In Midnights, In Cups of Coffee

This post is horribly overdue - I should have posted it about three weeks ago. But...life is what it is, right now and time and space feel weird and strange, so here we are.

I have been a Baha'i for an entire year, now. I formally declared in a friend's living room three days before Naw Ruz in 2019, and here we are, in a brand new year. This year looks a whole lot different than the last one, but not all for the negative. So...I figured, in light of all the hard things in the world right now, I'd talk about some of the awesome good that has come out of life in the last year.

Being part of the Baha'i community here has...exploded my life in a lot of really neat ways. I know a lot more people locally than I ever did, and they have showed me such amazing love. A friend recently said something about all the Baha'is they knew being amazingly kind humans, and...oh, they are not wrong. The ways these people have accepted me, in my altogether true, and have helped me find ways to serve and grow alongside them has been astonishing. These are the people of my heart, and I am so glad Baha'u'llah has helped me find them.

My husband is here now! We did the immigration dance, and he came here in June last year, on our second wedding anniversary. I am so incredibly grateful he's here - especially now. Having someone to talk to, to snuggle up to, to play video games with, to cook with...it's still magical in a million ways. I know a lot of people prayed for us and hoped for us and helped us along the way, and I still am sometimes startled and delighted that we got here.

I've found a lot of strengths inside myself I didn't know I had. I'm willingly going out and being social and attending lots of devotionals and other community events now - because my community has made me feel safe and welcome. And sure, it helps that right now they're video chats so I can do it from the comfort of my computer chair at home, but still - I love that there is a place for me to be a part of such an awesome community who is trying really hard to be a force for such good in the world.

I've been making our Baha'i community newsletter every nineteen days for a while now - I've learned so much about design and accessibility and how to make sure that people get the news and information they need in a way that's easy, aesthetically pleasing, and not too intimidating. I've really enjoyed learning the programs I'm using, and seeing how happy this connection to each other has made others in my community. It doesn't feel like I am doing something all that big, but here we are.

I've started recording myself reading various books from my childhood, as a way to spread some joy in the world. I'm posting them on Facebook and Twitter, and it's just been fun to share these happy things in the world, to give people a moment to breathe, to forget the world outside, and just enjoy a fun thing.

This year has been a lot of change. A lot of new things, a lot of hard things, and the world feels like it's a whole lot of struggle right now. So I thought focusing on some bright moments might help. We're going to get through this together, friends. As the Universal House of Justice reminded the Baha'is of the world in a Naw Ruz letter they sent us a short time ago, "However difficult matters are at present...humanity will ultimately pass through this ordeal, and it will emerge on the other side with greater insight and with a deeper appreciation of its inherent oneness and interdependence." We're in this together, my lovelies. We've got each other, and we're gonna make it through. The world will not be quite the same, but there are still flowers that are gonna bloom and birds that are gonna sing and somehow, we'll find a way. Take care of each other, love each other..

I hope to hear about the things that made your heart bubble up with joy over this past year, and maybe even what you're looking forward to in the months to come. We've got this. Today might be hard, but tomorrow will come. It might be hard too, but that's okay. We'll face it together.

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.