Sunday, July 18, 2004

When You Go Out Looking for Yourself, You End Up Finding Others...

I think that's how we're living...couldn't sleep last night. Revceived a late phone call from a dear and special friend who took me under his masculine wing and shepherded me through some rough times a few years back and it was such a joy to hear from him. Said the prayer for the departed for Juliet Thompson, who was a bohemian baha'i who wrote the book I, Mary Magdalene.  Three years ago, when I first met Mike, he'd invite me over to his house and have me read outloud excerpts from Juliet Thompson's diary, smiling to hismelf when I'd verbally butcher the persian.
 
Juliet was good friends with Kahil Gibran and there's a little story about Gibran not accepting the Baha'i faith b/c he could not imagine that there was anyone "greater" than Abdu'l-baha...
 
The world is still a swift blur which is healthy. As far as my cyclical nature ensues, whenever a transition in my life takes place , thumbing to the next chapter of my on--going autobiography so to speak, everything kind of smudges together, wads into a global nearsight and then unfolds in perfect stain-glass symmetry. Happens every time.  My emotional mettle transforms into a creative zygote that eventually evolves to the next rung. The next pillar.
 
And of course (the last two years esp---over exerting my health by always working)  the frequent insomnia serves as a spiritual needle stiching patches of my life back together. I'm reliving my father's death. I'm raking up my sins and foibles into a bushel of yesterday, dousing the leafy heap with fuel and striking a match. I'm trying to become the person I feel like I'm perenially suppose to be. I've realized that, even if your piss-poor in America, you still have it far better off than over ninety-percent of your sibblings globally dotted across this little solar island called earth. This tidy home of ours, a welcoming matt for the soles (souls) of the future, with dwindling ethnic obstructions and a cultivating spiritual linearity.
 
And yet we're still here. Still ensconced in the blurred moment. Still falling in love kicking and screaming, like a newborn, pushing way out, learning how to breathe, how to suckle, how to crawl and eventually....how to give. 




2 comments:

Arya said...

I love the book "I, Mary Magdadene" it's one of my favorites. I actually wanted that book for a long time and one great day, I found a copy (signed by Juliet herself!). She inscribed it to a dear friend but as I was reading it, and I had to break open those old pages for the first time, I realized that this book went directly from her hand into mine because I was the first person who had ever read it. It was an amazing experience. Did you know that 'Abdu'l-Baha compared her to Mary and that her own story very much mirrors that of Mary's? In fact, I think this was the story of Mary the way 'Abdu'l-Baha told it to Juliet and the portraits that she drew of Christ and Mary were self-portraits. Interesting book.

David Von Behren said...

I look forward to hanging out with Juliet in the Bohemian vector of the next world--a studio garrett, of course, with bad heat, no drapes and strong coffee.