Consensous

X3 was terrible.

Superman Returns was great.

DC - 2, Marvel - 1/2

If it ended today

I was given an audience today by my boss, around eight thirty in her office. She actually didn't schedule anything as much as she walked over and asked me if now was a good time to meet regarding the email I sent her yesterday. We sat down and I began as my butt hit the black, canvas chair, "I was hired on for a special project that was to last four to six weeks." "Right." "I've been here nearly three months. What is the status of this?"

She proceeded to tell me that things didn't take off as they thought they would, and the special project hadn't grown at all but flopped around like the only fish left in what was once a creek. Then she killed the fish. "I couldn't see us keeping you past the middle of July." When was this decision made? Was there some plan to have a ninja drop a pink slip on my desk to disappear just as quickly? Leaving me to my leaving?

So, it looks as though I'll be canned in the next two weeks. My job search has become frantic, arms and phone flailing, trying to find a lake, river or pond to supplant myself. There's a quote in Ruhi Book One about the "privacy of his chamber" that our Study Circle had been discussing this past Monday. The chamber is obviously something physical, but could it also be something within us? A place we can go to connect with God? The kind of connection found only when we open ourselves up and allow the chamber to be occupied by God and ourselves. To be comforted, genuine and One.

I have some work ahead of me.

Positive Introspection

I met with Julie Walker yesterday morning in the African themed office of her olive home. Orange, brown and yellow earth-tone images of flat lands, stereotypical African animals viewed as if through a camera with a child-like lense. The kind that simplifies things. Turns an otherwise complex scene of a "man eating" animal into something to walk up to, pet and nestle matted fur. Fall asleep to the giant beasts heaving chest. To yank on mane without recourse. I sat in a non-descript, brown chair as she initially scanned me with her eyes, trying to conjure up some kind of idea as to what she saw when she looked at me. Images of organs in movement, blood, in intervals, pumped into and out of the heart, an electrical impulse sprinting up thin chords to the brain? How would I look? She occasionally looked down at a stack of papers, photocopies, nearly blank, with three pictures running along the left side to take down quick notes. The first two images were actually next to each other moving left to right, of the human body; one of the body as if the skin had been removed, the other as if the muscles had been removed. It reminded me of this short statue of the human body my dad passed down to me when I was a kid. It frightened me at night, standing upright on the metal shelving, a clear plastic layer encasing the body allowing anyone to see every organ. A small piece of browned, aging tape would keep the "door" the size of three-quarters of the torso shut on the front to prevent the small intestines and lungs from falling out and clanging against the brown colored aluminum below. I would wake up in the middle of the night and see it looking down at me, looking through me as I did to it. Like a test subject or an American doctor to his/her patient. I felt ashamed knowing that I could see all its parts, and it's lifeless, painted eyes could do nothing but look straight. The last image, at the bottom, left of the page was of a start with four circles. The first circle surrounded the star and seemed to do little more than encapsulate the image, add an enclosure for the artistic work within it. The other circles were housed within the start itself, one seemingly growing from the other. She explained that one represented God, the next his manifestations and the last humanity. It lay on the page as a different interpretation of the Baha'i ring stone symbol, one to be used by Ms. Walker to diagram what she saw of the spirit.

She looked me over several times, her eyes rifling back and forth across and down my body as if studying it intently. Letting out interested breaths that were surprisingly uninvasive and in some how different from when a random gent off the street looks, memorizes a passerby. Soon there after she began asking questions and offering up observations of what she saw. Her words seemed so close to me, so incredibly exact to what I heard every day in my own head that I refused to look away unless diving into my own memories to answer a question she had posed for me. After the meeting, my satisfaction worn across my face, I walked to my car in what would be described by others as a jaunt meditating on specifics. Moderating a conversation inside my head about the last hour. Spending time to detach myself from anything but the millions of images, thoughts and concepts that lined up, single file to be heard.