Angels In America
I've actually known Tim and Thor for several years. We have in our little town a small community of travelers. They may roam far and wide, sometimes for weeks at a time, but they'll always return to our little train track town and find minimal shelter in the space of time between journeys.
Tim is a native son of this little town. Just like his fellow travelers he has a story, a story that could be a novel. That story finds the souls that need to hear it, become a part of it, even help write it. How is his itinerary developed? I imagine much like my own story has flowed. A channel meandering through the landscape, sometimes free flowing, sometimes experiencing violent redesign using heavy and sharp machinery. That painful and breaking process producing the most astonishing upheaval, only to yield a new stronger and more sustainable path. Better than before. If we can just get to the other side.
It takes me a while to sit with an idea these days, before I concrete it into a structure in my mind. I started doing this after studying Michael Shermer's writing on the believing brain. This litmus test gives me some hope of knowing a theory has been tested against wishful thinking. This idea that I tend to see these 'angels' like Tim at a time when the universe seems to be driving home a point in conjunction with my current state of mind and life. The universe I believe introduces ideas to us, a knowing, a feeling when life gets critical enough for it to intervene. That ever so incredible moment when it climbs right into the skin of one of us, flowing freely through our bloodstream, coursing ever so boldly to our command center, the brain. We become a traveler, we become the hands of the universe, we, with our novels of life stories, we, with our souls so unmistakably at that critical moment. I wonder sometimes how well we recognize when we become Angels In America.