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I've slept in the sands of the Egyptian desert, where the sandaled feet of priests and pharaohs once fell, whom now rest in the halls of the great pyramids. I've slept in the icy embrace of the northern lands once ruled by Viking jarls and Saxon chieftains. I've slept in the soils of the American South and the sands of the West, stained with the blood of man's conquest against man. I've slept in the shelter of jungles, and the shelf of the sea. Before tombs, before coffins, before shrouds, the earliest of mortal ancestors buried their dead in the raw earth. I suppose one could say I'm getting back to the roots of it all, reviving the most ancient tradition of all: The burial, the death rite, the turn from above to below. Death was the first thing mortals ever had to confront, and, in the usual mortal manner, they made habits about it.
Traditions and habits are not that far removed from each other. They are taken up, often without realization, for the purpose of satisfying some conscious or unconscious urge, and repeated until they weave themselves into one's psyche. The only difference is, people agree to share traditions, and so, they become the collective rhythm.
Mortals - and even vampires, as I've come to discover - long for the rhythm, more so as we age. It's written into our genes, from the birth of the first cells in the hot-spring pools of early life. All life is woven and wrapped into that rhythm, despite even the greatest of efforts to flee from it. It is greater than our greatest, older than our most ancient, and I am closest to it when I wrap myself in Gaia's mottled flesh.
It is quite curious that the same soil we use to bury the dead, we use to bury seeds, but from that burial came life. Life, growth, progress, and the birth of empires. We sowed and we reaped, and so freed ourselves from the short, brutal uncertainty of a life of hunting and and gathering that was often swallowed up by the bleak winter.
But even then, we couldn't break free of the rhythm. We planted in the spring, harvested in the fall, rose with the sun and slept with the night. For vampires, there is little difference, even as we shed the temporality of mortal life - we rise in the night and slumber by day.
Our lengthier lives even let us see the slower rhythms we couldn't see with mortal eyes. Empires rise and fall, mortal lives begin and end. Everything is up and down, in and out, ebbing and flowing, and at the right distance and scale, one can see the way the wave compresses and rarefies.
I've begun several lives myself; I was a mother once. Nothing so reminds one of the presence of time and the rhythm of life than waiting, day by day, for nine months to pass as the child in your womb grows, ever larger, ever heavier, ever more active as you and they become prepared for the inevitable beginning of a new existence. It is there in the counting of the days of pain and weakness and the sleeplessness by night, the careful measure of steps and meals so as not to disturb the child's growth, and the slow loss of your independence as you become confined to bed. It is there in the certainty that you will suffer to give the child life, and in the uncertainty of whether the child's first breath will be their last, or yours.
Only the one who has carried a child has truly carried such weight. I have carried seven of them.