Gateway to a Golden Summer
There's a road in my head. Gravel, straight, cutting through tall gold grass toward a sun that's just about to drop below the horizon. A split-rail fence runs alongside it, weathered gray, the kind that's been standing since before anyone remembers who built it. I didn't find that image — I went looking for it, when I needed a picture to sit behind the words "Anybody But You," the song I've been building for Judy, about the road that led me to her in New Ulm.
So you can imagine what happened when I opened the Monroe Institute's Expand app the other day, scrolling through meditation titles for something to pair with an evening in the SolTech chair, and found one called Gateway to a Golden Summer.
Same road. Same fence. Same light. I sat there for a second not quite believing it, the way you do when two things that have no business being connected turn out to rhyme anyway.
A Thread Three Decades Long
The more I sat with it, the less it looked like a one-off coincidence and the more it looked like a thread I'd just never stood back far enough to see all at once.
Childhood: My father hands me P.D. Ouspensky, planting the first seed of a lifelong interest in consciousness and metaphysics.
1989: I attend a Monroe Institute workshop — Bob Monroe's whole project built on the idea that sound, patiently engineered, can open gateways into wider states of awareness.
2026, earlier this year: I write "Anybody But You," and reach — instinctively, no research, no mood board — for a golden sunset road as the visual shorthand for the day I met Judy.
2026, this week: I open the Monroe Institute's Expand app for an evening in the SolTech chair and find their own "Gateway to a Golden Summer" — same road, same fence, same light.
Coincidence Isn't the Opposite of Meaning
Maybe it's nothing. Two people, decades apart, independently landing on "golden light, open road, going toward something" as shorthand for a threshold moment — that's not exactly a rare well to draw from. Sunset roads are a cliché for a reason; they're how a lot of us picture the start of something.
But I don't think coincidence and meaning are actually opposites. I think that's a false choice a lot of people box themselves into. A coincidence can be unremarkable in its mechanics and still be worth paying attention to — not because the universe is sending a memo, but because it hands you a moment to notice a thread running through your own life that you hadn't stood back far enough to see. In this case: a father's early gift of Ouspensky, a 1989 workshop, a chair built for exactly this kind of listening, and a love song written more than three decades later — all of it, it turns out, was walking down the same gold road the whole time.