UNITED STATES, July 30, 2021 (NY Times by Sara Aridi): When we were younger, my older sister Heba kept a photo on her dresser in our bedroom that always caught my eye. She said I was the young red-haired girl in the picture, but I was born with blonde curls and had light brown hair at the time. The girl in the picture was named Sara, like me, and I would later learn that the full story of the photo was too baffling for me to understand at the time. My family is Druze, a thousand-year-old religion whose adherents mostly live in Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Jordan. Among the faith’s beliefs is that every human being is reincarnated. Your body is a shell, and your spirit can claim another life form to live on indefinitely. Many Druze say that certain people can remember details about their past lives. My sister is one of them.
I am more skeptical than Heba when it comes to spirituality, but I have never denied her experience. Because I had heard other stories about people from our hometown in Lebanon who died but “came back to life” in new bodies, it didn’t seem far-fetched that she had, too. Still, I wouldn’t discuss her past life openly — I imagined talking about it at dinner parties, only to be met with eye rolls, the same way I dismiss the conversation whenever my friends go on about their astrological signs. It wasn’t until I started living with my sister in New Jersey during the pandemic that I learned to suppress my cynicism — and embrace her beliefs.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/well/family/sisters-past-life.html#commentsContainer