Pastel on paper by N.Wait 1996

Strange how you can meet someone and a spark ignites, yet seems to burn out quickly. The song becomes a memory, till one day  40 years later, you google him…

…and find that the music hasn’t stopped after all. It has only shifted to an underground stream. You were listening all along, with your inner ear…

Yesterday, walking on a Brooklyn street, I was suddenly impelled to take out my phone and google this man I knew briefly long ago, only to learn we had been playing in parallel streams all this time. For while he played the Green Man at the annual festival in an ancient English village, I was in Brooklyn writing a story about a girl who turned into a tree. I was drawing trees as the masculine/feminine joined as one. The would-be lovers transformed into tree bark, in the woods.

Or on opposite sides of the street, leaning towards one another.

The Green Man by Pete OMalley

I also learned that he died year before last. But energy doesn’t die, it merely changes form. And if perchance we meet someone, it doesn’t have to last more than a few weeks or months in order for the angels to strike up the band. Just because the lovers part, doesn’t mean the music stops. It plays on, in some other stream. Every meeting is significant. And sometimes the ones that burnish the heart are the most meaningful of all.

Dedicated to the one who once drew me, and I drew back…