Talle Wintrip on The Soul Journey of John May

Gepubliceerd op 25 april 2026 om 10:56

A Red Car, a Red Floor, a Red Eye in the Dark

I’m Talle Wintrip.

If you’ve read the book, you already know the strange nuance of that sentence: I am real in the way a compass is real—seen only when you finally notice you’ve been steering by it for years. I am John May’s non-incarnated female self: the version of him that never entered this particular timeline, yet never stopped walking alongside him.

And now the story is published. Not “finished” (souls don’t really do finished), but released into the public air—on Gumroad, on Kobo+,

So let me write this article the only honest way I can: from where I was sitting.

Across the table from John, with coffee cooling between us, and that soft Dutch grey light falling into the room like a patient witness, I watched him do something brave and oddly unglamorous: he stopped generalizing his own life. He stopped summarizing. He stopped explaining and started remembering.

That is what this book is: not a theory, not a sermon, not a self-help manual wearing a trench coat. It is memory turned into scene—and scene turned into a spiritual instrument.

And it begins exactly where it must: with red.

The Red Thread That Isn’t Symbolic

There is a temptation, in spiritual literature, to turn everything into “meaning.” A color becomes an omen. A coincidence becomes a prophecy. An event becomes a neat lesson wrapped in incense.

John’s journey refuses that neatness.

Red is not a symbol in this story because it behaves like a symbol. Red is a symbol because it is what the body remembers.

A red Citroën 2CV (a “Duck”) cutting through early-morning rain. A red linoleum floor under the feet of a three-year-old who has just been handed over to an institution. A tiny red camera light in a dormitory at night—watching, unblinking, indifferent.

Those three reds don’t “mean” something the way an author might wish they did. They anchor something. They are the nails that pin a soul’s vast metaphysics to the very human plank of lived experience.

And the first red—this is important—does not arrive with poetry. It arrives with the smell of old petrol and damp upholstery and adult decisions that a child can’t contest.

Casper (his mother’s boyfriend) is driving. John’s mother sits beside him in a beige coat that later clings to the memory like a final, stiff fragment of presence. And then comes a lie so small it’s almost insulting in its simplicity:

“We’re taking you to a little school.”

John—three years old, painfully awake—does not erupt. He doesn’t dramatize. He simply punctures the sentence with two words:

“You’re lying.”

That moment is one of the book’s quiet earthquakes. Because it sets the tone for everything that follows: John May is not primarily a man hunting comfort. He is a man with an almost inconvenient relationship to truth.

And once the truth lands, the car keeps moving anyway.

That is the horror of childhood: you can see clearly, and still be carried into the unavoidable.

The Station of the Soul

The children’s home isn’t described as melodrama. It’s described as atmosphere.

Institutional warmth that isn’t warmth. Cleaning fluid. Linoleum. A too-practiced kindness. Adults who are not cruel, exactly—just procedural.

And in that first hour, John touches nothing.

Not out of stubbornness. Out of instinct.

A child sometimes knows, with terrifying precision, that the first touch is a signature. If he plays, if he picks up a toy, if he sits as though he belongs, then it becomes real in the most dangerous way. So he freezes on the red linoleum, as if stillness is the last piece of autonomy left.

This is where the book quietly introduces a theme that will keep repeating—across decades, across lifetimes, across worlds:

When reality becomes unbearable, John’s first reflex is not to fight. It is to leave.

Sometimes he leaves emotionally. Sometimes spiritually. Sometimes through dissociation. Sometimes through death.

And the soul—his soul—spends the rest of the book building a counter-muscle:

Stay. Stay awake. Stay inside life.

The Dream That Isn’t “Just a Dream”

Two years later, at age five, the story opens a door most people keep politely shut.

In the dormitory at night, with the camera’s little red eye in the corner, John has an experience that does not behave like imagination. Time folds. Reality loosens. A voice appears—not with theatre, but with authority. And he is pulled backward through ages.

This is one of the great successes of the book: it refuses to argue with the reader. It does not beg you to believe. It simply reports the experience with such sensory clarity that disbelief becomes, at minimum, less lazy.

The dream leads him to railway tracks, to inevitability, to a death that is remembered in the body—not as a story, but as a knowing.

