For several seasons, Joel and Maggie "do the dance" but never take the risk of love. Then suddenly it happens. Together, they touch the Philosopher's Stone, and base metal turns into gold. But dying to self is scary, so the ego goes to work, and whenever the Voice of their intimacy speaks, a gun goes off somewhere! It spooks them both, and she calls it off. -- She's used to running, he's used to his walls. But now the walls come tumbling down.

Joel is no longer the man he was. Having learned the two are really one, the scaffolding has fallen away. Blast-off into Infinite Sky! A bit too much for the ego-mind of Mr. Conservative New York Doctor. He chucks it all and leaves their town for the remote outback village of ... Manonash! Annihilation of the Conditioned Mind! I marvelled at Your imaginative ways!

Meanwhile, Maggie's back in town, closing the door to her larger life (at least for a while). Still, sometimes it bothers her: it's her fault that Joel has "gone off the deep end". So she travels up to Manonash to see if he's OK -- but only for a day, mind you, only for a day.

They dance like droplets upon a wave, from dawn till dusk, from forest to river, in Manonash! Mr. Convention is now Mr. Totally Free, like Tom Bombadil in Tolkein's tale. You can see the love in which he lives, rejoicing in the presence of the lovely mirror in which he first glimpsed his innermost self. "I feel like it's my fault", Maggie says, "that leaving you has brought you here". So Joel tells her of The Great Honey Mushroom.

"Do you see that mushroom over there? and this one here? and that one there? Do you see that cluster up on the ridge? and those lying further on down the hill?" Of course she does, but what of that? "They seem to be so many mushrooms -- separate, individual and alone. Yet the truth is hidden beneath the earth: there is only one root -- they are all the SAME ... the same one 'Honey Mushroom'."

Maggie listens silently. "So you see", he says, clear-eyed with love, "though you are there and I am here, I know that we are One." And so it seems the Avatar comes, not only as a man to all men in creation, but as Mushroom to all mushrooms too! "You and I are not 'we' but One." To Meher Baba!: the Great Honey Mushroom!