We May Have All That We Need

It may not last

The space of a whisper

The meeting of lost waves

Or the touch one cannot forget

But may remain as a name

A goodbye on a rainy day

When lost waves became sea again

And old dogs slept to the sound

Of knowing that at sunset

There will be wood in the fireplace

A warm blanket upon the floor

And simple love to take and give

Even if it may not last

The space of a whisper

March 8, 2016

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016

Photo of my dogs, in trust and in comfort, near a lake in Virginia.

Armenopolis (Gherla), Romania

In 2012 the World Health Organization (WHO) invited me to conduct a series of workshops in Croatia, Poland and Hungary.  It was a renewed opportunity to see my friends and continue our collective work toward improving the quality of health care.

… It was my last workshop in Budapest and we finished it in the early evening hours. As I was collecting my papers and turning off my laptop, a woman who was not a participant in the meeting, came to see me.

“You are Armenian, yes?”

“Yes.”

“I am too. Wanted to meet you and say hello.”

It was not the first time I had such encounters and I wanted to hear more from her.

“Well, I am not Hungarian,” she said. “I am Romanian, and my family comes from Armenopolis. You know about our city?”

I did not.

“It is now called Gherla, it is in Transylvania. Historically it was called Armenopolis and was a mostly Armenian city. We have a beautiful church.”

“Your name is not Armenian,” I said, “but do you speak the language?”

“No, but I can recite the Lord’s Prayer in Armenian if you want.”

It was a surreal and very emotional moment. A small conference room in Budapest, dark outside, and I was facing this woman who actually sang the Lord’s Prayer in Armenian. I had to sit down and let my tears testify to the moment.

“There are only 8 Armenians left,” she said. “All very old. You should visit Gherla soon.”

… I had reserved the last day of my trip for personal time and wanted to walk through Buda and Pest as I had done a number of times before. I think the Danube is most beautiful when it passes among the majestic palaces and building of the historic Hungarian Empire.

I had seen the Danube before, but not Armenopolis. So, drove to Gherla and back the same day.

It is a small city, and the Armenian Church is well kept. But it was empty and I was not able to see any of the 8 remaining Armenians.  I did say a prayer and drove back.

… I never regretted the 12 hour of driving that day. The story had stayed in me and with me for a few years, and did not find an outlet or opportunity to come out.

Until this morning when a friend shared with me the January 5, 2015 issue of the New Yorker Magazine.

“There is an article you should read,” he said. “It was a revelation for me.”

Which I did. It is a well written, well documented testimonial by the grandson of an Armenian survivor of the 1915 Genocide. His grandfather was from Diyarbakir and died in 1956 before the author of the article was born in Long Island, New York.  It is the testimonial of how the author decided to go to Diyarbakir, learn about the story of his grandfather, and as a reporter, describe the trip within the historical context of the early 1900s.

I have heard such stories from my grandfather, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, whom I had the privilege to know for 8 years. I have read countless books and articles about the Armenian Genocide. And I have written my own book about the survivors I have known.

Yet, there was a passage in that article that stopped the vagabonding of my eyes upon the page. It was about the author’s sister who, fifteen years earlier, had also gone to Diyarbakir to search for remaining family members. The passage was about the first encounter of his sister with Uncle Anto, at the Sourp Giragos church. It read:

“My sister visited Sourp Giragos at its nadir, about fifteen years ago, and found Uncle Anto, as he was known, sitting on a rock, disheveled: loose shirt, cardigan tucked into sweatpants, Through a friend , she spoke to him in Turkish, but he just sat there, mute, empty-sighted. Later that afternoon, she returned and spoke to him in Armenian, and he jolted into alertness: Who are you? Where did you come from? We haven’t had a priest for so long. Do you know the Lord’s Prayer? She recited it, and he wept,….”

… That was the impetus for me to write about my last day in Hungary and long drive through the Carpathian Mountains in Romania.

March 5, 2016

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016

PS1/ The New Yorker Magazine article was written by Raffi Khatcharourian and can be accessed via:  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/century-silence

PS2/ I found a 2011 population census on the Internet regarding Gherla. It shows that at that date:

15,994 (79.2%) were Romanian

 3,419  (16.9%)  were Hungarian

    718  (3.6%) were Gypsy

      72  (0.4%) were others, including 16 Germans.

So, I can only guess that the 8 Armenians were among the 56 “Others”…

PS3/ I received an email from a dear friend who had read this posting and wanted to share a youtube link about the heritage of Armenians in Transylvania. I found it absolutely delightful and most educational. I would recommend watching this video as a complement to my post:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU3YFjCnzFs&feature=youtu.be

Kosmos and Harmonia

Yield or act

Let the flow guide your wonder

It is spring for pear trees

A season for humility

And a time to learn

For a sphere is shaped in simple love

To find its peace in symmetry

Beauty in proportion

And harmony in silence

Yield or act

Join and fasten

Let your river guide the flow

To find its ocean and tempest

Yet

In proportion and symmetry

That ocean will becomes mist

 Relives in a teardrop of rain

To become new harmony and find its ocean

As you and I

We and all yet to circle that sphere

Quietly will return to what we once became

Along the serpentine path

Of how the flow shaped

The secret of solitude

While wondering

If to yield or act

February 29, 2016

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016

PS/ I took this photo during a ceremony by Taiwanese Original Inhabitants in North East of Taiwan. It is said that the indigenous people of Taiwan have lived on the island 8,000 years before a Han immigration to Taiwan took place in the 17^th century. Taiwan’s aborigines have genetic ties to Austronesian ethnic groups such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Oceania, Madagascar and Malaysia.

