From Joined: Musing After the Death of Mother

By Leah Napolin

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Twenty-First Day of May.

 

On the road to the Old Time Fiddlers and Bluegrass Festival in Union Grove, Iredell County, North Carolina.  I'm driving with Barbara, and we are heading west to Harrisburg, then south, down the length of the Shenandoah Valley past fresh-ploughed acreage and fields of black-eyed Susans and crimson poppies blazing all along the Interstate. A long ride on a lovely day.

 

Barbara and I spell each other at the wheel, two hours at a stretch, and sometimes while I'm driving or more often when I'm resting in the passenger seat, I see out of the corner of my eye an old friend I haven't seen in a long time.  I'll call him the Runner because that’s what he does, runs alongside the car, keeping pace with us as we cruise, hurdling obstacles at the side of the road with ease.  And never tiring.

 

As a child, the Runner was always there during trips, especially train trips.  Looking out the train window it seemed as if his long, incredibly smooth strides

were eating up the miles as the countryside sped by at ninety miles an hour.  I thought of it as a kind of private fantasy until I read an article years later about a phenomenon identical to this, and realized that I wasn't the only one to experience it.  But where does the explanation lie? In science? Religion? Metaphysics?

 

One theory I might subscribe to is that this parallel being who accompanies us on our journeys is really some archetypal figment of the collective unconscious (thank you, Carl Jung); or, possibly, that the image is rooted in physiology, generated by an electro-chemical reaction resulting from the effect of speed and light on the cerebral cortex (with thanks to you, too, Albert Einstein).  But what I really want to know is, who is the Runner?  An angel, perhaps?  Or is it my Ka, in a dimension only faintly glimpsed?  

 

Because, while I experience this presence outside the window of the automobile as a being quite separate and distinct from me, there seems to be an invisible filament joining us so that when I accelerate, he accelerates; when I slow down, he does, too.  

 

Joined.  Recognize that you are feeling joined.  Don't struggle against it.  Surrender to it. The sweetness of it.  For it goes well beyond what I'm capable of doing.  It involves the obliteration of distance, the conquest of time, the transcendence of the limitations of the human body.  

 

Just don't ask me to explain it.