We looked into each other’s eyes when we met,
and then we hugged for the first time surrounded
by masked strangers in Sea-Tac Airport.
We already knew so much about each other – but it was
knowing from a distance, during the back-to-back
pandemic years. Yet somehow we knew we’d be together and
understood it’s better to be late bloomers than never bloomers.
The messages, the knowings, the feelings transmitted,
every night for four-hour conversations over mobile phone
video screens – devices made for a world ready for the beginning times,
the New Now times, all the times connecting two who like so many others
were grappling with and gaping in wonder about where we
were, within an ever-expanding moment, full of breath and visions.
We chose each other as the other one who was theirs.
In a world where life and death is always a daily occurrence,
living in a historic moment that’ll be told and retold,
then handed down, layered with truths and mistruths, through the centuries.
They’ll say, remember when the whole world became one
for an instant, and time stopped in the way a river is stopped by a damned dam.
For three moon’s passing, billions said yes to a worldwide stillness
which could be felt by all. Nearby and faraway, in the ocean of time and space.
We found out we were the people we’d been waiting for.
For a while, there was no time – no upstream or downstream.
We met on the Internet, and were willing and able to believe
in spider webs long enough to stretch to the moon, and future Ice Ages
meant to be sung, mythologized about, and lived through with clarity and
love and courage – knowing the cave dwellers and treehouse climbers of
the reinvented and rebuilt ecotopian Northwest, 700 years hence will sort through the
words and pictures recounting the long-ago world from scraps of paper found in
derelict, underground, dusty, salvaged, entwined by vines, stores of the boke, next to
windblown roadside signs with place names of food emporiums made meaningless by
time’s swift and slow passage. Made meaningful by future curious minds.
Did food ever grow on shelves, away from soil? Were foods ever not whole?
Voices and tongues and bodies alive and evolved in the Beyond Times,
often recounting with wonder our current times, our whirling wilder times
full of violence and misunderstandings, dug so deep, almost beyond belief.
Yes, and also full of healing hearts opening and loving kindness flowing.
Yet somehow, in our now, seeds were planted deep within future beating hearts
and in the earth, to grow the new beyond now world – to envision, to continue, after
the ecological collapse humans went through to end war, created at first by peaceful
pockets of whole humans, beginning with each connected heart, in the world.
A whole and complete world grew, so different from the Before Times – from those
warring, primitives times of the Early Twenty-First (as it shall become known as).