Miracles and Devastations (originally written in November 2012)

It is not yet 3pm, in the real world, but is fully dark outside, as two-hundred strangers share with me another world, improbable and bizarre.
     We two-hundred (give or take) are 33000 feet up in the sky, inside a gigantic metal machine, moving forward at tremendous speed.
   I love flying, because each time I do it I know I am experiencing a miracle. How can it be possible for this massive craft, weighing thousands of tons, carrying perhaps another 14 tons of humanity, to be way up here, above St. Petersberg, without muscle or feather or beady eye, and for such a miracle to take place many times a day the whole world over?
     To my scientifically-challenged mind it is simply magic, just like the sleek white tablet across whose glass my fingers dance, recording contemplations which later it will effortlessly disperse across that same world for more strangers to share, in an instant.
      The dancing fingers themselves are a miracle, animated as they are by brain signals, sinew and bone, and my own unique life-force, pulsing through them, inspiring, connecting, fulfilling a potential that goes far beyond any one of these and all of them.

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I think of my mother, 18 months ago, as she lay slowly dying on her side after the massive stroke that destroyed half her brain. A vibrant woman all her 81years, the life-force shone through a body no longer able to dance to its tune, and I marveled that such a vibrant being could be felled, in an instant, no longer able to share her thoughts through words or graze a beloved cheek with fingers, now rendered sausage-like and cold. My heart contracts at the thought and also swells, remembering her receptivity to my fingers on her beloved cheek, remembering the miracle of loving her out of the world as she loved me into it. A greater gift, and honour, than I can say. The communication, heart to heart and soul to soul, transcending the words she could no longer speak and I no longer needed to. As the life-force left her body, and I cradled her and blessed her passage, I knew her soul, and my own, as separate from our flesh as fire from the grate, and for days afterward I experienced my loved ones, strangers on the street, all of humanity, as two distinct ingredients, interacting in a dance of exquisite intimacy but entirely separate; the vessel and the soul that animates it.

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Since witnessing my mother's sudden, unforeseen paralysis and trajectory to the next stage, I marvel and give thanks for every day that I am able to open my eyes, snuggle into my husband's embrace, climb out of bed and choose to swim, or walk, to call a friend or take a shower, to eat my breakfast-fruit, sun-ripened and rain-fed, to tell my daughter I love her, that she's wonderful. Each of these and every instinct, thought and muscle-movement that contributes to it is a miracle. Each of us experiences and performs a thousand miracles a day and more, and yet we do not notice, and often focus on a negative world-view that can only blinker us from the magic that surrounds and pulses through us.
     My mother's death was traumatic to watch, and beautiful. Its gifts of gratitude, awareness, healing and connection are unfolding in me daily, still. It made me someone I could not have been without the intensity of its pain; the fear and grief that danced exquisitely with transcendent love and spiritual intimacy, as separate yet intertwined as body and soul.
     The capacity of the human spirit to overcome adversity and evolve as a result is what propels me forward as a passenger of this improbable machine and in my quest to learn of others' evolution through a level of adversity I can barely fathom.
     Sixty-seven years, three months, five days and almost sixteen hours ago, another miraculous machine, smaller than the one in which I sit and write, containing fewer people, flew above Hiroshima and dropped its cargo, innocuously-named "Little Boy". The lives of those below changed, and, for many, ended, in an instant, and the world has never been the same again.

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In five days' time I will arrive in Hiroshima and meet some of Little Boy's survivors, 67 years on. I am humbled at the thought. What were the miracles that brought the Hibakusha (survivors) through those times and to a time and place in which they have united, with other hearts and souls that want a better world, to make this come about?
     Perhaps their words, their stories, will provide an answer to my questions, or perhaps I will be lucky enough to experience another shared transcendence and their collective life force will communicate with mine.
     I, have, packed safely in my hand-luggage, a box of images of hope created by friends and strangers seeking and offering communication that transcends the norm. It is an honour to be the messenger delivering these gifts of empathy, to the Hibakusha and, beyond this trip, to whatever hearts they are destined to inspire. Each one is invested with The Miraculous, animated as they are by brain signals, sinew and bone, but more, each artist's unique life-force, pulsing through them, inspiring, connecting, fulfilling a potential that goes far beyond any one of these, and all of them.