Part Twelve

Ever Reaching Past the Horizon

Joan Lansberry

June 27, 1997

A song can call to mind a panorama of memories associated with it. I had that experience this morning. While getting ready for work, I listened to a CD of "new age" songs called pure moods. One of the songs on this compilation disk is Enya's Orinoco Flow. The chorus Sail Away, Sail Away, Sail Away... made me remember a young woman I worked with several years ago. Kayla's long brown hair, slender figure and generally smiling face appeared in my mind's eye. Though only eighteen, she possessed remarkable poise and confidence, and was always friendly and cheerful. One day I was working with her, Orinoco Flow came on the radio. She told of how a friend had 'ruined' this song for her. The friend told her she had first thought the lyrics were Save the Whales, Save the Whales, Save the Whales.... Kayla said that ever since, she couldn't listen to the song without hearing Save the Whales..... Now, every time I hear the song, I remember Kayla and "save the whales!" I wonder where she is now and how she's doing.  

June 28, 1997

I was listening to pure moods again this morning, and the lyrics of the first song, Return To Innocence by Enigma, spoke to me:

Just believe in Destiny,
Don't care what people say,
Just follow your own way,
Don't give up and lose the chance,
Return to innocence.

MC Curly

~ ~~ ~~~ ~~

Return to Innocence (The Birthright)

Innocence ... pure ... clean ... light of ease ...
Return...
Innocence ... free of stain ...
Let go of undeserved pain,
Let go of boundaries.
Set free ...
So LOVE YOURSELF:
Reclaim your smiling power!
Reclaim your dancing light!
Reclaim your singing truth!
You know you have that voice.
Hear it,
Hear it deep within.
You know no one can take this journey for you.
Return ...
... to Innocence.

JAL, 6-28-97

June 29, 1997

We got a letter from one of our dear friends today. Kat's been enjoying reading the on-line journal. She feels "there with us". Her comment made me happy, for that is exactly the effect I hope it has. I want the readers to inhabit my head and look out the windows of my eyes. I'm grateful for this opportunity to able to share my thoughts and my life.

I hope to write an article called "The Joy of Journaling". It really is a joyous labor, something that more people should do. It is a time of intimacy with yourself, as you sift through the day's thoughts and events to pick what seems 'just right' for the entry. It is a precious record of memories. I know when I'm an old lady, rereading them will be a treasure. Those with children leave the record for their great great grandchildren to find. I often wonder about my distant relatives. Just why did my Mother's grandparents leave Bohemia and come to the United States? There was a potato famine in Ireland that motivated a lot of immigrants in search of more prosperous times. But what motivated them? What did they hope to find here? Did they find what they'd hoped they'd find? If one of them had thought to keep a journal, we'd know.

July 1, 1997

While researching Czech Republic coins, I came across Four Winds Travel Service's web site full of information and photos of that country. Since they are no longer under communist rule, the country has become a tourist attraction. The architecture is distinctive, with Art Nouveau influences. Forty years of communism left it virtually unchanged, and all that was necessary was for them to renovate their treasures, which they have begun. I was surprised to see beautiful castles and spas, set incharming countrysides. The old town square and a fanciful clock tower made me think magical things could happen there. Certainly my ancestors did not pick an ugly place in which to be born. Why did they leave? I want to learn the history of this place.

later in the day...

Curiosity drove me deep into the tall shelves of Borders Books, seeking what bits and pieces of the Bohemian puzzle I might find. There were no concise histories, only a couple of books by their current president, and a book with the intriguing title "Commies, Crooks, Gypsies, Spooks and Poets: Thirteen Books of Prague in the Year of the Great Lice Epidemic" by Jan Novak. It promised a good look at what the Czech Republic is today. It might give a clue to the past. I bought it.

I have not done much book reading since meeting Laura. After The Mists of Avalon and The Celestine Prophecy, this will be my third book in ten years. An author can write more books in ten years! Obviously a book has to be unusually good to keep me interested. The first chapter "Book of the Unknown" compels the reader forward. He powerfully shows his feelings about his family's upcoming sojourn in Prague. A bookkeeper had questioned him about the sanity of taking his kids "into a war zone", confusing Czechoslovakia with Yugoslavia. A lesser writer could have just said, "America is a war zone, too." Novak SHOWS how America is a war zone. In three pages of potent writing, he makes you LIVE his fears as a parent. Never once does he simply say he is frightened, he CAUSES you to feel the fear that he has.

What an inspiring lesson for me as a hopeful writer! I have been too easy with words. I slap some words together in a few minutes and think I've captured my topic. How such laziness could ever move a reader? No, my words need to be muscular, agile, as they swiftly and gracefully lead the reader where I want her to go. I've got real work ahead of me.

July 4, 1997

. Today we celebrate the 221^th year since the thirteen colonies signed the Declaration of Independence from British rule. This courageous act was the beginning of the United States. Something must have been successful with this experiment in revolution, for immigrants have come to this country in mass droves over those two hundred plus years. Something inspired all these people to take a risk and leave all that was familiar to come to a new land. The new land somehow signified hope to all these brave adventurers.

