She rises up out of the depths, this mysteriously strange human with a beautiful name—Temma Day—coming from heroines and ancestors. With a shock of sand-colored hair, and eyes that change color with the day, she sees nothing and everything at the same time. Emerging into a vast valley, bending with the earth and the grass, she extends herself slowly up and out. Wrapped, as if in a cocoon, she studies the ground, listening. 

We watch through a glass dimly. We can make out a swirling about her, something like a ladder alive with angel wings ascending and descending. Humming and buzzing, the angels form their questions to Temma Day. 

“Where do you want to go?” 

“What kind of mark do you want to make on this earth?”  

“I wish to become one with persons like me. I want to show how we are needed,” she answers.

Humming and buzzing in agreement, the angels lift Temma Day with their wings. They arise soundlessly, a mystery dream of light.

Weary then—as if they had been carrying a heavy weight for ages, knowing not where—a group of travelers arrives. Their hands calloused, their mouths dry, sweat and mud on their faces and beneath their nails, their flat-footed strides grind deeply into the earth. They stop and let down their weights at the sight of Temma Day. She hears their cries and sighs, the wings stop their fluttering, and she looks up.

“What do you know?” the travelers ask. 

“Touch us, please, mysterious one. What is the meaning of your being here?”

Without words, the wings again begin to flutter and the travelers re-behold the stars from whence they came. They begin to move with Temma Day, humming and buzzing as dragonflies over the water. 

But the travelers begin thinking and their thoughts become fears.

“Didn’t we come to settle?” “Where are we going?” “How can we know?”  

From afar off a bell rings out. Not loud, without echo, it sounds like something meant to bring together rather than to alarm.

“What will we do with such a sound?” they ask.

As if in a dance from long ago, Temma Day shows them how to honor the sound of the bell with their presence, with their being, with their feet—singing like sighing. Their dance is like the continuous pulsing of earth and light, of animals and sun’s orbit. As they dance, the travelers trust that they are moving to a special place.

With running feet and anxious cries all about them, yet ndifferent to the chaos, they travel to the place where Temma Day guides them. 

Bending down to get through the doorway, the travelers look around the room at the other ones like Temma Day who gather there. The gathered special ones ask nothing of the travelers. Slowly, the travelers begin to join the special ones sitting on the floor. Others kneel down by wheelchairs, and some begin to walk around with the music, following the special ones making wild gestures. There is no sense of time, no roles to enact, only the relief of a kind of profound honesty among them. Their buzzing, breathing, and humming together is as nourishment for life in this community they could not ever earn. 

Temma Day laughs a wild laugh then, like a gasp, a sharp intake of air, or a bell ringing out with joy. Resounding, the entire place and everyone around her joins in.