دل به دل راه دارد

I have always believed in the Persian quote "دل به دل راه دارد", "your heart is connected to my heart", which is used when one person thinks about the other person and finds out that they have also been thinking about them. It has always been true in my life, but today I experienced it once again and it confirms that it really is true. I had not thought about my cousin in a long time, and yesterday suddenly her thought knocked my mind. It really felt like that, suddenly, I think of her and tell myself to call her. Today in the mail I see I have a postcard from her. Did her thought knocked my mind's door at the very moment that the mailman left her card in my mailbox? eitherway, it is really cool.....

It brings me to think whether all the times that I have thought or dreamed intensly about my ex, he has also thought of me? I hope so.

p.s: ironically this picture was taken in a post-breakup, recovery trip!

the tale of two cities

My uncle, an Iranian-American who has been living in the U.S. since his mid 20s told me after I came back from my first visit to Iran a while back, and after I shared my ambivalence and confusion of which place I belong to, that "after a while, you don't belong to either of your hometowns, you just belong to two places, and you should embrace that."

I didn't believe it then or decided not to. I thought it was being complacent and it was cheating. I thought it was not just and I tried hard to keep belonging to the old place. Eleven years later I finally have come to understand what my uncle meant by that statement and have gotten to a point where I look at it that way too. Instead of seeing it as a limiting, complacent, coward point of view, I see it as abundance, having choices, and more traveling!

It is also the first time that I have come to accept that I am an 'immigrant' and not just an 'ex-pat' and a person in transition. That by itself brings a lot of other choosing. What is the best place to live in? what are the things that you should be looking for in a place that you chose to live in? It is not anymore as if you were born somewhere and it was your destiny to live there and the pros and cons of the place were just part of the package. It is now more like you have a multitude of places to chose from and you can set, prioritize, and decide on the criteria that makes a specific place appealing to you. This indeed is a great, free and open ended field with a lot of questions and a lot of unknowns.....

The first day I walked on the lawn of the university I had moved to attend in the U.S., it was a sunny beautiful August day, students were walking around in colorful outfits, the sky was vast and reflected the freedom and independence that was thrown at me upon this move. I had the world in front of me. Nothing like the university days of Iran, with the scarf, the morale ladies checking your outfit and bags at the entrance, the constant fear of what not to do wrong, and the ultimate lack of freedom. What was surprising was that I didn't feel 'happier'.
I told myself "هر جا که بروی آسمان همان رنگ است", which means, "every where you go the sky is the same color."

Wherever you go, the sky is the same, it is what you make out of it that makes the difference.

"Art" and friendship

I saw the play Art by Yasmina Reza last week. It is a neat story executed beautifully and actually less complex than I expected it to be. There is a lot of humour and many good lines in it. Three old friends go on a roller coaster of their friendship over the purchase of a very expensive minimalist white painting (a white canvas essentially) by one of them. The play starts on discussions of subjectivity of art and its value and very quickly moves to the psyche of friendship, and the battle of the egos.

The line that stood with me the most is "do you love me because of who I am, or because of who you are". In other words, in our friendships do we like the other person because of them, or because of how they make us feel about ourselves. Perhaps it is a mixture of both for many people. To me it is also the dance between the ego and the alter-ego; and aren't we all aiming to be our alter-egos eventually? Does this mean that a mature and complete friendship would be one where we love the other person for who they are and not necessarily for how they make us feel?

I had a clarifying conciliatory email exchange with a close friend today over a misunderstanding we had that we each in turn had hurt the other one. The misunderstanding was simple, I had said something in a tone that didn't sit well with my friend, and my friend had in return said something that did not sit well with me! Does that mean we are still not merged with our alter-egos and that our friendship is based on how we make each other feel? perhaps.

Art goes to a more radical place in the stirring of the friendship of these men where they actually question why they are friends, what keeps them together, and how they became friends in the first place. I personally believe in 'unconditional friendship' where there is no balance-sheets and where there is ample emotional generosity.

Art ends on another concept that I particularly ponder upon: perception is reality and does the truth really matter?

At the height of the friends' fighting over their friendship, Serge who has spent $40K on the white painting, asks Mark (the critic of the purchase and the piece) to draw on the painting with a marker. Mark draws a skier coming down a snowy hill. Later they 'find out' that the marker was erasable and so they erase the skier. Mark now connects to the white painting because 'the skier is an astronaut who has flown in the skies' by his interpretation. He never finds out about the fact that Serge knew about the erasable marker! Now is that Serge's genious to save the painting and the friendship or is that a lie? I think it is the 'white' lie that we should be allowed to say to whiten things up and keep friendships that are not yet based on the alter-egos thriving!


More on Yasmina Reza and Art: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/yasmina_reza/index.html

Love at first sight

A lot of us love movies where there is love at first sight. "Before Sunset" type of films that give that good feeling in our stomachs, thinking ah.... if and only if it was me, I would never let go of that opportunity. I would jump on it and grab it and go to the end of the relationship, I would live it inside out, top to bottom, all around, over and over again.

My best friend S. today told me one of those stories. A guy whom she has never met personally but has worked with over the phone, meets with her at a professional lunch, and an hour later emails her telling her that he believes that "in life there are moments where there is a before and an after." He later tells her that "after seeing her, his world has shifted and they have to meet."

I can not even count the number of times that I have fantasized about that type of courage. I have been on the train where upon a simple look, I have felt I should go to the person and tell them we should have coffee and know each other more.... There is zero times however, that I have done that in reality.

And the question is why haven't I done it and why do I think the guy who approached S. is crazy? Is it the fear of rejection? the societal pressure of being rude, blunt, pushy, too forward, presumptuous, or just our self instigated shyness or is it that the longing and the fantasy is gratifying already. Why do we love it in movies, but when it happens to us we think it is 'crazy'.


On the 'crazy' point it might just be that S.'s guy was possessed by the "love darts" Eros and Cupid. I hope they hit me with their darts too!


In the classical world, the phenomenon of "love at first sight" was understood within the context of a more general conception of passionate love, a kind of madness or, as the Greeks put it, theia mania ("madness from the gods"). This love passion was described through an elaborate metaphoric and mythological psychological schema involving "love's arrows" or "love darts" such as Eros or Cupid. (Wikipedia!)

p.s: I forgot to mention my friend N. does believe in love at first sight and has experienced it.

fekr o zekr

Starting to blog finally! Reading Sioban Lombardi's blog http://artandthinking.blogspot.com/ inspired me to start one. Her engaging writing style, and the variety of subjects, from her best friend's birthday wishes to feminist art is very stimulating.
now I have to remember to write and make sure I don't use too many passive tenses!

Fekr = thought in Persian

Zekr = prose/words/talks in Persian