Dreams unwind, love’s a state of mind

I figure a quote from Stevie Nicks’s “Rhiannon” is as good a title as any for a post about mysterious things. You’re going to hear more from Stevie in this post, which is a response to questions from David and Mark.

In fact, an exchange with Mark yesterday made me think of the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. I told him that it’s one of my favorite places to study and think about. That’s because some of the faces that the various artists (mostly Filippino Lippi) painted in the frescoes are familiar to me.

Disclaimer: I don’t worry about whether things like “past lives” are plausible or not, and I don’t debate them. Whether we’re reborn into many lifetimes, or carry locked in our genetic code the memories of our forebears, or share memories because we’re all part of the same energy, or whether all space and time happens at once, giving us the ability to glance into any time or place if we hone that ability–I don’t need to solve those big questions. I’ve developed my own personal theories which I’m not inclined to share because, you never know, they may end up in a novel some day. Or my autobiography. Or maybe I’ll start a cult based on them. No point giving this stuff away for free, right?

I’ve allowed people I trust to guide me through exploring my…visions. (Stevie again: “Now here I go again, I see the crystal visions…” Maybe I should keep my visions to myself?) In my case, my guides called these explorations “past life regressions.” I’ve been taken to fifteenth century Italy, eighteenth century England, nineteenth century England, and twentieth century Germany (which I’m told is impossible, but I think if you’re breaking the rules of logic, you may as well toss all rules out the window). If these are past lives, I’ve never been famous, unlike all those people who think they were Alexander the Great or Cleopatra. But at least in my Italian lifetime, I was acquainted with and even apprenticed to great artists.

Which takes me back to the Brancacci Chapel. Mark asked if I could go to Florence, would I? In my mind, I’ve already been. I have seen, smelled, and even tasted Florence. I suppose I could travel there and confirm or refute my inner knowledge of Florence, but I’m not sure contemporary Florence can do that about 1400s Florence. Florence is connected to one of the most profound relationships I’ve had in this lifetime. If there’s anything to these memories, visions, whatever you call them, I made a promise five hundred years ago that I kept in 1992. That’s all I want to say about that.

I know this is all a roundabout way to discuss the reason for our instant reactions to people we meet. We could be like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple: recognizing truths about people based on characteristics of those we’ve known before in our own personal village of St. Mary Mead. Or maybe we knew them in a past life. Or maybe they look like someone we’ve dreamed. Or maybe we glanced past a wrinkle in time and saw that we’d be meeting them soon.

I don’t know, and I don’t need to know. Something resonates when I meet certain people. It happened when I met Tim, Jim, and Timmy online. There were others I met in the same chat room (including Rhonda, who lives right here in Houston and became a good friend, along with Lindsey, to Tom and Tim as well as to me); and Tay, who lives in L.A., with whom I found out I shared mutual acquaintances; and Ron, who lives in Oklahoma and turned out actually to be related to me via Alabama great- and great-great-grandfathers).

You can’t force these things. You can’t make them happen. They just do. I don’t know why the four of us–Tim, Jim, Timmy, and me–connected and held on to the connection beyond all the others the four of us made in that chat room. Ultimately, we took as our theme another Stevie creation, “The Chain.” In case you don’t know your Fleetwood Mac history, this has the distinction of being the only Rumours-era song that all five band members wrote during a time when their relationships were fractured. Along with its lyrics, that group input made it the ideal theme song for a collaborative writing team, though I’m not sure any of us, unless maybe Tim, knew all the history of the song when we first began quoting it at each other.

In every one of my past-life regressions, there was a common theme: creativity. Powerful connections that defy the limits of time and logic have for me always been based on the shared passion for art or music, and in 1990s AOL time, writing. It was an accident (if there are accidents?) that we began writing together, the result of an offhand comment of Tim’s. It was something we began doing for fun. We had no intention of writing a novel. We didn’t plan to be published. We just wanted to play online and engage each other in something fun and creative. We never anticipated that it would turn into several novels and full-time writing careers for two of us.

It’s not always fun, and it’s never effortless. We don’t always say and do the right thing. There have been disappointments and angry nights and seething silences. And there are plenty of critics who will tell you that what we write together is no Brancacci Chapel. (I wish I could find an appropriate version for them of Timmy’s wonderful brush-off: “Fuck you. I’m deleting you from my iPod.”)

I don’t know where it comes from. It doesn’t matter to me. It’s ours and it is fun and maddening and mysterious. It helps satisfy our hunger to create and connect and use our voices. It forces us to try things we might not try on our own. We have the comfort of one another when it doesn’t bring us great fame or fortune and sometimes even brings us truly hurtful things that could damage us if we let them.

We believe in what we’re doing and respect it and each other and the people who pay for it and like it. What more could you ask from your work and your passion?

I know that doesn’t really answer questions about the technical side of how we do what we do. It’s not even specific about how we met and came to know each other. I find that as time goes on, I’m less inclined to explain all that because it just is what it is. (Sorry for the cliche, Rhonda!)

I know that however it came to be, I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. I absolutely love and trust Tim, Jim, and Timmy with every part of my life, interior and exterior, and I’m pretty sure they feel the same way about me and one another. Even when Timmy’s not writing with us, like now, we’ll always have Daniel and Company linking us together in the chain.

Photo taken from Paul’s collection.