He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors.He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts.He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.

He had been reborn into the knowledge of death; and the inescapability of change, of things-never-the-same, of no-way-back, made him afraid. When you lose the past you're naked in front of contemptuous Azraeel, the death-angel. Hold on if you can, he told himself. Cling to yesterdays. Leave your nail-marks in the grey slope as you slide.

Our mouths and bodies speak for us in a new language as the trees shake loose a rain of petals that stick to our slickness like skins we will wear forever. And just like that, I am changed.

Perhaps the various burnings of the Alexandria Library were necessary, like those Australian Forest Fires without which the new seeds cannot burst their shells and make a young, healthy forest.

You're different. You're more perfect. Time is three things for most people, but for you, for us, just one. A singularity. One moment. This moment. Like you're the center of the clock, the axis on which the hands turn. Time moves about you but never moves you. It has lost its ability to affect you. What is it they say? That time is theft? But not for you. Close your eyes and you can start all over again. Conjure up that necessary emotion, fresh as roses.

And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over.

She died--this was the way she died;And when her breath was done,Took up her simple wardrobeAnd started for the sun.Her little figure at the gateThe angels must have spied,Since I could never find herUpon the mortal side.

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

Sometimes you have to kind of die inside in order to rise from your own ashes and believe in yourself and love yourself to become a new person.

Those who eat what is rightfully theirs, will incarnate as humans. Those who take what is not theirs by right, will incarnate as animals. Those who give away to others, what is rightfully their own, will incarnate as celestial beings. Those who hurt others and take away from them what is not theirs by right; will take birth in hell.

Redemption in Christ Jesus is the grace rebirth.

Rebirth is born of God.

Rebirth is neither born of blood nor flesh or human origin. But born of God.

If we born into the world, we must seek rebirth in the world.

Repentance leads to rebirth.

Sanctification is rebirth of spirit of soul by the power of the Holy Spirit,