You'll Always Follow the Voices Beneath

I read a lot. Like a lot a lot. As of earlier today, I've read 244 books since January 1st. My e-reader is always in my bag wherever I go, I read while I walk, I read on the bus, I read everywhere and I read super fast. It's just something I've always been able to do - I started reading really young, and I just...never stopped. I like books! They're my constant companions.

The only problem is, though, is that I read in my head. I very rarely have to read out loud in my day to day life, so I've never really thought about it - there've been a number of words where I am not always sure if how my brain reads them is how they should come out of my mouth, but I can mostly get by without worry. That is, until relatively recently, when I've been asked to read things as part of Ruhi circles, or during the devotional portion of Feast! All of a sudden I am tackling language out loud in a way that I've never really had to do before. And often, I'm reading things from the Writings, which means dealing with language patterns that are often unfamiliar to me - it's the language of revelation, modelled on the language patterns of the King James Bible, and sometimes my tongue gets tangled in the bigness of not only the words, but the concepts themselves. 

Not only that, I'm doing this in front of a number of people - if it's my Ruhi circle, it might only be a small handful, but if it is a devotional, it's a bigger handful, and if it's Feast, it means a relatively big handful (or maybe even both my cupped hands). I know my community is just grateful for my willingness to do it, but it trips me up hard. I read in my head with so much ease, but suddenly I'm in front of people and my tongue and my brain just struggle with working together.

On top of all this - I'm a very anxious human. So I'm often trying to read, and also likely wiggling/stimming/twitching/flapping/moving some parts of me at the same time, and also probably giving up on the idea of making eye contact entirely. All of my focus goes to making sure I give the words I am reading the respect they so deserve. I manage pretty well (although words like quintessence and omnipotence never fail to tangle my tongue.)

It's one of the weird moments in my life where I can really notice some of my more neuroatypical traits, and it's kinda jarring sometimes. I mean yes, I often end up with my fidget cube in my fingers at some point during the longer bits of Feast so my brain can pay attention, or I handflap when I get really excited (come on, how could you not be excited by the phrase "That time has come." from the 2019 Ridvan message?), but those just feel like extensions of my emotions or an attempt to make sure I'm giving people my attention and focus. When I have to read out loud in front of people, there's a little voice in the back of my head going "NOT ONLY are we reading out loud BUT ALSO people are gonna notice you're twisting and rubbing your fingers or tapping your feet or or or or or".

So a lot of this is just me...learning in public, I guess, how to accept myself in all of myself, in all of my most imperfectnesses. I might need to practice reading out loud (my cat makes an excellent captive audience), I might not ever be able to properly look people in the eye as I read prayers or quotes from the Writings, I might always be a twitchy kinetic stimming bouncing joy bean - and that's okay. I'm Ash, and I'm always trying. As Baha'u'llah tells us, O SON OF BEING! Bring thyself to account each day ere thou art summoned to a reckoning" - which to me has always felt like a reminder that I should always think about my actions, and always strive to keep a humble posture of learning, no matter what. So, I will keep reading at Feast, I'll keep embracing my handflaps of joy and the way hearing about some aspects of pilgrimage or the history of the Baha'i Faith literally making me have to lie down on the floor flattened with my limbs stretched out like a starfish. 

On the Edge of the World, or Wherever We Are

Sometimes, I feel so grounded in my physical spot in the world. My house, the street I live on, my city, the people I see every day. the bus routes I take, that's my whole world. Other days, I delight in the joy that my world is SO much bigger than that - I have friends scattered all over the globe, in so many different time zones and countries and cities and towns and places. I spend a lot of time online - when I struggle with facing the outside world (it's gotten better, but sometimes, the world is still too big and I am still so very small), my pocket friends (they live in my phone, which fits in my pocket, mostly) were always there for me. Heck, they still are, all the time. We share our lives in a million ways, big and small.

If it wasn't for that sort of online existence, so much of my life would be different. I'd not have my fantastic husband (met him on Stack Exchange, in one of the Arqade chat rooms), or most of my best friends, I'd not have learned about the Baha'i Faith, I'd've probably struggled more with various aspects of my personality and identity, but here I am, as whole as I can make myself, with a pretty cool bunch of humans at my back.

I know the internet is so ubiquitous now that a lot of people don't blink at the idea of having pocket friends in countries they've never heard of (I've had to explain where Guam is a lot, and I've gotten a lot better at American and European geography, and time zone math!), but it still delights me endlessly that I can just...find these people. It's given me so many different perspectives and things to delight in. 

It does make things uniquely complex, though - try getting friends together for some role-playing games when you've got up to a 14 hour time difference involved, or remembering who is sleeping and who is awake when you found the BEST comic that you just HAVE to share. That's not even mentioning the giant pile of immigration paperwork and time and money and prayers it took to get my husband here! Add in my meatspace localish friends who I *can* physically hang out with, and sometimes I am just very glad for things like my Google calendar to sort out when and where I gotta be. 

I'd not change it for anything, though. My friends are some of the best people I could ever ask for. They've seen me through joys, and sorrows, through weddings and births and sicknesses and graduations and so many things in between.

I've been thinking about my friends a lot lately, as my life goes through all of this change. How I've come to realize that these people are still here, still supporting me through all of this chaos and magic and joy, and it's really been bringing home this idea of unity in diversity that happens to be one of the core tenets of the Baha'i Faith.  As Baha'u'llah stated, in one of the Hidden Words, "O CHILDREN OF MEN! Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other. Ponder at all times in your hearts how ye were created. Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land, that from your inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness and the essence of detachment may be made manifest."

We're all different - different places, different thoughts, different looks and hearts and wants and needs and experiences. Our relationships to each other aren't perfect, we still fight and argue and have impassioned discussions about how the world should be, but we're also lucky to be able to see outside ourselves, to understand that this tiny spot of ground we happen to put our feet isn't all the world is. 

It seems like lately the world is convinced we need to be divided - along country lines, states/provinces, gender, sexuality, religion, whenever we can shove each other into neatly labelled boxes so we can have an us and a them, where the us is good and the them is bad, the world seems to delight in it. It breaks my heart. 

Maybe you don't have a world-spanning online community, but I challenge you to start looking outside your boxes. It's not going to be easy (I still struggle with some of the challenges of the different perspectives and personalities I encounter, both online and in meatspace, every day), but I think it's worth doing. Maybe you'll just learn a new food you've not encountered, maybe you'll make a new friend, maybe it won't go perfectly at all - but if we are going to make the world better, maybe we can all try to stretch ourselves a little further, open our arms a little wider.