In reading the news coverage of a "war on terror," that has no conceivable end, one phrase surfaces in article after article. It's "deja vu all over again." Deja vu as we look at the cast of characters from the first Bush Administration, playing new roles in the unfolding drama. Deja vu of the "Gulf War" as the Bush Administration Redux readies itself to complete unfinished business. Deja vu of the Reagan era as we, again, declare war on "terror," fight "evil," and revert to such ill conceived notions as tactical nuclear weapons and a star wars missile defense shield. For those of us ancient enough to remember Atlantis, it is deja vu, indeed.

Several years ago, while standing on a subway platform in mid-town Manhattan, I had a chilling, deja vu moment. Zoning out, as one only can while waiting for the subway train that never comes and staring too long at the endless grid pattern of ceramic tile, I was overwhelmed by a sudden awareness. "This is what it felt like right before Atlantis fell. This is exactly what it felt like." The experience left me deeply unsettled.

For some time before that, I had lost my taste for Giuliani's New York, a gentrified -- and Disnified -- imitation of it's former, brutal honesty. More than that, the shifts in vibration were growing intolerable to me. In the seven years that I worked in the city, I had been aware of something growing increasingly wrong. In the years that followed it only got worse. The pavement felt off-kilter, somehow. The air did not taste right. Always a vibrational cacophony, the energy of the city had gone from bracing to physically painful. The inescapable feeling was one of impending doom.

New York is the city of my birth. Years later it was the city outside my window, a spectacular view from my various New Jersey residences. I have loved that city for my entire life. In the intervening years that I spent living in Ohio, it's siren's song echoed through my head, assuring that I could never be comfortable in that flat state so far from my origins. Even now, it is, in many ways, my center of gravity.

Imagine my astonishment as I felt more and more pushed by greater forces to flee the area, to run as far and as fast as I could, ending up on the other side of the country, in Southern California. Now, one could say the destination was obvious, and that there was no reason other than to join my beloved, stationed here with the Marine Corps. Indeed, it was largely the stirrings of a new life determined to be.

A year after my cross country trek, I lay in a hospital bed nursing my newborn daughter. After an arduous pregnancy and life threatening delivery, I lay exhausted but overjoyed by the miracle in my arms. It was 6:00 in the morning. Clicking through channels on the hospital television, images of home caught my eye. "Why is there smoke coming out of the World Trade Center?" I wondered. It was September 11, 2001. The events that unfolded before my eyes, in real time, are now engraved in the annals history. And, I wept. I wept for lives lost. I wept for the destruction of a magnificent structure, a symbol of the greatness of the city of my birth, the most stunning element of my beloved skyline. I wept for what I knew would follow. War.

As I looked at the face of my beautiful child, and beyond it to the ancient, wise Atlantean she was, in that time of yore, I could not help but wonder why she chose this moment, in time, to burst determinedly onto the earth plane again. I see her other lives, lives spent as a warrior. Indeed, in the roughly five years that I had known her spirit before it forced its way into physical incarnation, her warrior nature has been clear to me. She is her father's daughter, after all.