When had it happened? An image settled in Maya’s mind, of a young woman facing a pack of wolves deep in the high desert forest, a glint of moonlight shining in her eye. She had felt both afraid and yet fearless all at once. She stood toe to toe with those creatures, secure in acceptance that whatever happened she would accept. She made peace with her imminent death, and with that, dissolved that ageless fear. It was in that unlikely place that she had opened to the gift of surrender, slipped off the shackles that bound her. And who was the ally who had assisted her, who propelled her beyond the threshold of fear into expansive awareness, but the gray-coated Canis lupus?
Muriel was staring uncomprehendingly at her daughter’s wondrous expression. Muriel, who had made a crossing of her own through a far different landscape than Maya’s. When Maya first returned home, she assumed that the courage she was witnessing in her mother was a kind of psychological projection of her own rapid growth. But she was wrong. Muriel’s expansion was very much her own, with credit due to Henry and his approach to her drinking problem. Muriel had not only taken responsibility for the full spectrum of her behavior, but had summoned the courage to adopt a philosophy of ongoing self-examination and responsibility, something she had never been disposed to do. And though her journey certainly had its lurches and derailings, it remained solidly on track. None of it would have been possible without Henry, a recovering alcoholic, and Alcoholics Anonymous, his chosen path to sobriety. To Maya, it was a miracle, plain and simple, which had made possible a steady reduction in tension between mother and daughter.
Henry was beaming at her, his grin ear to ear.
“We have an announcement, Maya,” he said.
Muriel held out her left hand. A glittering three-stone, emerald-cut diamond ring sparkled on her ring finger.
Henry frowned. “Honey, you’re doing it again.”
“What?”
“Jumping in.”
Muriel gave him a look. “But we’ve already had a toast,” she said.
“That was for Maya.”
Muriel grew quiet, her face softened, and she uttered something Maya had waited her whole life to hear.
“I’m sorry,” Muriel said.
Maya laughed. She leaned over and gave her mother a hug.
December 31 was the coldest day of the year, dominated by insistent, biting winds and a piercing, bright sun. The two-block walk from Maya’s apartment to the Cleveland Park Metro station was a grim-faced march that morning, Maya’s focus squarely on the concrete sidewalk in front of her. She rode the long escalator down to the underground station and leaped the final step, dashing into the open doors of a subway train that had just pulled in.
Gripping a support pole, she observed the commuters wedged up against one another in the narrow seats, dressed in their winter attire, most of which was drab and colorless—the bureaucrats, lawyers, teachers, clerks, students and all the rest, coming in from the outer city and suburbs. At each station stop, they would look up from their devices or magazines for a quick scan of the station sign. Some would then stand and wait for the doors; the rest would resume their downward stare and continue on with their solitary activities.
As Maya swayed with the train’s movements, she considered her father’s predications of societal change. The subject sometimes came to mind when she was in a crowd, though, the truth was, less and less often with the passing weeks. Would his great shift ever happen?
Doubt had been creeping in for some time. At times, the best she could manage was slim acceptance of the possibility. At other times, the whole thing seemed downright crazy, a fantastic fiction fabricated by a utopian dreamer. She hated to think that way, but she knew she might be right.
She considered the impressive people she’d met on her journey, like Georgia and Keith, who believed in it wholeheartedly. What did they see that she didn’t? No world-altering shift was astir in the air. Events large and small occurred as they always had and always would. Leaders vied for power, wars raged, peacemakers toiled, and ordinary people struggled to keep pace with the demands of their lives, which often exceeded their reach.
Her father’s theories had receded from the sphere of curious possibility to the realm of quixotic dream. The world was the world, its great motors chugging away without hesitation or pause, the same today as they had yesterday and would tomorrow. Even someone who’d only been around a little over two decades could see that.
