In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

– C. G. Jung

Once I met a man I’d met first in the ephemeral dimension of my journeying practice. He walked into the nether regions of my imagination after I posed a question to the powers that be. The electrical signals of the brain are capable of creating visuals we understand anthropomorphically.

Shamanic cultures have been tapping into this space of the psyche for eons. We as the technologically advanced progeny of such ancestral richness chafe against such phooey. We are above our superstitious primitive ancient relations.

Indeed, I sat on the fence albeit reluctantly for most of my adulthood about the mystical claims to which my dreams and meditations seemed to refer. Oh, I would have bouts of connection with the divine but much more often I have shunned the part of me so patiently available for inner exploration.

However, one day not too long ago, the man from the vision caught up with me in the mountains of South America. Time had separated us more so than space. True, he emerged on Earth over a decade after I did. He learned a different language than me at school but what seemed to catapult us both into the complexity of the safe haven of the imagination was the death of a sibling.

There is something about seeing someone very close to you suddenly (overnight in my brother’s case) or slowly ( through the tortures of his sister’s cancer in his case) disappear from their bodies that awakens you to the veil of existence and chaos takes its place in your life. It can be run from but never escaped and it can be embraced but never devoured completely.

It was while I looked for a warm alpaca sweater from a vendor on the Plaza de Armas in Cusco that he reappeared. I say reappeared because the moment I heard his voice over my right should, in Argentinian Spanish, I thought, He’s here. I had all but forgotten the previous ephemeral meeting. It could have stayed in my imagination if, suddenly and unexpectedly in a place I’d never been before, the man walked up beside me, flesh and blood.

He was on a photography assignment for the Latin newspaper for which he worked. He invited me to the cathedral next door to the Quechua vendor displaying her knitting. It happened I’d left my coat in the valley where I’d been part of a shamanic ceremony the night before. I was chilled by the misty Peruvian air at 11,000 feet in the Andes. Randomly I had made my sweater purchase next door to the Baroque/Gothic/Renaissance Basilica Cathedral (1640) where he would be shooting a children’s orchestra as they performed later that evening.

Of course I said yes to his invitation to join his group in the cathedral. I sat underneath the towering vaulted ceilings and watched him maneuver his shots. I wondered if I’d understood him correctly and we would go up the cobblestone streets together after the performance. My heart pumped self assurance and calm through my veins while simultaneously I wondered if I might be hallucinating the manifestation.

After the church emptied, we had drinks, hot green tea for me, for him a chilled Cusquena, while Peruvian musicians played South American jazz. The notes made their way past the desire pulsing through me. I watched the candlelight flicker along the ancient brick walls sensing they’d seen this sort of chance meeting many times over the decades between strangers. I wondered if they knew what was ahead like the journeyer in me did.

Later that night, well, morning, I bypassed his lips, gave him a reassuring hug and said goodnight. He began telling me a story through his translator app. He was leaving that morning with his group. We might never meet again. I tempted serendipity and said I would write him… I did. I explored my curiosity about him as if I were 17 again and again. In the realm of time I had arrived on the planet before him by several years but biologically we synced and met exactly the way I imagined connecting with a man when I was a teenager, without artifice.

Fortunately, the older I get the more I realize that honesty and vulnerability are enough and in my encounter with the man we had that in abundance. Eventually, the quarantine found us in separate countries with a mountain range separating us. Unexpectedly, the world shifted and so did we, this time in the physical dimension but surely the cosmos moved into play long before we saw the inevitability of chance coming right at us.