Surprising me a memory from long ago

In the early moring, in Boston I come upstairs and !Boom! I see the well trodden dirt path past my house in Swambu, Nepal.   We live upstairs in the dirt floored, no running water, no toilet home we are happy in.  We are in love with Nepal.  Across the path is a nunnery with a high wall; their little terrier type dog commands it and as we walk up to our place,  he runs along the wall barking threatenly.  Up above this live the Russian embassy people whose music delights us; someone there plays skilled piano or is it a recording, we don't know.

All of this is the setting which came to me naturally and in a flash.  I see the Russian embassy man walking down the street with the young Peace Corps woman, his arm casually around her shoulder, the other arm gestering to the heavens, and saying, "We will go to the moon together!"

Tears came to my eyes.

Paradise Lost.  

It all seemed so possible then, the world without war and hatred.  And though we have a space station with Russians, American and Japanese "the world, it is the old world yet" and spins and worls on and on trading goods, fantasies, anger, love, posturings of bravado or perfection,  all the raiment of the human heart and mind. 

And where is that Paradise, which I felt seeing again that moment in Swambu?  

It is, they say, in accepting what is, the world with all it's beauty and suffering.  And sometimes I am there through no effort of my own, but quite the opposite.  Mostly I am struggling, searching, wanting, longing and distressed by my distress.  I have, thanks to Metta, learned to feel compassion for myself and others struggling as I am struggling(tears come to my eyes), grateful for sense of companionship and belonging which come with the full human experience.