Dear family and friends,
Early tomorrow morning at one a.m. it will be four years since Danny's
accident. I won't even try to summarize all we've been through and all
we're still going through in this brief email. I've begun work on a
book about our adventure and have been struck all over again by the
extraordinary heartaches, triumphs and revelations we all experienced
during Danny's adventure.
I just wanted to let you know that we're doing all right and we're
still grateful for all the love and support we've received from so
many extraordinary people. We're enjoying our identical adorable twin
grand-daughters, Sadie and Sophie, whose exhilarated though exhausted
parents, Andy and Tricia, have been grateful for all the consistent
help that Lynn provides and the spotty, though loving, service offered
by me.
Last week we had a wonderful visit from our Indian friend Bhau
Kalchuri. At 83, he can't get around like he used to but he can still
deliver inspiring talks about Meher Baba and the soul's inevitable
journey to God.
I also wanted to alert you that the Ofersures CD, "New Songs for Old
Friends", is now available for downloading on iTunes. The band
consists of Danny's old bandmates, Sherif Shoucri (guitar and vocals),
Brian Gregoire (mandolin and vocals) and Ediz Basol (drums and
percussion), along with bassist Danny Holmes (who has become, just as
the other guys have, like family to us).
Two notable tracks on the CD that you should check out:
1) "Say Goodnight, Say Goodbye", a tribute to Danny, "the soul that
never dies", a rousing Irish-sounding anthem that features such
memorable lines as "the stage is six strings short again; it's a
feeling I don't plan on getting used to..."
2) "The Way I See The World" which features a new and untested, though
not-so-young, harmonica player: me. It was kind of the boys to invite
me to participate and exciting, albeit nerve-wracking, for me to go
into a recording studio and play.
I hope that things are well with you and yours and that we all
continue to remember the lesson that Danny taught us: to cherish
family and friends and treasure each second spent together, even the
times that our loved ones try our patience or wear us out. Each moment
is one that will never come again.
Much love,
Jeff
p.s. I'm attaching three photos:
1) Bhau holding Sophie Owens at two months old.
2 & 3) Danny's friends, Brian and Ediz of the Ofersures, just returned
from an eight week trip to South America and met the twins at Andy and
Tricia's house. The first is Brian holding Sophie; the second is Ediz
with Sadie.
"Consciously or unconsciously, every living creature seeks one thing.
In the lower forms of life and in less advanced human beings, the
quest is unconscious; in advanced human beings, it is conscious. The
object of the quest is called by many names—happiness, peace, freedom,
truth, love, perfection, Self-realization, God-realization, union with
God. Essentially it is a search for all of these, but in a special
way. Everyone has moments of happiness, glimpses of truth, fleeting
experiences of union with God; what they want is to make them
permanent. They want to establish an abiding reality in the midst of
constant change. It is a natural desire, based fundamentally on a
memory, dim or clear as the individual's evolution may be low or high,
of his essential unity with God; for every living thing is a partial
manifestation of God, conditioned only by its lack of knowledge of its
own true nature. The whole of evolution, in fact, is an evolution from
unconscious divinity to conscious divinity, in which God Himself,
essentially eternal and unchangeable, assumes an infinite variety of
forms, enjoys an infinite variety of experience and transcends an
infinite variety of self-imposed limitations." Meher Baba
|
