Back at Twin Arrows, Cern went to his room and gathered up his things. Dema went with him. When they were alone she gave him a very private kiss.

"We could all spend a night here," he said.

"We really should. But we all want to get home."

"Okay. Anyway, my night in the desert wasn't so bad. I really am good for the first leg."

"You got better acquainted with Gaia."

"I did indeed. The desert is a special place. None of the city noise."

"Better than the forest?"

"Nothing is better than the forest."

Cern saw Lisa in the lobby and introduced her to Dema. He told her he was going back to Chicago and she gave him a goodbye hug. He asked her to say goodbye to the band for him. He could hear them playing, and knew they were in the middle of a set.

On the road, Cern checked the mirror and could tell that Juan and his girls were all in shaman dreamland together. He and Dema did much the same in the front seat, fully sharing the experiences of the days they were apart. The hours were long, but nobody seemed to mind.

Epilogue

As Cern drove through the night in the mountains of Colorado, the rugged forested mountains that were his first love, he looked at Dema beside him and in a midnight mood thought how like the spirit of the mountains she was, how bold and relentless, yet kind and yielding, her Lamia nature could be.

She slept, and he felt that in her sleep was the sleep of Gaia, a timeless presence, fearless and uncontained. He slipped into his own spirit dream, the shaman link to Gaia that he shared with Dema, deepened by their recent experience. He saw as if from outside the way their relationship had evolved, continued to evolve, enveloping them both in the spirit realm that was in truth the realm of Gaia, the embodiment of earthly evolution.

What is evolution after all, he thought, but an ever growing web of relationships, a network of interactions that leave indelible imprints on each of the many actors. Be the actors represented by particles becoming atoms, atoms becoming molecules, molecules becoming self-replicating, complex organisms, it was all a matter of impressions that persist, resonate, and become precedents and models for similar interactions to develop.

Similar, but not identical, for as much as the interactions may tend to repeat they can never repeat, for the circumstances though similar can never be the same. The variations evolve new relationships, new resonances, new precedents, from which emerge new, more complex, forms. And every persistent form is a new thought, a new idea, a new hope for life.

The ideas evolve, emerge, entangle and evolve again, an ever growing web of thought that is an echo of the primeval Thought from which all evolution springs, the original impulse from which all acts, all actors, arise.

There can be no end to this evolution, as there can be no beginning. There can be only a persistent, evolving Now, grown distant from itself, incapable of stasis, capable only of change, of interacting with its own parts, its own similar elements.

This then is where we stand, he thought, looking again at Dema, and what lies before us.
Change is the rule, not patternless change but change that inevitably reflects what has gone before, allowing favored forms to persist while at the same time ever becoming more than what they were, patterns of change through growth, through innovation, through the emergence of new concepts of self and relationships.

What then are the limits to this growth, he wondered. There seemed to be some fundamental rules that define and limit relationships, restrict the rate of change, but the rules themselves may be capable of evolving, of merging and re-emerging until what seemed impossible is possible.

The very fact of growth, of increasing degrees of separation, the lengthening chain of past interactions, allows for unexpected intersections of divergent strands from which new directions may emerge.

The implication, he concluded, is an endless future, with endless expansion, and room for endless dreams to be realized in time. Thus, there is endless room for hope. This hope swelled within him until he experienced it almost as euphoria, a heightened enthusiasm for life. And as he arrived at this new place, he felt the presence of Dema beside him, her sleepy eyes opening to greet him, her lips curving into a serene, welcoming smile.

The world is rooted in your presence--
it takes shape from your expectations.
You mean for it to be alive with its own surprises
in unimagined love that melts earthcrust and bones.
Kiss fire cuts through death and life in uncontrolled ecstasy.

Russell Salamon
June 5, 2014