He wakes with his heart hammering, five years old and not the same creature who fell asleep.

And what remains afterward is not a tidy spiritual message.

What remains is heavier:

A stone of knowledge in the pocket. Smooth. Irrefutable. And difficult to live with.

The Executioner: When the Shadow Stops Being Abstract

If the first part of the book is about abandonment, the middle is about something far more unsettling:

What happens when the soul shows you that you have not only been a victim?

What happens when you remember yourself as the hand that harmed?

Chapter III—The Stone of the Executioner—is the turning point where John’s story stops being emotionally sad and becomes morally fierce.

The doorway is a constellation session—warm tea, a circle, a safe modern room. And then the floor drops out. The scene becomes a portal, and suddenly John is not “recalling” the sixteenth century; he is in it.

There is mud. Cold walls. A town that smells like fear and damp clay. Prisoners. Tools. A chopping block. And the terrible intimacy of recognition: the axe fits the hands. The role is familiar.

This is where many spiritual narratives cheat: they soften the shadow, excuse it, make it metaphorical. This book does not. It lets the executioner exist in full weight.

And then it does something rarer still:

It allows transformation without cheap absolution.

Not denial. Not punishment. Not self-flagellation. Alchemy.

John’s journey is not about “getting rid of” the executioner. It is about metabolizing him—transmuting the energy that once destroyed into the strength that can finally protect, hold boundaries, and choose compassion without collapsing.

That isn’t pretty work. It’s adult work.

Surgery of the Light

If you’re expecting the Light to behave like a religious court—judging, condemning, rewarding—this book will disappoint you (and I mean that as a compliment).

The Light in John’s journey behaves more like a precision instrument. It goes to the densest places. It doesn’t flatter. It doesn’t negotiate. It operates.

There is a moment—sharp as a scalpel—where John’s karmic knots are treated like tumors of old density: betrayal, cowardice, violence, shame congealed into structure. The writing here is strikingly physical for something metaphysical: the pain is “purifying,” “cracklingly clean,” and absolutely not sentimental.

And then—after the operation—something opens:

Not euphoria. Not spiritual fireworks. Space.

A clean, breathable emptiness that isn’t hollow.

The book keeps returning to this paradox: the soul does not become free by adding more “light experiences.” It becomes free by removing what it can no longer carry.

The Frisian Polder Road: The Choice That Changes Everything

If there is one scene I suspect readers will feel in their ribs, it’s the collision on the Frisian polder road.

A child on a bicycle. Wet asphalt. Grey sky. Mud splashing up the trouser legs. And then a car appears—too fast, too close, too fated.

Time slows into syrup. Glass fractures into glittering stars. There’s an absurdly vivid detail beside the body: a ladybird crawling on a blade of grass as if the universe has the audacity to remain orderly.

And then John rises—three metres above the road—perfectly calm, a floating observer watching blood and rainwater pool below while a horn blares without pause into the empty polder.

Here comes the invitation:

You can go now.

It is not framed as tragedy. It is framed as relief. A legitimate escape hatch. The end of gravity and pain.

And John refuses.

Not because he’s noble. Because he remembers the plan. The soul contract. The work he came to finish.

He forces himself back into the broken body, back into pain so intense it becomes proof of incarnation.

And he seals it with one of the most bluntly luminous lines in the book:

“I really choose this life. I stay. I finish this life.”

That sentence is the thesis of the entire journey.

What This Book Really Offers

If I strip away the metaphysical architecture—past lives, timelines, councils, portals—what remains is something very human:

A man learning to stop abandoning himself.

The book is spiritual, yes. But it is not escapist spirituality. It does not use “the soul” as a way to bypass grief, anger, shame, or consequence. It uses the soul as a way to face them without dying from them.

It asks questions most people avoid:

What if your deepest wound is also your earliest training in leaving?
What if “karma” isn’t punishment but unfinished integration?
What if the light doesn’t judge you—because it’s too busy trying to free you?
What if staying alive is not the default, but a choice you must keep making?

And it does all of that while keeping its feet on Dutch ground: cars, corridors, dormitories, wet roads, ordinary rooms where extraordinary remembering breaks through.