In Search of All Things Beautiful

I wanted to start this post with apologies for absenses, for reasons for time away, for all of those things you feel you have to say when you stopped doing a thing and hid for a good long while. But...I am not going to! Because that's not what I am here for. I'm here to be a compassionate joyful being, so let's do that instead. 

One of the compliments I get a lot is how open I am, how I am really good at small joy and delight and making people feel cozy and comfortable. I've been thinking about that a lot lately, and what that means and how it works and how I make it happen...and my brain just stops. Like...I don't know! There's no secret sauce, it's just...I think about all the times in my life I felt like I didn't fit, that I was unhappy and lonely and how much that hurt. So I seek joy, first and foremost, and I make sure I can make room for people to also feel that joy. Can it be that simple?

I have been praying with some friends lately, just because. I kinda forgot how to pray for a while, which sounds silly because as a Baha'i, we have all these amazing prayers that Baha'u'llah and Abdu'l-Baha and The Bab revealed for us, but there's a difference, I think, between "I can read these words out loud like a parrot repeating stuff they've heard but don't understand" and "My heart is using this to talk to God". But slowly, I am figuring out how to open that part of me again. It feels good to sprinkle those drops of joy into the world, slowly, on my own terms.

This quote has been on my mind a lot, too. It feels like a HUGE ask, to be a centre of attraction, just by...being. How does that even work?
 

At first I decided I couldn't ever do this, that I wouldn't ever be enough of the right things. I think of all the ways Baha'is talk about Abdu'l-Baha as like our best and brightest example of how to do all of the Baha'i everything, and my brain just stalls out. I might like cats and I might be good at sharing cake, but I can't ever do all of these things! I can't! It's impossible! I'm never going to get all of these things right enough to ever have the people of a city unquestionably say I'm a Baha'i....can I? 

One of the things I'm re-learning lately, though, is that it doesn't have to be an all or nothing proposition. Sure, I might be SUPER bad at things some days, but God made me and wanted a me just like me in the world, so I might not be perfect, but I'm here for something. 

So I will keep loving on people, I will keep dancing to my music when I walk, I'll keep sharing cake and helping neighbours figure out Zoom, I'll keep being all of my authentic self, because I think that's how we do this. We exist, we breathe, we love, we admit we don't have it all together, but that we're going to keep trying. And we say prayers, we cry, we laugh, we dance, we tell people how awesome we think they are. If we keep showing love, compassion, and honestly share of ourselves, then that's how people will see how Baha'is are. 

We're not perfect. And that's okay! We don't have to be. In fact, some of my best conversations about Baha'i life have come from me admitting how often I feel like I am secretly three trash pandas in a trench coat desperately pretending that we're a whole and functioning adult. Because it takes off some of that weird expectation that faith needs perfection. It doesn't! We're all messy. 

Love yourselves, friends, even when you're messy. You're always worth that love. I'll remind you of that, endlessly and always. 

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.