THIS Rhett Butler Will Never Die

 One of the most powerful women in my life was Sita. She was an upper-echelon devotee of Gurumayi, during the years I was involved with the ashram in Oakland. She knew Muktananda. I don't remember exactly how she and I met. I should ponder that some... the moment and situation in which she and I met and started our journey together... it must have been a seemingly inconsequential meeting in the Amrit (ashram dining room)... wow, some scenes are coming back to my memory... I think it might have been during a busy morning in the Amrit, perhaps a Sunday after the Guru Gita was chanted and I decided to ask if I could sit at her table because the Amrit would have been full, and it was at a time when my defenses of shyness were weakened... ashram life did that for me, opened my heart, emboldened me to just be myself and not be afraid of meeting new people. I had no intention of trying to make a connection with Sita... I don't even know if I had ever seen her before. I might have. I m...

I spent the last 5 years nurturing a very powerful friendship with a young woman half my own age. She literally became the best friend I've had since I left Santa Cruz when I last lived there in 1995. We went through a lot of changes, she and I, during these five years. There were times when we were extremely close and spoke to each other every single day, and then there were times when we would vanish into our separate cocoons of isolative depression for months. We learned a lot of things together too. This was one of the highlights of our friendship, how we would discover something new that we wanted to learn to do, and we would practice developing these new skills together. Another thing that was powerful about our friendship was how dynamic it was. We adapted to what was going on in the other person's life. I don't want to spend a whole lot of time going into details of what I'm talking about, that's not what this post is about. I want to talk about changes I...