Sometimes
the stars align. There is always a moment in time when some stars align. Isn’t
there?
What do we
know of science as the description of the Laws of our Nature, except as
explanations of a logic and design we know to be there, within us and expressed
everywhere?
Ramona had
the name Misha in her mind from the earliest time she could remember. Now she
is 28. This time the man’s name was shown in a television news report, and
connected, though not clearly, with a stream of terrible deeds – bombings,
rebellions, a hatred and bitterness which belied a true patriotism based in
love. Love is hard-won, she knew.
Her father
was a newspaper man. He had started his own paper, with a passion for the Press
and the news of the people, for the people, when he was in his thirties. Not
much older than she is now. Does she
feel such passion? Her mother, dark-eyed and quiet, was not so expressive in
the streets, but her intensity burned within her. As she grew older, she walked
faster, holding her purse or her shopping bag closer and more tightly, thinking
and observing with an intensity that was nearly audible.
I do not
know these people. Do you? Yet I feel I do. I awake with a dream, and Ramona is
telling me her story. I see her sad mother, her passionate father, her
architectural dreams as they unveil themselves in modeled beauty beyond the
rubble and rainbows of her memories.
This morning
Ramona told me, shortly before I awoke, how she had seen fleeting pictures of
Misha in her mind, and how the television stories confused her. Did you see
them? She asked me, intensely, as her mother might, if she spoke at all. I
nodded. What must they mean? She asked. We are told to raise ourselves in the
way we should go. Somehow he has lost his way. To be lost in the city, in the
world in which you are born, is to find yourself strapped to a missile, a
bombshell, a fragment of a life which you cannot fully believe is all there is
to you. Yet you continue, until love finds you – until you let love’s seed,
which begins with each mother, begin to breed, to breathe, and sprout new green
growth with sunlight’s chemical coronation into life, as if beginning anew but
forgetting only what has created destruction. The stars align, this time.
A motorcycle
roars into the scene, out of my dream. There is infinite optimism in the way
the crowd cheers, even as the roar reminds some of the lions from the sudden
jungle. Others relate to memories of starbursts, Fourth of July’s festivities
which most often bring on happy excellent independence pride and a whole legacy
of heroes. Gunfire pops and bursts remind some minds of assault, hurt, others
of flowered paintings which they prefer: oversized poppies, and mountain ranges
covered with raging blooms overtaking each other in an avalanche of color.
Take my
hand, I say, and she smiles.
We awake
together, one of us material and physical, the other purely dream, and I smell
breakfast as she disappears into her own world of dream, the passion of poppies
and the press and a hope to soften her mother’s sadness as she seeks the truth
of Misha’s rebellion. Love lives in the neural tunnels, she says, turning down
a side street she remembers from when she was a child. I have no fear of
searching. Those days are over. Don’t you read the papers? We must have the
courage to love, above all.
