Date sent: Tue, 28 Mar 2000 02:20:10 +0100

Dear lists and friends! I've turned my computer on again tonight because my head does not want to sleep till one of this day's joys is shared with you.

At 6 pm Monday, Euston bus station is lit by the strange, filtered sunlight you only see when mist, rain and sunshine mix in the air -a light that seems to simply exist without source. The red bench of the bus shelter is perfect for my big backpacker's "rücksack", so I squat in front of it and feel my shoulders release when the big bag rests on the bench. From my frog perspective I enjoy the towering red buses and black, depressed Euston-columns that seem to resist magical light and emphasize that they are not the origin nor have anything at all to do with it.

Two children in front of me are busy playing, too busy to notice the stranger who suddenly has folded himself down to their eye-height. A sister and a slightly younger brother, dark-skinned, white- clothed, belonging to the light in their carefree existence at the bus station where they like the light seem so displaced that you wonder where they came from. But circumstances and asphalt no longer counts - this space belongs to them and is filled with a little game that threatens to bounce her backwards into me. My hand is ready to stop her, though hesitant... "Careful!" Noone could help smiling to those four curious and completely unembarassed eyes. And the eyes happen to find the smile extraordinarily funny. Laughing, pointing, the boy looking at me through a circle of his indexfinger and thumb. Follow improvised game of me pretending to hide behind my "Big issue" rough sleeper-sold magazine and re-emerging to smiles and the continuous use of fingercircles, which makes me produce my broken glasses from my pocket. According to the reaction, they must have turned into comedians on my nose!

All this has been going on un-noticed on higher levels, but now the father rising above the three of us, is poked: see, a smiling stranger!! Behind the smile, I'm a bit worried about how I appear from the parental angle, but he doesn't seem to mind the odd guy squatting on the pavement to smile at his kids. A few more smile-sharings, and they enter nr. 59, calling "bye!". 59 would have taken me to Waterloo, but I'm still a bit worried about the father's impression of me, I don't want him to think I'm following them, so I stay put. As the bus starts rolling, they emerge in the upper floor- windows, waving bye. Good bye and God bless you, my little friends!

Hardly a minute had passed, but what a minute! The memories of seconds of trust, of un-selfconscious curiosity and a generosity of joy sieve through my soul like the misty light through Euston. While growing up, I sometimes had the feeling that a world was slowly closing behind me: the world of childhood, the world where I was not a big and dangerous person, but one of them. That's something I never again will be, but ocassions of trust are golden nuggetts from a time that is gone, nuggets hidden in the river bed of life among enormous amounts of grey sand. The sand doesn't matter. The gold does..

Thus, trust is one of the most beautiful things I know in the world, and when I experience these moments, striken with awe I wonder: why do they trust me? Where does mistshine and trustmiracles come from?