I think back to my ancestors and what inspired my Mother's grandparents to leave Bohemia. Perhaps late at night, when the couple was alone in the bedroom, quiet now, to share events of the day and thoughts kept between them, is when the kernel of the idea began. The husband says to his wife, "Things might be better there in America. I could find real opportunity for my skills. The air might be cleaner there." The quick industrialization of Bohemia might have been TOO quick. Or perhaps it was the Prussian Armies intrusions; they occupied Plzen for two months in 1866. There was SOME reason things looked rosier here. The wife was probably terrified. For all the bright tales of the new world, she'd no doubt heard a few scary rumors. And what she hadn't heard, she could invent. Every "What if?" danced like butterflies in her stomach. But she had never seen her husband this animated before. His eyes glowed with excitement , his heart pounded with thrill of all these hopes. And so she would not deny her husband these dreams. She would swallow that huge lump of fear. They would take their chances in a new home land!

I don't know if America gave them all they'd hoped. One thing is true: They stayed!

Our country has been blessed with a stability for over two hundred years.

(from the Fourwinds travel site)

An 80-year-old man told the National Geographic writer: "Look, I was born in Austro-Hungary. I grew up in Czechoslovakia, suffered from Germans, spent 40 years in a colony of Russia -- without ever leaving Prague! Now we're Czechs again, like we've been for a thousand years."

What must the stress of all those governmental upheavals be like? My cushioned imagination can conjure only the foggiest of images. We Americans may complain profusely about the shortcomings of our President, and those in the House and Senate, but we never doubt that things will pretty much go on as they always have. We never worry about the bombs of war coming to our relatively peaceful shores. We never fear that there are spies watching our every move, ever suspiciously looking for anti-government threats. Things are not perfect here, but the inhabitants of so many down-trodden, poverty-stricken lands have turned their eyes this way as if it were Paradise.

Jan Novak, on returning from his family's one year sojourn in Prague had these observations:

Descending toward O'Hare Airport, our plane banked around the Loop - Chicago was no Vapor and Dream, it was millions of tons of concrete and thousands of square miles of glass glinting in the bright afternoon sun, a bar graph of human ambition rising out of a hazy plain.

The Tough Vertical City of Hard Edges had a scale that made people look like ants and cars look like matchboxes, and yet I had missed it, missed the different colors of its people; missed its sea of a lake and its shoreline, the beaches, the sand dunes, the ice floes melting in its harbors; missed the Barbecue Whiskey Genital Heat of its summer nights; missed its blues and soul beats; missed the curt, punchy rhythms of its English. I'd missed the Inching - With - Blasting - Sirens Bustle and the Kick-Off Energy of the place, the grab-bag images and harsh music of it, the sheer Shut - Up - And - Show - Me - Bullshit - Walks Balls - Out Vigor of it. And I knew now that once you had tuned your ambition to the pitch of this place, you couldn't sing your aria anywhere else: I was cursed with this scale for good, and now even to fail in Chicago was always going to seem more honorable than to succeed in Prague.

July 5, 1997

Humankind's curiosity is ever reaching past the horizon, ever reaching out further and further. We have placed our feet on the moon, seeking to know its mysteries. We would know the feel of foot on other planets if we could. But fortunately we have been able to send unmanned spacecraft to the great Beyond. Mars, 309 million-miles away, has always been a special lure. However the last successful venture to the "The Red Planet" was the U.S. Viking mission back in 1976.

But now, twenty one years later, we rejoice again. The Pathfinder lander, a 3-foot-tall pyramid with three triangular sides and a triangular base, landed safely in its protective air-bag pillow on the rock-strewn planet yesterday. The air bags retracted, and three side "petals" folded down to reveal the investigative equipment. A 23-pound, six-wheeled robotic mini-rover and a camera (designed by scientists at the U of A in Tucson) that, after landing, rose to the man's viewing height of five foot six will be our eyes, feet and hands upon this planet. The camera can rotate 360 degrees and gives us its full-color pictures by piecing together 120 separate smaller picture units. These and other scientific equipment will study the geology and elemental composition of the various Martian rocks. This particular mission, however, is mostly to test how all the new devices work. For it is only the beginning in a decade-long program which will attempt to answer questions concerning Mars early evolution and whether it could have at one time supported life. Two probes will be sent to the planet every twenty-six months, and samples from the planet will be brought back to earth.

That camera is being the eyes of the billions of inhabitants on this blue-green marble planet here, at our ordained spot in space. We gaze at the night sky, full of awe and wonder. It was those celestial stars that brought me the sense of the Mystery that holds all those sparkling diamonds suspended in that forever - reaching - on - and - on heaven. Those mysterious objects, so many millions of miles away, may in time, become less mysterious. But they will never lose the Magic. Oh, they can never lose the Magic.