I missed this question because I wasn't a member yet when it was asked.  It startled me when I stumbled across it today because I, too, believed that the moon was following our car.  My sister and I used to ride at night sleeping in the way back of the station wagon (back before seatbelts!) to our grandparents' house on Cape Cod about once a month.  Sure enough, the moon found our car and followed us almost every time.  The thing is, though, when I asked why it was following us, nobody understood what I was talking about!  I dropped the subject and eventually learned in school what was actually happening.  I felt sort of foolish until way into adulthood I heard the lyrics of Dave Matthews' song, You Never Know.

Funny when you're small
The moon follows the car
There's no one but you see
Hey, the moon is chasing me!

It made me so happy to know that someone else had experienced the same perception!  And after finding this Questions & Reflections question and reading the other responses, I now know that there were, in fact, many more!  Thanks everyone!

Today I am still amazed that my husband is alive.  Thanks to modern medicine (and a Life Star helicopter ride) and amazing doctors we are still here together, over a year after his heart attack.  Thanks again to modern medicine and amazing doctors I haven't had a migraine in 6 days and the last one was easily aborted.  Psychologists call it "projection" and others call it "creating your day" or "living with intention," but I'm still amazed that it works.  I used to be so anti-western medicine until I finally gave in to gentle encouragement from my family to see a neurologist.  Used to get migraines every 2 or 3 days, and some would last for days.  I call my Zomig nasal spray my dose of magic, because it is magic to me.

Don't get me wrong, I still think there is a lot wrong with western medicine, but somehow I've been finding wonderful doctors lately that are open minded to complimentary medicine, using the best from western and alternative medicine.  We're still into organic and locally produced foods.  But I remain amazed that I am over prejudging doctors and their motives and have had some wonderful positive experiences.  And most of all, Tim is alive to enjoy this new phase of life with me.

What thought provoking questions!  Being an introvert and taught as a child to keep a low profile, most of the time I don't feel that I'm on stage or that I have ever had an audience.  Quite the opposite, I usually feel that I'm in the audience, observing the activities of those around me.  Perhaps that's one reason Ian Anderson's words in my favorite Jethro Tull song, Skating Away (On the Thin Ice of a New Day), resonate with me so much.

Well, do you ever get the feeling that the story's too damn real and in the present tense?  Or that everybody's on the stage, and it seems like you're the only person sitting in the audience?

That's how I feel most of the time.  But then I realized there is an exception.  When I write a letter or a journal entry or part of our family history I am very conscious of unseen people who may read it now or in the future long after I'm gone.  Reading makes me feel connected to ones who have lived long ago and I feel grateful that they took the time to leave something of themselves behind to satisfy my curiosity.  And I like to imagine that even if no one is interested in what I have to say right now, some day in the future perhaps a kindred spirit will be grateful for something that I have written.

The Internet is an amazing tool.  More than a few distant cousins have come across my family history website while doing research on-line and have contacted me with excitement at finding a new branch of their family tree on my site, and also, some have shared information with me that I didn't have before, and probably would not have been able to find out in published sources.  It's always a thrill to make these contacts.

Yesterday a wonderful thing happened to me.  I was visiting at my dad's house in the woods, where spotting deer, coyotes, wild turkeys and fishers is not at all unusual.  (Haven't seen any bears, yet, though they have been seen in Connecticut lately.)  We were watching a movie when my brother-in-law noticed a doe in the yard, quite close to the house.  Being so enchanted with deer I jumped up to see her.  She was so beautiful with her large soft eyes and large ears lined in dark brown.  Our eyes met and she stood there transfixed for a very long time.  I could not take my eyes off of her.  After a while she lay down and continued to stare at me, occasionally looking about to see what a noise was, but then fixing her gaze back onto me.  She seemed so peaceful and I wondered what, if anything, it all meant.  Then I started to worry that my looking at her so intently might be threatening her in some way.  But she did seem relaxed.  At one point a buck appeared and walked right past her and started helping himself to Dad's rhododendron.  John was going to go shoo him away but I begged him not to.  After the buck had enough food he slowly retraced his steps and passed the doe again, glanced at her but seemed unconcerned with her behavior.  She ignored him completely.  After another long while she stood up and started nibbling at the ground, looking at me once in a while.  She slowly made her way downhill around the corner of the house, so I changed my vantage point to another window on that side of the house.  She was now one story below me.  But she looked up to the window and saw me again and started looking at me again with the same intensity as before.  Her look felt so reassuring in some way.  It's hard to put words to it.  It was getting darker and darker until I could barely see her, and just at the point where I felt I could see her no longer she suddenly darted away.  More than an hour had passed.  I feel as if I was given quite a gift!

When I heard about the December 26, 2004, Sumatra Earthquake and Indian Ocean Tsunami, I found myself saying out loud that it felt like Mother Earth was very angry.  Exploring that idea I found two wonderful books that confirmed in my mind what I was beginning to believe.  One was The Earth Has a Soul: The Nature Writings of C. G. Jung, edited by Meredith Sabini, and the other was The Earth Speaks: An Acclimatization Journal, by Steve Van Matre & Bill Weiler.  Mother Earth is alive!!!

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans I found myself glued to the TV.  One night Larry King had a group of religious leaders as guests, including the Dalai Lama.  He asked them all why God would let such a terrible thing happen.  They all had very vague and unsatisfying answers, to me, anyway, except for the Dalai Lama.  The gist of what he said was that God didn't do this, we did it to ourselves with the choices we've made about not living in harmony with the earth.

Another night I saw Kurt Vonnegut as a guest of Jon Stewart.  He said he felt that mankind had become a sort of cancer or infection on the earth and that the hurricane was the earth's immune response, trying to rid itself of the disease.  I was discovering that many people, past and presently, see Mother Earth as a living organism.  (And I went to see Kurt Vonnegut on stage at a writer's forum in Hartford after that and before he died.  Fascinating man.)

Being the daughter of a scientist, I was especially delighted to discover Paul Stamets, who wrote the book, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World.  Mycelium are fungal networks - mushrooms.  Two quotes from the book:

I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature.  Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes.  These membranes are aware, react to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the host environment in mind.  The mycelium stays in constant molecular communication with its environment, devising diverse enzymatic and chemical responses to complex challenges.

I see the mycelium as the Earth's natural Internet, a consciousness with which we might be able to communicate.  Through cross-species interfacing, we may one day exchange information with these sentient cellular networks.  Because these externalized neurological nets sense any impression upon them, from footsteps to falling tree branches, they could relay enormous amounts of data regarding the movements of all organisms through the landscape.

An amazing talk given by Stamets can be found here:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/
paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world.html