My name is Karma

I am a fictional character and the protagonist of the Karma Visionary Fiction Series, written by Niniane Mackenzie.

I am immersed in a reality of cause and effect—causes that generally fade into the background with little notice; effects that arrive hours, days, weeks, months, or even years later. Patterns have always emerged around me—repeated numbers, synchronicities, improbable timing, and unexpected encounters. A missed bus can create a cascading series of events: a chance encounter with a complete stranger can change what I know and, in turn, influence decisions I haven't made yet. By the time the consequences become visible, the missed bus has become a distant memory. That is the difficulty with cause and effect. We usually identify the cause in a therapist’s office long after we've endured the effect.

My life has included military service, several apartment evictions, homelessness, and prolonged periods of standing in traffic medians with cardboard signs. I've learned to panhandle with dignity and survive with nothing more than pocket change and fast-food gift cards.

My maternal DNA carries a peculiar inheritance: generations of women who observed the visible world while remaining suspicious that it wasn't telling the whole story. My hippy grandmother was eighteen when she attended the 1969 Woodstock Festival, immersed in a dense cloud of cannabis smoke. Nine months later, my mother was born. Sperm donor unknown. Twenty-seven years later, my New Age mother gave birth to me. Sperm donor also unknown. The women in my family have maintained a remarkably consistent maternal lineage while treating paternal genealogy as an optional recordkeeping exercise. By the time I absorbed their collective wisdom, it required ten plastic milk crates and a considerable amount of tent space.

The ten plastic milk crates contain my philosophical inheritance—three generations of well-worn, dog-eared, hippe-dippie, New Age books. My intriguing library includes, but is not limited to: Ram Dass, Shakti Gawain, The Kybalion Hermetic Philosophy, Huna, A Course in Miracles, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Ernest Holmes’ The Science of Mind, Napolean Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe, Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Daniken, Gregg Braden, Deepak Chopra, Jungian studies, theories, old-world folklore, mythology, astrology, tarot, herbalism, crystal healing, reincarnation, New Thought philosophy, New Age “ask-and-you-shall-receive” mumbo-jumbo, counterculture literature, and a three-ringed binder with assorted magazine articles and journal proposals concerning the structure of reality.

I view my metaphysical foundation as an asset. The books offer wildly different explanations for the same universe, which is probably why I keep schlepping them from one domestic incarnation to the next. Somewhere among the contradictions, improbable claims, ancient ideas, and occasional flashes of brilliance are questions far more interesting than any single answer.