Numerous times I pondered my dream, even going over it in psychoanalysis. It seemed a vision of beauty and power, but what puzzled me was the warrior's arrow sent into the child's open and defenseless heart. I began to think it was perhaps a sign for my childhood to end and my adult warrior self to emerge. To help myself understand the powerful symbolic imagery, I made a large painting of a warrior holding an arrow in a drawn bowstring. Not until Naomi was suddenly diagnosed with advanced cancer did I gradually comprehend that the dream might have signified future events in not only my life but also my child's. Fortunately, I did not witness dying. I thought, the dream did not foretell death maybe, but rather the transfer of power.

When I first met the woman who would be Naomi's mother, we exchanged greetings on a winter morning at the mailbox in front of the downtown Santa Fe Post Office. I could not have guessed then what she would mean to me-that from the two of us, Naomi would come into the world and forever our souls would be linked. My soul was almost intuitively drawn to this woman. We engaged easily, and I liked her openness and easy laughter as she stood in front of me wearing a yellow ski jacket, her auburn hair tucked into a red knit cap. Something else drew me to her as well, which at the time I hardly understood. My soul glimpsed a maiden standing on an uneven precipice, in danger of falling, and instinctively I reached out to hold her, perhaps because I too have an ambient personality, and had at times in my life stood perilously on a precipice.

Kathleen spoke fluent Spanish, which she had learned while growing up in the Canal Zone of Panama, and now at the age of thirty was unemployed. I was twenty-seven and a budding artist, fresh out of art college. My artistic soul was attracted to her because she had an enigmatic, childlike presence and seemed full of contradictions: she was fragile and stubborn, hopeful and lost, friendly yet distant. And there was always that awesome precipice she stood upon.