Ramona and Misha

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.