I don't have the answers yet, but I have learned enough to be dangerous, and ask better questions..

The sun is down, and it's way too early. Feels so late. The tube was blaring CNN projections on this red state and that swing state, and 8% of this state's precincts are in....

I decided to succumb to my daughter's pleadings and shed my clothes to head for the hot tub. We'd just had a great Italian dinner in town, replete with an orgasmic creme brulee for desert. However, my dinner began to sour in my stomach from thinking about the dismal state of the election as it  emerged increasingly red.

But my daughter is utterly irresistable. So I followed two little feet and a giggly voice (is Aphrodite here again for a visit?) down the drive to the hot tub, and shivered my body into the steaming water.

I know, I know. I live a rough life, don't I? I don't even have a day job.

Don't throw up. Just work with me here a moment.

For some reason, I felt the urge to lie back in the tub, which thankfully, my little mermaid had decided NOT to jack up with bubbles for the moment. As I floated on the water, I looked up and got caught up in the absolutely clear night sky. The stars seemed more luminous to me than usual, and my daughter became a soft presence in the water beside me as I began to feel something opening.

What is it with the water? Why must I continually trek to it to become connected to something ....sacred?

It seemed to me, as I floated in the heat and lost myself a little, that the stars seemed to be shifting somehow, as though the heavens were rearranging themselves before my very eyes. I didn't feel like I was in this yard, in this town, or even on this planet. I kept rotating in slow lazy circles on the water (because we haven't worked out how to shut the jets off) and the view continued to shift. I felt myself really getting lost in the stars, as though I were being granted a brief, limited window into the cosmos just for this moment.

Could I be this lucky? I mean, without smoking peyote first? What pattern was shifting and reforming itself before my eyes, perhaps turning the wheels of time? Were the three fates measuring and cutting the threads for multitudes of lives? Was this a sign for me personally? Or was I merely an inconsequential witiness, being afforded a brief glimpse of the engines of Heaven in motion?

Everything was still. I felt like I had disappeared and melted into something Else.

As I drifted further, I became aware that my daughter was cooing out some melody softly. It was a sweet little song I'd never heard before. The words were beginning to penetrate my consciousness, which was somewhat resentful of the intrusion during this rather pleasant floating in the ether.

She was singing:

Take some water
Mix it all up
Make the goddesses
Make the gods
Add tomatoes
Add some lettuce
Take some more water
Make the people
Take the stars
and throw them up in the sky
With some love
(then the song meandered into the school fight song, but hey - she's only 7)

I sat up in the tub, amazed.

Wow. A glass of chianti, a hot tub, a clear night sky, and a Piscean child is all it takes for me to feel connected to the cosmic consciousness.

And she went there with me too!

I mulled over this, and then I realized that we were both cooked by the searing heat of the tub, and the moment had, sadly, passed.

So I followed two little feet and a singsong voice back up the walk to our little home, where the TV had never stopped its relentless blaring about everything to no one.

Jim called to remind me this was a nail biter.

I think I'd like to go back to the night sky in the water....