Lately, we have a few more to speak with.
art by Bruce Stuart
*
Yesterday, the signs were clear, and bad. Here in the neighborhood, the front door of the house across the street was kept open, with people sitting just inside in the passageway that doubles as a living room, and people coming with food, casserole dishes and such. It was so, there in the cold, when I went to bed at midnight.
This morning, I asked Samanta, my downstairs neighbor, on her way back from somewhere, rhetorically, because I already knew the answer, "Someone has died?" "Yes," she painfully replied, "the son."
Six months ago it was his father. A year before that it was his wife. Six months before that it was his brother. Now the 30-year-old son is gone, leaving a three-year-old daughter, who is cute as a button, to the care of her grandmother.
And it gets worse.
art by Bruce Stuart
*
The son and his daughter moved in after his father died six months ago. His two divorced sisters and their children already lived in the tiny windowless house, with only some open brickwork with a screen stretched over it where one day a window might be. The sisters work, but one sensed that their father, a driver in a car service, was the main source of livelihood for the extended family.
The son also chauffeured for a living, meticulously cleaning his car directly across from my house, often with his daughter lending a hand with her squirt gun. I would interact with them, mostly her, on my way to do yoga in the garden there.
Samanta didn't know how he died, but our next door neighbor Oscar later told me that he had been murdered, to which I replied: "That easy money is so attractive"
art by Bruce Stuart
*
Also yesterday, Wednesday, I learned of another death, this one in our foreigner (extranjero sounds so much nicer) community. Colorful Bruce Stuart, an accomplished, award-winning artist, died Monday, in bed, I understand of a heart attack. I have nine of Bruce's paintings (four individuals, and a set of five very small studies) hanging in my home, works he very generously gave me in exchange for publicity. I also have two of his Hawaiian shirts.
He volunteered at ALMA for years, thus acquiring first dibs on the used clothing, toys and records donated there. He dressed outrageously, and incorporated the toys into even more outrageous works or art, panoramas and three-dimensional mandalas. His wife, Claudia, died a year or so ago, also a wonderful person. I'm glad to imagine that they are reunited. He also leaves a child, Danny, in his late teens, whom they adopted from their housekeeper's troubled home when he was very young.
That's the bad news. Now for the good.
art by Bruce Stuart
*
This morning when I woke up my computer, I went to the email folder where my subscriptions land, a place I don't often visit. The subject line of the first email there (from Tablet Magazine) was "Talking to the Dead." This while quite independently, the night before, I had been preparing for publication the article on El Nigromante, the Necromancer, the Talker to the Dead.
I noted this coincidence in a message to a friend with whom I share such synchronicities, and she was duly impressed, as I was, as I hope you are too. And I thought about condolences Albert Einstein once offered.
Einstein had a very, very good friend, from his youth, a colleague who helped him greatly personally and with his physics, Michele Besso. Besso, who was also a physicist, going on to study philosophy, insisted that Special and General Relativity did not account for the passing of time.
In reply, Einstein asserted that since the laws of physics also operate in reverse, and so as time also moves backward, time does not "pass," is not relegated to the past: "Subjective time with its emphasis on now has no objective meaning."
On Besso's passing, four months before Einstein's death (he knew he had very little time), Einstein wrote:
"Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us... know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
Einstein and Besso
*
My father appeared to his sister and mine the night before he died. A theory of UFOs holds that they are not from a distant place, but from a distant time. They are our future selves, come back to help us along.
Our mind is not a by-product of the electrical activity of our brain, as standard science still insists. Be it souls or our future selves come to visit, our most essential self does not pass.
Consciousness is the truest, most abiding reality. Everything else, the whole "physical" universe, physicality itself, is only a metaphor, a lesson for our evolution.
Hyperattentive, I have made myself neurotic wondering what I am overlooking; what the things are that I still need to learn; what are my father's ghost, my future self, or the Universe in general trying to teach me.
Bruce Stuart
*
But lately I am broadening my perspective, and learning a bigger picture. Looking past this or that particular, I'm breathing more easily, seeing that in some universal, often inhuman way, everything is already ok. Heaven starts at home. I suppose that's why Buddha has a smile on his face.
**************
Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, our local social network, the community online and off, Atención robustly reborn for the digital age. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.
**************
*****
Please contribute to Lokkal,
SMA's online collective:
***
Discover Lokkal:
Watch the two-minute video below.
Then, just below that, scroll down SMA's Community Wall.
Mission
Visit SMA's Social Network
Contact / Contactar
