And, like always, Mama was right!
Hi! I’m back after a bit of a hiatus. Life happens, you know. In the past month I’ve been to the United States (see my April 13 blog post Total Eclipse) and back home to Paris.
I’m also working again – after 9 years of “indolent” retirement….
Actually I’m being a bit ironic.
Indolent? In those 9 “lazy” years I’ve written 3 books, over 60 weekly blog posts, and recorded a 6-song EP – not to mention packing up my home in the US and moving to Paris – after a challenging year-long adventure with Stage IV cancer!
The “work” is a labor of love: walking all over Paris for 5 hours, showing groups of visitors the city that I love. I get to share my passion and my knowledge of Paris Histories & Mysteries.
I’m making money, getting in 12,000 steps a day, meeting cool people from all over the world and seeing the sights – sights I see every day, but seeing them afresh and new through the eyes of people who are seeing Paris for the first time.
I’ve had people cry at their first sight of the Eiffel Tower….
I’m also being ironic with my title, Mama told me there’d be days like these.
The actual title of the song is Mama Said by the Shirelles. It’s a song about the mixed-up feelings we have when something good is happening and we don’t know how to feel.
Mama said we would have days of confusion, joy and sadness mixed.
My favorite Paris movie is Paris Je t’Aime a 2006 anthology starring many famous American and French actors. Each vignette is directed by a different director.
The penultimate scenario stars the wonderful Margo Martindale as an American postal worker who has gone to Paris (alone) for the first time, to see the sights and practice her French.
She has been taking French classes and she narrates the segment as a student giving a report in front of her class.
You can watch the short 6-minute segment here.
The scene is amazingly funny and very poignant. At the end she is sitting in a park eating a sandwich and a feeling comes over her that she cannot identify. She has never felt this before.
Then, she puts her finger on it! She says:
A feeling came over me, as if I recalled something, something that I had never known and for which I had been waiting. But I didn’t know what it was. Maybe it was something I had forgotten, or something I had missed my whole life.
I can only tell you that at the same time I felt joy and sadness, but not a great sadness. Because I felt alive.
Yes. Alive.
It was at that moment that I fell in love with Paris, and the moment I felt that Paris had fallen in love with me.
The human experience is wild roller coaster ride of events, people, times, emotions, surprises, boredom, choices, relationships, births and deaths, ups and downs, highs and lows.
Maybe it takes an extraordinary event to wake us up and begin to have eyes that see and ears that hear. Maybe it only takes an ordinary event that happens at a moment when we are ready to receive with a full heart and an open mind.
One of my most profound mystical experiences happened in (of all places) a large shopping mall.
It was near Halloween. I was going back to the store I worked at after eating. I walked the mall full of people, many families with kids in costume. Music was playing on the sound system.
Suddenly I had this sudden shift in my consciousness. It was if everything slowed down, like a slo-mo segment in a movie. I was looking at all the people, all shapes and sizes and colors and ages….
….and I did not see them in my usual way of judging and evaluating people (This one is cute; This one is fat; This one is old; etc.)
I saw them as they were, through – the only way I can describe it – through eyes of love. I felt immense love, acceptance, compassion, warmth toward each and every one of them.
I noticed this feeling, this revelation, and I was afraid that, by noticing, it would vanish….
But it didn’t vanish, it persisted and persisted for quite a long while.
I’ll never forget the bliss, the easiness, the complete non-judgmental acceptance and benevolence I felt. Total compassion and love.
American author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich, who describes herself as "a myth buster by trade," describes a normal activity: walking out the door, which without warning turned into a mystical experience.
I stepped out alone, walked into the streets of Lone Pine, Calif., and saw the world—the mountains, the sky, the low scattered buildings—suddenly flame into life . . . just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it . . . It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, too vast and violent to hold on to, too heartbreakingly beautiful to let go of.”
A Psychology Today article describes Ehrenreich’s experience:
“She felt a kind of unity with all of nature, living and nonliving, all “recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze.” She felt “ecstatic and somehow completed, but also shattered.”’
When we’re ready to have a mystical experience, we will have one. We may not feel ready, but the Universe knows….
We will see a new world through new eyes. The old will pass away and the new will be made evident, and this can (and will) happen in a myriad of ways. We just need to be open-minded, open-hearted, ready to receive whatever the Universe has to offer.
Seeing the Eiffel Tower again (and again and again) for the first time is a mystical experience for me.
Suddenly remembering something we never knew we knew before.
Mama said that we likely will have many days like these!
Enjoy!
Johnny
I am available to do private tours of Paris, based on my book, Paris Histories and Mysteries.
You can get life-guidance using my book, Prosperity Now! A 12-Week Journey to the Life of Your Dreams.
I also do general life-coaching for individuals or in small groups.
I do amazing I Ching readings and dream interpretations.
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