The cycle of life advanced inexorably. The march of days, of seasons, of the myriad beginnings and endings, pushed on in accordance with the laws of nature, and perhaps of God. If life was a miracle, then it was one that was largely predictable. In a few months, winter’s frost would give way to spring’s green growth, pink blossoms would awaken on the cherry trees around the Tidal Basin and creatures great and small would play their assigned roles in life’s unending drama. The lawns of the Capitol and the memorials would dance with life as people from many lands came to learn about a bold idea some men had long ago for a new kind of society, whose story, like so many stories, continued to amaze and confound. The sleeping grass would awaken with new shoots and children would wage their war on apathy and cynicism without even knowing of its existence. Amid all this, Maya would pedal her bicycle along the forested path that ran the length of the city, listening to music on her headphones and doing her best not to crash into anyone going the other way.
But that time had not yet arrived. Today, the sky was a concrete gray, the temperature a frigid two degrees above zero. As Maya exited the Farragut North station, she speed-walked to the Foundation’s building, dreaming of warmth.
In the front lobby, she performed her usual cold-weather ritual: unbuttoning her coat as quickly as possible to revel in the burst of warm air that awaits anyone entering a well-heated building. A few feet away, a woman from another office seemed to be doing the same thing. Their eyes met and they smiled conspiratorially in recognition of a fact that exists at the heart of every cold winter, providing the glue of many communities: We are all in it together.
Maya rode the elevator up to the fifth floor and made her way to the Foundation’s office, settled in at her desk and draped her coat and scarf over the back of her chair.
By ten, she was well into her morning routine, mostly replying to emails, when she heard a voice beside her.
“Hello, Maya.”
She turned to look. The man beside her was in his early seventies, tanned and fit. He smiled and extended his hand.
“Roger Anderson,” the Foundation’s chairman said.
Maya flushed, taking his hand. “Mr. Anderson,” she said. “It’s so nice to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.”
“It’s Roger, please,” he said. “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to come by. I want you to know how good it is to have you here, Maya. I’ve seen your father quite a bit lately. He asked me to say hello to you.”
“Thank you,” Maya said. “How is he?”
“Oh, he’s fine,” Roger Anderson said. Then he leaned in close and in a whisper, added, “It’s about to happen.”
That was all. Just those words. About to happen. He said goodbye and walked away.
Of course, Maya knew what he was talking about. The shift. There was a kind of religious fervor about it among some of the people at the foundation. Maya was always mindful to be cordial about those conversations, keeping her doubts to herself.
She set that thorny issue aside and turned back to the computer screen. Among the unopened emails was one from her father. He would write her now and again, sharing a few details about his travels, usually in a guarded way. She understood why. She clicked it open.
Maya, all on schedule. Pieces falling into place. Will jump-start the shift through NY mass prayer. Get ready. Love, Dad xo
Maya stared at it, baffled. New York mass prayer? What was that?
Throughout the morning, between phone calls and emails, she tried to decipher the meaning of the message. But she was stumped. Then, just before lunch, she had an idea.
I know this.
She clicked open a folder in which she stored interesting articles she had come across while web surfing. She was never quite sure why she kept them; she just had a feeling they’d come in handy one day. And usually they did. Reading through the filenames she found one entitled “New Year’s World Peace Prayer.” She grinned. “NY” stood for New Year’s, not New York.
Her father was referring to the annual tradition of spiritual and religiously minded people to pray for world peace at midnight December 31, Greenwich Mean Time. That way their intentions would be synchronized.
The theories of the Mandala addressed the power of coordinated intention and its role in creating events. The aim of its adherents and the people praying for world peace were essentially compatible, and maybe even identical.
Worldwide, the Mandala, including Ben Ambrose, would attempt to use the power of the global peace prayer to build upon their own collective vortex meditation. Their meditators, located at pyramid houses such as the one Maya visited, would beam their intention for global change en masse, supported by many thousands unknowingly on all continents.
