Here comes a story from my past, when I lived in Tallinn, Estonia, and worked as a journalist in a Estonia government newsletter Rahva Hääl– People’s Voice. This was blessed time of hope for the profound changes… The Party Twentieth’s Congress, 1956 that denounced Stalin’s cult happened some years ago. Gulags’ inmates started to return home freed from charges invented by Stalin’s regime. Adzhubey, Khruschev daughter Rada’s husband, was chief editor of Moscow popular newspaper Izvestiya and future seemed to bring justice to all! So, it seemed to us, the young journalists at the time. 

I saw only one difficult and teasing cloud on my horizon, the upcoming deadline for submitting a new article to my newspaper. Tomorrow I had my deadline at 8 am. I was ordered to write a story about women at the Kiviõli, an enterprise of refining oil of the shale coal mined in the North Estonia. My hand refused to advance that story, but my young will made me to continue. The story about women in their gray overalls and red hard hats was slowly sliding toward its “happy ending” ….  

When, about 5 am, I got up from my chair, I met an unpleasant surprise. A threatening red line was sliding quietly down as a reddish snake along the armchair’s leg toward the carpet. Today I would consider this an important warning sign and call for an ambulance. But 50 years ago, the deadline of submission of an article to the board of the newspaper where I worked seemed to me more important than the obvious – the beginning of the miscarriage… So, I learned that I was pregnant. Was it a cherry on my destiny pie or a curse? I was not in love with him. He was not in love with me, he forced on me a casual sex at a party, and I had no strength to say “no.”

The Kiviõli story was crawling slowly to its conclusion. Who were the women who worked there? My writing did not clarify it. Some pieces of bloody meat were falling out of me on the floor, wrecking the carpet. My body refused to accept that pregnancy. My consciousness did not accept it either.  

He was not a bad man, he was all-around nice person, professional, with his apartment, a rare thing in these days in the Soviet Union, where people still lived in communal apartments, one toilet room for many families…. But he did not love me, and I did not love him, we were only distant acquaintances… He and family?  No, no and no!

I was rewriting the ending of the story, and last time reading my cold, nasty text about the women I knew nothing about and do not want to know anything about them, why they worked in a place where they had to wear red  and heavy and metal hats… … I flied out of my apartment and caught a taxi. At 7: 30 am the story was on the table of people who had already gathered to work together in the name of salary, position, and expectation of some changes in future.  They asked me, if I was OK, as I looked for them kind a too pale and weary.

Instead of getting to a Tallinn’s café – to sip some black morning coffee in company of fresh newspaper… I changed my route, and rushed to the nearest taxi stand to get as soon as possible to the proper hospital to stop bleeding…

In other words, I was bleeding and walking! And then something happened, something unusual and not expected. When I was walking so bravely toward taxi parking spot, my consciousness took off lifting my hidden, invisible part – my  soul, my awareness, whatever it was — into a milky cloud of pure love! It was high up there – out of this world, that I, a Soviet journalist, knew nothing about! My body continued stepping toward a waiting taxi on the street.

I was a beginner, offered a position in the “People’s Voice” after a random article written for hem about what? I did not remember. However, the bleeding was not slowing down. My legs continued stepping along the street, but my consciousness found itself high up in the subtle air of love and forgiveness… If someone happened to be there, live there, they breathed in instead of oxygen pure love. The bliss of pure love and happiness was the material that the space there was made of…

I felt being forgiven for all my trespassing… I was pardoned and my world was transforming! My consciousness was overcoming the dualism of good versus bad, young versus old… In one short instance, my enemies, anger, ego, judgmental attitude were melting away, out of my way to … taxi. My hand grabbed the handle of the taxi door, and soon I was in the hospital.     

Regrettably, I was not allowed to stay in this blissful state of mind too long.  Soon I was “on the table’’ and a gynecologist was asking me pronounce some random words time to time. She explained, “… then I knew that you are alive, you lost too much blood!” Yes, I survived, I was meant to stay on earth and learn more from its hard lessons of survival and love of life that can sometimes turn its threatening face to you, and ask for all attention you have.  

Nevertheless, the brief meeting with subtle empire of love up there, never abandoned me entirely. How many times it had reminded me about The Great Oneness that had helped me resolve many harsh and seemingly none resolvable problems of my life.

The next day, I was supposed to leave the hospital, and I was invited to step by at the doctor’s office. Instead of greeting, and asking me to utter some random words to confirm being still alive, the same nice doctor shouted, being angry as hell, “What did you do to yourself! Have you forgotten that self-abortions are forbidden by law. I will report you to police and you will be out of “People’s Voice” in an instant, and sentenced do time in prison!”

But the milky world was still in me fresh and acute. I kept some pause and answered quietly, “Do what you have to do! I told you the truth…what did happen to me!”

She continued throwing angry words into my face. But touch of white paradise was still protecting me. And I thanked her for saving my life and encouraged her to do her duty, recommend me to serve time in prison, if necessary! My mind remained calm and peaceful.

She continued looking straight in my eyes. Suddenly her hands grabbed the report from the table and tore it apart sending the pieces of paper into the “round file” under her desk. “Go to your “People’s Voice,” am I the judge of your words and deeds?”

In my old age, an esotericist familiar with this kind of finer matters commented that usually people find themselves in high realm of milky cloud of love and forgiveness shortly before they near transition to the next world, before facing death itself. So, I faced death, but it was not my hour to leave this planet yet.