new year's eve, 2013

Andree here.  Happy New Year's Eve, everybody.  I hope wherever you are it is warm and dry and you're with people who make you smile.  Maybe you're thinking of E and your memories are making you smile (Dean did that for me on Facebook today when he posted a funny Xerox of Erik's face that he found).
About the picture:  long story short, I took a leap of faith in the fall by leaving a job which, though destructive and humiliating, was utterly stable. I haven't found its replacement yet.  But a few weeks back, when I was deep in angst over my future or rather my perceived lack thereof, I woke up to find two things:  one, somebody had grabbed my special pink pumpkin I'd bought at my favorite farm stand, and smashed it on the sidewalk;  two, someone else had left this Buddha yard statue front and center on the porch to greet me when I opened the front door.  They did this deep in the night, as I'd been up till ten and was up before six.  I have still not got any clue of his source.
Clearly, I thought, it was time to have a little more faith in the random possibilities of the universe now.

So that happened.  

But I miss Erik still, in ways I don't understand until they have manifested (and then I have to explain).

And then I found this year's Rumi poem, which I keep hearing in E's voice:

The Body is Too Slow for Me

Toward the gardens,
Toward the orchards,
I am going.
If you want to stay here,
Stay here -
I am going!
My day is dark without His Face,
Toward that bright flame
I am going.

My soul is racing ahead of me.
It says, The body is too slow for me -
I am going.

The smell of apples arises
from the orchard of my soul.
One whiff and I am gone -
Toward a feast of apples
I am going.

A sudden wind won't blow me over.
Toward Him, like a mountain of iron,
I am going.

My shirt is ripped open
with the pain of loss.
Searching for a new life,
with my head held high,
I am going.

I am fire, though I seem like oil -
Seeking to be the fuel of His fire,
I am going.

I appear as a steady mountain
Yet bit by bit,
Toward that tiny opening
I am going.

From: A Garden Beyond Paradise: The Mystical Poetry of Rumi
Ode 1668 Version by Jonathan Star
from a translation by Shahram Shiva
- See more at: http://allspirit.co.uk/rumi2.html#sthash.UyUP63Zx.dpuf