1 In The Beginning
Some people are born knowing they are destined for greatness. For others, the truth of their greatness is flashed at them in Morse code from the corners of coffee shops or the spines of great novels. Truth, for these souls, must be broken down into tiny digestible bite-sized pieces; because the reality of it all at once would be too much. Still, when you have greatness inside you, wanting to get out, it will. Rest assured, it always will.
Satori Stone’s greatness began the day she was born, March 21, 1975, at 12:56 a.m. the precise moment of the spring solstice that year. Although, like the other flashes of insight throughout her life, this event went unnoticed by almost everyone. Everyone, that is, other than her mother. Her mother chose the name Satori in part because it was the title of a student publication on campus for poems and short stories. However, we are getting ahead of ourselves. For now, let’s stay on the surface as the truth of Satori Stone and her greatness reveals itself in little digestible bits. Because if anyone would have told her, in the beginning, the whole journey of her life, she may never have agreed to travel.
Satori grew up in a normal home. So normal and mundane in fact she never knew her father. She was raised by a single mother. It was becoming abnormal these days to grow up in a home which had both biological parents under the same roof. A Norman Rockwell moment of sitting around happily playing board games or enjoying bike rides and picnics in the park. No. There would be no fatherly memories for Satori.
She also had painfully normal school stories as a child born in the seventies, growing up in the eighties and nineties. She wore fluorescent leg warmers and a single-sequined Michael Jackson white glove on her right hand. In her room were posters of TV show icons, stuffed animals and of course, she had a clear phone with bright florescent wires and nodes. It was one of those phones with a cord, and everyone shared a party line. It couldn’t leave the house let alone her room. This was back in the day when you could waste an entire slumber party prank-calling people about their refrigerators. She spent her mornings on the weekend holding two fingers on the record and pause buttons of her stereo trying to get the perfect recording of her favorite songs while listening to the top forty count-downs. Praying the DJ didn’t talk over her favorite song. Still, recording the perfect mix tape was an art and a science.
She wasn’t picked on in school, but Satori wasn’t particularly popular either. She lived a remarkably invisible existence all her life up until this point. She had the normal round of boyfriends, the jock, the bad boy, the strangely sensitive. None of who really impressed her much. She had the normal broken heart from a couple guys along the way. Moreover, as you might have come to expect by this point, one treated her like a pile of dog dung stuck to the bottom of his shoe and she gave all her power over to him. At least until she found herself pregnant. Then she knew she had to walk away.
It wasn’t until she became the keeper of a tiny soul when she finally discovered her own power. She knew there was no way she was going to allow her daughter to be treated and learn how to be treated by a foul unkind man. You could say her daughter saved her life in one sense.
You could say that, and you would almost be right. However, we aren’t to the lifesaving part yet. Her daughter did get her on track, but Satori was going to be the one doing the lifesaving, the world saving to be even more precise.
Growing up, Satori envisioned many careers for herself, never a superhero mind you, nothing so grand. In 5th grade, she wanted to be a top executive. To help her on this path, she started carrying a briefcase to school instead of a backpack. Even then, she wasn’t teased. She was lucky in this way. Most people didn’t pay her enough mind to care when she was being quirky. Most eleven-year-olds at the time were exchanging notes with boyfriends; Satori was using a tape calculator to do her math homework because she liked to hear the sound. Soon enough she lost interest in this along with several other career choices. To be fair, she lost interest in most things in life and moved on.
Until she found writing. Her mother was an English professor at Winona University in Winona Minnesota. One day she discovered she could create entirely new worlds with words and a pen. She loved going into those worlds and living there for a little while. She could live in any world as long as she liked and then leave again when the whim struck her. No commitment. A new adventure every day if she wanted. She finally decided to major in English. She did not want to be a teacher like her mother, however. Satori vowed to write things people were going to read, lots of people. She would spend her nights and her daydreams wishing for this. It is all she could think about as she studied. People looking at the pages she typed. As it turns out, she got exactly what she wished for. Unbeknownst to her at the time, she was learning a lesson. What lesson? Be very careful what you wish for because you may get it.
Satori wanted droves of people to read her novels, to love them and long for them. She wanted people to beg for more. But all she could see in her mind was people staring at the pages she had written. Which is exactly what she got. Many people did read the things she wrote.
After college, she did what any normal unnoticeable want-to-be writer would do while waiting for their novel to be born from them. She took a temporary full-time job just out of college in a place a few states away. She moved to Wichita Kansas to become a technical writer. If you have never heard of technical writing, you would be like most people in the world. As a technical writer, Satori wrote user manuals and product sheets for a manufacturer of camping equipment. She also wrote training manuals and guides for the employees of the company.
It was dreadfully boring. Kind of like sitting and watching dust collect on a treadmill of good intentions. Knowing you should list it on Craigslist and cut your losses, but you also keep telling yourself one day you will start. Still, hundreds, if not thousands, of people read what she wrote. At the very least, saw what she wrote as they used it for kindling to start campfires next to the tent they just purchased. It was not the career she envisioned, but it was going to have to do.
In fact, Satori’s life was going just about as well as she had ever thought or hoped it could be. It was drama free if not a little boring. In other words, perfect. Anything more and for Satori this could only mean one thing. Demise. Bitter and complete. It seemed, for Satori anyway, just when everything was going well a big ol’ Texas-sized wrench would get right in the middle of her almost perfect life. She never much cared for wrenches. Texas either for that matter.
It wasn’t as if she had anything against either of them. She just found them unremarkable. She equated them with salt and pepper. So incredibly ordinary they were part of everything without even thinking about it. Salt and pepper were on just about every meal she ever ate as a child. Moreover, after almost every meal she would find herself in the restroom, clutching her stomach and wondering if the food was even worth eating at all. Everything but desert, which sat on her stomach just fine and so became her very favorite part of eating. Later in life, she found out she was allergic to black pepper. Apparently, a person, Satori specifically, could actually be allergic to something as ordinary and every day as black pepper. Who has ever heard of such an absurd thing? Nevertheless, there it was. She found she was violently allergic to everything normal. Including black pepper, salt, wrenches, Texas, and as it happens, her life.
The next wrench in her life was about to smack her in the face and she couldn’t even see it coming. Still, this time it was different. This time the wrench was bringing with it a restart. Why a restart and not a reset? The main difference in a reset and restart is the degree of the entire event. A reset is a 90-degree change while a restart was twice as far. This was a restart; the kind of transformation which changes a person’s life forever. The kind from which you cannot return. The kind, which if it ever happens, can only happen once in a lifetime. Or so you get down on your knees and pray it will only happen once. The kind that leaves you wishing for a moment of normal. The normal which, until this point, bored Satori into a state of monotony.
This life-altering, wrench flinging, 180-degree turning restart of destiny was crashing toward Satori. She was oblivious to every little hint of it. All the flashes, all the coincidences, all the inevitabilities. All the while not knowing, not even glimpsing, it was crashing toward her like a runaway freight train. It was coming. Like it or not. Moreover, her life, if she was even going to have one in the end, (yes, it was that big) was never going to be the same.
