Do our thoughts echo through time?

We returned from an Airstream camping trip to Joshua Tree National Park last week. My husband and I chased the remnants of summer into the desert as daylight saving time announced fall.

The echoes of summer lingered, giving me permission to ponder, as I felt the quiet ground me. A memory of a summer in my Midwest childhood home at 1777 settled into the dusk in Joshua tree. The unworried, unhurried play of youth resonated in the laughter of a young family in a nearby campground as they chased each other around the Joshua Trees and scrub bushes.

At 1777, the summers in the early ‘70s were filled with swimming, backyard games, and bats. Swimming lessons at the Racquet Club, burgers and fries on our parents’ tab, suntan lotion, and matching one-piece bathing suits with pleated skirts. Games of Red-Light/Green-Light, Where is the Ghost Tonight? and Statue-Maker on rotation with the neighborhood kids, mostly older boys. And bats.

We all have echoes from our childhood. What are echoes? Do our thoughts echo through time? Can we plant thought seeds as echoes to our future selves?

what are echos?

The air one evening the summer of 1973 was warm. The July-August humidity not forewarning a thunderstorm, that night. The sky, a fading blue in a patchwork of light behind the 20’ oak tree canopies in the woods between the six houses on acre lots, connected by a creek in the gullies of our parents’ properties. The breeze rustling leaves in the twilight. We kids congregating lazily by some unspoken, pre-tweet era after-dinner invitation.

We all gathered in our yard. I don’t ever remember going to other houses, although we covered many other yards during our chases. Someone suggested a game: Red-Light/Green-Light. We started as the bats woke up and a dozen kids ran around squealing. Someone caught a glimpse of a lone bat above in their peripheral vision and pointed and shouted “BAT!” Everyone stopped and watched the bat-acrobatics swooping for bugs coming out at dusk as the street lights warmed up their amber glow. We’d duck. They’d swoop down. More bats. More squeals. The bats and tween-teens ran around chasing their prey.

Echoes: the repetition of a sound, like ripples in the sand from waves receding. What else can echo besides sound? Light reflects off surfaces creating a rainbow, a colorful iteration; a type of echo. With touch, sometimes there’s a lingering, like the warm pain of a bruise from a neighbor boy pushing me to the ground, creating a memory ripple; another type of echo. With both taste and smell, a favorite meal lingers in the air. In our upstairs bedroom above the kitchen, at times dinner’s aroma hovers in the air around us as we brush our teeth. Stir fry, spaghetti, homemade cookies. If I close my eyes I can follow those sensations back to the original experience. All sensory echoes.

do our thoughts echo through time?

When we’re in Joshua Tree, we step off-grid, except for the water runs and WiFi drops. Joshua Tree’s a perfect place to spend time with my thoughts. There’s a heavy blanket of silence that envelops me, especially at night when the last of the cars and vans have settled in, the few late-comers hoping for a first-come, first-serve site or traveling back to base camp after a day of hiking.

We take awhile to unwind. It happens fast once we settle into a site for a week or ten days or two weeks if we’re lucky. The dark comes hard as the sunset dimmer switch turns all the way off. The Milky Way sparkles with planets and planes and satellites, not to mention the billions of stars, many dead. Their light echoing into the future with a tail into the past.

What about our thoughts? A thought echo. Recurring dreams or a persistent memory, a goal or apprehension repeated against the uncertainty of time. An insistent pulse. Sometimes an ache, waiting for the ebb and flow to pass. These thought echoes pulse and pull, and tug and cling. They stick. A feeling, an emotion often detached from its origin. They are ripples that pulse through time.

The mornings at Joshua Tree are special. One morning while writing my thoughts down having coffee at our campsite, the cool breeze blows my chaotic bangs over my eyes, creating shadows on the page. The sun rises over the Pinto Mountains to the east. Overhead a bird squawks its morning chatter. The bush trees bend in their morning exercise reaching towards the sun. My prompt for the day: Tell me about a time you just knew something was true.

After a beat, I thought marrying my husband and found myself writing:

“At some point, a quiet little something, a sense that we’d always be together, slipped in beside me. No questions asked. No words exchanged. There wasn't a specific conversation with myself or my then boyfriend before the sense it was true. The feeling wasn't a premonition or a déjà vu before we had ‘the conversation’ — just an intuition, maybe a thread from my quantum future self sending a message back in time. A red thread boomerang.

There’s a blanket of calm in the air space around me. All warm and unhurried. Sitting in our campsite in Joshua Tree, facing some jumbo rocks, surrounded by them in every direction. After two days of 30 mph gusting winds, I bury myself under a coverlet, three layers of coats, and two hats, nestled into a cubby reading Scattered, a novel about time travel. My thoughts float above me like the water droplet mist swirling from my coffee mug looking into the sun.

How did I know I'd be with him? So comfortable. Inevitable, if I let it, let nature take its course. Maybe the realization we were connected by something old, familiar.”

As the words settle on the page, I realize — my thoughts have an echo, they have a pulse.

can we plant thought seeds as echoes to our future selves?

First thing in the morning, I enjoy writing as a way to catch the red threads blowing in from my still sleepy brain. Pulling them down. Inching my way back into my subconscious. Like a rock collector wandering the long beaches of my mind.

In the jumbo rock clusters at our campsite group — there was a hand complete with thumb and thumbnail. Not a whole hand, rather the side view of a hand opened with another hand nestled in its palm. It’s called Pareidolia, a phenomenon where you see faces or other figures in patterns in clouds, or at Joshua Tree in the rock formations.

There was also an old person’s nose and prominent chin. Reminded me of Strega Nona, the Grandma Witch character by Tomie dePaola, the new stamps we have at home. The stamps I used to send a final check to deposit a refund from Mom’s health insurance premium to the bank before we left. A check made out to The Estate of Edith M M Bonness Tomsyck. Had to smile when I saw the mistaken double initial. Reminded me of how much I loved M&Ms from my childhood. A comfort settled into the quiet echoes of Mom’s estate winding down, like stars that died with their light still shining.

Maybe I can learn from the desert and the quiet of the Milky Way of dying stars. Learn that my carefree summers of swim lessons and bats; of my intuition about my future husband, and setting my Mom’s estate - are all part of the echoes we tell each other through our stories.

The Milky Way. The light from dead stars. We're all stardust. We all come from star dust and to star dust we shall return. As Carl Sagan said in his famous Pale Blue Dot broadcast, "This is where we live, on a blue dot. That's where everyone you know, and everyone you ever heard of, and every human being whoever lived, lived out their lives. It's a very small stage in a great cosmic arena.”

On the way back from Joshua Tree we stopped at friends in LA and listened to the last Beatles song “Now and Then” billed as a decades-long echo of John’s last words to Paul. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a watch on YouTube.

Like light from the stars and the stories we craft, what echoes can we leave before we become star dust again?

LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS BELOW.

Please leave a comment below and if you enjoyed this post, I invite you to subscribe to my thought echoes newsletter.