I saw this last week during the Perseid meteor shower.
Hoi, his friend Vivian, and I were walking around our block, near the parking lot of the huge ritzy hotel that mysteriously appeared sometime last year. I looked up behind me for a moment and felt like time stopped when this white orb appeared in the sky. It seemed to move much more slowly than in that picture. I know it sounds corny, but if there is magic in this world, I believe that was some evidence of it. Breathing felt different after that.
Mom and I laid in her bed last night and chatted until the sun rose. We talked about everything, serious and silly things, and I took the opportunity to ask her lots of questions about my dad. My dad and I don't really talk ever, so here was my chance. She said she didn't understand why I had to know so much about his childhood and I didn't know how to explain it to her because it felt so self-evident to me. But I think I know why. As she told me all these little stories about him, and a tiny bit about the grandfather I never knew, images began revealing themselves in my mind, like soft impressions onto a memory that runs deeper than memory.
She also told me in greater detail the story of how they met and became together. He fell for her when she came to his salon in Hong Kong. When she told him how she was incredibly picky about her hair and had gone to dozens of salons, he gave her the best haircut he could manage in hopes that she would come back. She did. He called her night after night and she humored the earnest hair dresser who gave her free cuts. He told her how much he loved learning English at night and that he was going to the US someday. After persisting for six months, he finally won her over.
I love imagining it in my head, but it's more than a sweet story. All the phone calls, the little walks, these unhurried innocent emotions... they were part of a world that was slowly creating me. I don't know for sure if I will have children someday, but if I do, everything I am doing now is already a part of them, is moving towards them. I am already creating their stories, and as I think about that, I am seized with the conviction that it must be a good one. I don't think it just has to do with having children. Every moment is pregnant with the future. If I can reside deeply in each moment, track the rush of movement with my eyes and see it for what it is, then life appears to slow down just a bit, for awhile.
Even though I am uncertain about so much, I know that the future is unfurling itself without hesitation. I can trust in that energy of creation and birth. I know that it's something that is not very far away from me at all.