family.  Merlin was quite taken by my maternal grandfather’s bushy browed, moustachioed handsomeness and declared, “Are you sure about that Portuguese blood?  He looks just like a darker version of Yitzhak Shamir.”

Long years after Merlin’s passing and just after Isadore’s, in 2008, I would learn that the Portuguese blood to which my family is connected is by way of both Harella’s paternal grandparents having been of Sephardi heritage, along with her maternal grandmother.  Nevis, on which I was born, grew one staple, cotton, during colonial times.  That cotton was prized and the Sephardi were a small colony from not Portugal but Brazil.  Harella’s paternal grandmother was a Levine though it was mispronounced over time as Lavigne, after all, St. Kitts next-door was both French and English with some French families still present, and the tiny Sephardi community were referred to as the Portuguese.  Harella’s paternal grandfather, Claude Sr., was of mixed blood his paternal grandfather having been Sephardi who parented children with a freed slave of African descent… one peculiarity of Nevis – which Canadians are wont to mispronounce as nay-vis or névis it is more appropriately knee-vis – is that it is the only Island in the Caribbean where slaves were allowed to own land and will it to their descendants thus making them freed slaves – odd peculiarity that – and it was a condition of the ‘Portuguese’ electing to relocate there and trade the prized Nevis cotton to both London and New York City.  So, Merlin’s suspicions and intuition, as ever, proved spot-on.

Here’s to life.  Here’s to lovers.  Here’s to Merlin, a lover like no other: magical, charming, witty, sexy as all hell with the largest most hypnotically beautiful eyes, dream shaman, dream companion, über-sapiosexual…

**Since this post was created on the eve of Merlin’s passing’s anniversary in 2013, I have learnt that Merlin’s reincarnated.  He was reborn female in a Northern European city on December 2, 2006.  Merlin also is living the first lifetime as a first level old soul.

Clearly, Merlin was able to grow from 7th level mature to 1st level old thanks to the spiritual work we undertook as task companions after his passing through the conduit of the dreamtime.  All of this is, of course, readily validated by many of the dreams shared in this blog of Merlin and me after his passing.

2/12/2006 = 2.3.2 = 7.  Great numerology for the reincarnated Merlin and that twoness – like my current incarnation assures her a life of being creatively focussed and a definite intellectual.  Marvellous.

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Photo: Merlin in the 1970s.

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