quote....and my thoughts

"People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels."
- Charles Fort

This quote couldn't have come into my life at a more perfect time. Two things happened yesterday, one after the other, that -- like so many marvels -- can only be unraveled by the individual experiencing them. Alison and I were walking to meet Don for lunch; the day was crisp and blue and beautiful; we passed a group of young children holding hands and dancing in circles and singing Ring-Around-the-Rosie. They reached the "...Ashes, ashes, we all fall down" part -- and they plopped to the ground -- at the exact moment we passed them. Besides the Rising Phoenix imagery this captures (also appropriate for this time in my life), this struck me because yesterday morning I'd just finished a draft of a story I'd been working on for a long time. There is a very similar Ring-Around-the-Rosie part in it, and how fitting that the morning I take that breath of relief and hit print and get a copy ready for T to read is the first time in YEARS (like, 20) that I've actually heard children sing that song. The second event occurred while Don and Alison were still in Laughing Planet ordering their food and I waited for them outside at one of the tables, soaking up the sun and the delicious breeze. I was just sitting there, pondering how a certain phase had ended with B picking up the last of his things and returning the last of mine, and all of a sudden this little red paper heart blew up right next to my foot. It was cute and perfectly shaped and strung on a frizzy string, like it was part of a kindergartener's present to his mom. I picked it up and tucked it in my backpack, gently....Then, at home, when I opened the bag of my things, I just knew somehow that B had tucked something in the Six Feet Under DVD boxset. I opened it, and there was a postcard inside of a veined, sad woman whose physical heart pumped in her transparent chest while she held in her hand -- yes -- a cracked-in-half heart dangling on a string. At first I was struck in awe by the events of the day, and then -- even more miraculously -- I noted that the postcard heart was broken while my little kindergartener's heart was whole, healed, pure, alive.