The Corridors of Our Hearts

I have lived in cosmopolitan areas for more than fifty years on three continents. During this period, I have traveled to most of the large cities in the world, along with villages and dusty towns of emerging countries. Yet, when a year ago decided to open a new chapter of my life, it was the High Desert (about 6000 feet above sea level) of Arizona that won the first choice.

And I have not looked back. The vast open spaces of the high desert are made of 7000 feet tall mountains, covered in snow for at least two months, stubborn vegetation and trees, and of that silence that I have not listened to anywhere else. Except of course when the coyotes howl and bark at sunrise and at night, especially at full moon.

At least twice a week I fill my coffee canister with Irish Cream and leave for the desert an hour before sunrise. By now I have my favorite spots to watch the first rays. During the winter months the temperatures are below freezing and there will be snow on the ground. But as soon as the sun turns the rocks from gray to yellow, my coffee delightfully awakens all my senses. I sip slowly, almost at the rhythm of breathing during meditation: one, two, three, four – and inhale the warmth of the morning brew.

I have also learned much from Native American friends I now have.  The only teacher in this vast openness is nature. The only lesson is the one we already know but do not want to admit. It is the lesson of passing through the desert without leaving a trace. But somehow to let nature know how much we learned during that visit and journey.

… I was reading a 2007 book by Sage Bennet titled “Wisdom Walk”. It is about creating peace and balance while learning from the world’s spiritual traditions. I was interested in learning more about the Native American spirituality, but did read most of the other sections.  And it was on page 87, that a line resonated unexpectedly. The author says:

“Those who are afraid to step down the corridors of our hearts are the ones to put on our list to forgive.”

Hmm.

Somehow it was not the concept of forgiving that stopped me to think, but the words “corridors of our hearts”. And it was not my heart that surprised me by this but rather the catacombs of my memory, since I immediately recalled the cover page of Time Magazine from the 1960s! Yes, there was an issue when for the first time, micro lenses were used to photograph the inner structures of a beating human heart. And I remember this because my father was the editor of a medical journal and brought that issue home. I had spent countless hours reading and re-reading every word of the magazine.

That was the moment when the heart stopped being the romantic center of my inner world. It was now a pump, and looking back at it, a rather simple one.

To the romantic I was, it was a sad day.

… Years later, as a health care professional I visited Mumbai, India. Again, I discovered the corridor of the heart, but this time in a very practical way. Indeed, given the gridlock traffic of Mumbai streets, when there was an accident and a fatality, it was practically impossible to transport vital organs from the deceased in a timely way to the transplant hospital so other lives can be saved or ameliorated. So, a “green corridor” was built in Mumbai where only ambulances can travel from the city to the airport. That way heart, liver, pancreas, and kidney can reach the transplant center during the critical and short time window.  In a most eloquent way, I was told that the “green corridor” is more than a special lane in the city – it was the pathway to the corridors of our hearts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson proposed that:

“Man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world”

I will think about this more tomorrow, when I have my first cup of coffee leaning against a sage brush, in the Arizona High Desert, at sunrise.

February 23, 2016

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016

PS/ I did check on the exact date of the Time Magazine issue about the heart. It was January 19, 1968 and was titled “The Corridors of the Heart”.

The Wound Is the Place Where the Light Enters You (Rumi)

A wound is the most obvious abrupt opening into our inside.  While tangible and visible, a wound can also transcend to the hope of seeing beyond our insides, even beyond our world. Indeed, when I was a kid I often thought that the full moon was a clean-edged wound into the dark sky from which I could see the bright universe on the “other side”. 

Then I went to school and was told that the Moon was just a planet, a satellite to our Earth. Just like Charon is to Pluto. Interestingly, now that we know that Pluto is not a planet, I am hoping that soon we will discover that the Moon is in fact a hole in the dark skies above us…

This morning I came face–to-face to a wound. It was in a parking lot. Upon exiting my car I saw a large tree that had its massive branches too precariously attached to its trunk. So, a creative team from the city landscaping, had decided to somehow open wounds at the base of the branches, insert steel pipes into these wounds, and bet that the tree would heal around the pipes and make these its support.

And the idea was a good one. Looking at the wood and bark that have grown over the steel pipes I assumed that this intervention was done many decades ago.

… A few hours later when I returned to my car I recalled (even recited) a few lines from Rumi.

                                      My friend, in friendship I am bound to you:

                                 Wherever you set foot, I shall be the ground.

We all heal, at least from the outside. When we heal, often from inside out, we close openings others can see. We become scarred in order not to scare others. Sometimes those scars are cherished and most welcomed by others as if pearls made by mollusks to coat the intruder (often an irritant parasite) in nacre.

Other times, we heal from inside out to liberate our very inside. To make it free of itself.  As I took the ramp to the freeway, I found comfort in another line from Rumi:

I knocked and the door opened but I found that I have been knocking from the inside

January 28, 2016

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016

Genius is childhood redefined

To take the cold away from coldness

And boil down all fear to their absolute pleasure

To let the mind touch all corners and make them round

As time does to passion so we can call it love

To sit by the fire and feel your feet so far

Away from the roads that once led to pleasant names

To be pleased with what you have and dream simple dreams

With others, or alone when in a world full of brown eyes

To quietly know that you have become who you once were

A child

And be ready to discover again

January 22, 2016

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016

Red Cap with White Pompom

It may be just a leap

When one wakes up on a snowy night

And hears his arteries drum

Because he had dreamt

Of the dead

While feeling alive

Like a dog hacking a hairball

It might have been just a leap

But when one lands in the same place

Was it a leap?

Too early for coffee, too late for new dreams

But a walk in the snow is like a forbidden book

One knows not to read yet each page turns one’s fingers

To point

To the same point

Where the leap was taken

At the drum beat of neck arteries

So loud

January 7, 2016

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016

I took this photo in Jerome, AZ a day before Christmas 2015