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"And so am I that you are here with me," I said to her somewhat bewildered. I took hold of her hand, "Yes," I said quietly, "our life should be like living in a garden; your life and mine."
"Of course it takes a lot of effort to cultivate a garden," she replied.
"This also means that we can have a great life ahead of us in our individual worlds if we take care to tend that garden well, provided we awake to it more fully," I added with a smile.
Perhaps it was the vase with three small roses on our table that inspired the analogy.
I said that all of this was like a fairy tale coming true. Except, fairy tales don't exist in the real world.
"I would like to suggest to you that you've got the world upside down," said Erica with a smile. "What you call the real world is a world of fairy tales, and they don't come true as you have admitted yourself."
I just nodded in agreement.
"Tell me," she said, "if you can figure out an answer, why it is that most married men dream about having an intimate relationship with other women, and women with men?"
"The answer is obvious, isn't it?" I replied, "but why don't we accept the obvious? I suppose the reason is that we have become slaves to a mythology that has nothing to do with reality. We think like slaves. We behave like slaves. We dream of freedom, but we live like slaves to that mythology."
"Welcome to Disneyland," said Erica. "Welcome to our fairy tale world where nothing is real and never will be." Then she stood up and kissed me right across the table. "That was real," she added, "it reflects my love for you."
We had soup that evening, Wiener Schnitzel, and later, Black Forest cake, the finest in German tradition, but none of that measured up to the feast for the heart that she provided with her smiles, with the grandeur of her ideas, and the love of her sharing.
"I find everything extraordinarily beautiful that is happening tonight. Do you feel the same way?" I asked her.
She nodded. "It is beautiful, yes," she agreed, "but the sad part about it is that this beautiful happening is perceived to be extraordinary. It shouldn't be that way. It should be happening all the time. It should be commonplace. We have learned to travel to the moon and back. We have done this in an almost routine fashion, but we haven't yet learned to freely cross the bridge between two human hearts except on extraordinary occasions. Also, we find it easier to sit at our radio telescopes and study galaxies that are billions of light years away, than to look at each other across the barriers we have created between us. In a sense, we're hypocrites, Peter. We have made all these advances in understanding, even to understand the inner spaces of atomic physics and microbiology, but we haven't made a significant step in almost two thousand years towards understanding the strengths, the beauty, and the needs of our human Soul. In fact, we have become more and more isolated from one-another. Only on extraordinarily rare occasions, as this one, do we dare to take a tiny step in the right direction, if we dare at all. This is a paradox that must be resolved, but how is one to do that?"
I shook my head. I had no idea. I had never made these comparisons that she had so easily presented, and with such clear and simple logic. "You are a genius," I said in utter amazement. "Where do you get these ideas from? What do you do for a living? How...."
"I work at the university," she cut me off. "I do advanced research in organic chemistry for microbiological engineering and bacteriological processing, that sort of thing. I think this is the most exciting field that is on the move today. It is amazing what you can do by rearranging the long carbon chains of organic molecules. And what is more amazing, Peter, we can create bacteria that will do this rearranging work for us. This is more exiting than nuclear physics that I lost interest in some years ago when the funding was canceled for the necessary labs. My new research is inexpensive compared to that, and is highly promising. There is even evidence coming to the surface now that the gasoline in your car had its origin in a bacteriological process that goes on naturally deep inside the Earth. It has been noticed by some of our researchers that several big oil fields in the world are actually getting bigger, even while the oil is being pumped out. Also, they have found that the new oil is from an earlier biological age than the original pools. It may well be that oil is a renewable resource, created by bacteria deep inside the Earth."
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