Poised at the Earth’s power centers in the Middle East, the Himalayas, Central America, the American Southwest and all the other places, the Mandala, energized by the inflowing energy of the vortexes would make their demands amplified far beyond what they could have done on their own.
As Maya considered this, feelings stirred in her; images, too. In her mind’s eye, she saw her father, Georgia, Brandon, and thousands of others, maybe even Buddy, all becoming still. Everyone connecting together as one.
If her father was right, critical mass would be achieved and the shift initiated. The plan amounted to an enormous group meditation backed by the power of the Earth itself.
Leaning back in her chair, Maya looked out a nearby window at the cityscape, and wondered: Would it work?
Epilogue
| N |
ew Year’s Day.
The morning hours travel through the globe’s many time zones.
In a large South American city, a prison guard hangs a new calendar on his office wall. On the upper page is a photo of a beautiful raven-haired woman. The guard admires it for a few moments, smiles, and then settles in at his desk to read the morning newspaper.
Suddenly, sadness overcomes him. What is this? he wonders, confused. Nothing is wrong. Life is good. He is confidently in charge of his domain, the lord over these prisoners, who deserve to be where they are. He knows how to put each man in his place, and often that is exactly what is necessary.
He tries to shrug off the baffling discomfort, but to no avail. It grows stronger. Soon, he is struggling mightily. He tosses away the newspaper, gets up and, without knowing why, walks toward the prisoners’ cell block.
Standing before one of the cells, he stares at the man beyond the bars and takes out his key ring. With a shaking hand, he slides the key into the keyhole and swings the door open.
A battered, haggard man peers up at him through eyes that have seen too much. His crime: Writing articles critical of the country’s ruler. He has been tortured. His family harassed. He has been forced to confess to crimes he did not commit. He is an innocent man awaiting execution.
“You are free to go,” the guard says. “I can’t bear it. Please, go.”
The prisoner looks at him curiously, then pulls himself up and hobbles down the hall as the guard falls to his knees and weeps.
At that very moment, thousands of miles away, in a small town in the American Midwest, a twelve-year-old boy is being chastised for being inattentive at school and acting aggressively toward his classmates.
“I can’t help it,” he pleads to his mother, honestly, for indeed it is true.
“You can’t concentrate on anything,” she says, sitting with him in the family’s kitchen.
“Math,” the boy says suddenly. “I can do math.”
His words surprise them both.
In an instant, he experiences an expansion of comprehension for subjects that are far beyond him: Geometry, calculus, probability theory. The epiphany shakes him to the core. His aggression disappears, never to return.
Halfway around the globe, huddled with his men in a military tent in the mountains of a battle-torn country in the Near East, a warlord who has committed countless atrocities, who has ordered the deaths of untold innocents, leans over a territorial map and falls into a momentary hallucination. He imagines the enemy general as his own brother. With trembling hands, he unwraps a cigar and lights it. He continues his plotting, but it will not go on much longer.
Further to the east, a Chinese woman stands unsteadily in a rice paddy on a misty afternoon. She is crushed with grief at the loss of her sister, killed in a robbery. Yet inexplicably she feels hopeful. She knows that things will improve, the agony will pass and she’ll know peace again. She ventures a smile, a gesture she has not allowed herself in many months.
The tide gains momentum. All populations feel it. It comes from up from the depths of each woman and man. Beneath their conscious awareness, biochemical processes shift, neuronal pathways change and psychological blocks begin to clear. Pure energy surges up from the collective psyche. In a timeless moment, the world’s peoples know fully and beyond doubt the power of their humanity, the limitlessness of their potential and the promise of their heritage.
In a large American city, an old man falls down on a sidewalk. A young couple rushes over to help him and they embrace in the manner of friends, though they have never met.
Two hundred miles south, in another American city, Maya Burke, walking near her home, stops suddenly, overwhelmed with excitement. It is the same feeling stirring in her father as he stands on a mountaintop in Peru and takes in the glorious view. She knows, just as he does, exactly what is happening