Bought a Dave Mathews CD at a garage sale the other day. Hadn't really listened too him much. It's very good stuff. He has a song on one of the disks about meeting a girl on the street, asking directions, and walking a few steps away - then realizing she was amazing and wanted to get to know her. But she was gone. It reminded me of a conception I formed long ago about a fraternity of souls. I was skiing, maybe 25 years back, with my friends in New England (I am very sketchy on details about anything that far back) I got on the ski lift and just as I was being taken up, I saw a girl go by. We made eye contact. In that exchange of quick glances I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could love her intensely and loyally and forever. I also knew It was unlikely I would ever see her again. Being a thinking person more than a doing person, and at the time absurdly reserved, in stead of baling off the ski lift, suffering the broken leg, dragging myself pitifully across the snow yelling "wait, I know we could be lovers", I formed a concept instead. It occurred to me that at any given time there is a fraternity of souls for each of us. Maybe a hand full of people scattered across the earth, each in their own circumstances, of nationality, or ethnicity, or status, or lack there of. And these souls are such that they can be lovers and intimately united, on a level rare and almost never obtained. And I thought that we may, on occasion cross each other's paths, not by coincidence, but by the pure pull of an attraction and a longing to be one. And It occurred to me that in this tragically unaware condition of existence, we world let such an encounter pass, right by, as I did, and know nothing of the forces at work. It is as if life wants such powerful combinations but will not have it's plans manifest by cowards. Would that we could have those moments back. I imagine, sometimes, this fraternity living out their lives. Do any of them ever come together? Perhaps the time frame of the universe is much larger than one one lifetime. Perhaps in past lives it occurred, which is what I remember ever so dimly, or in some future life the courage and the sensitivity will come together in the perfect encounter.