FIRST IMPRESSIONS

This week my seven-year old granddaughters came to my house for a sleepover.  The two cousins had a lot to twitter about (in the old style of twittering) since they both have a "crush" on the same boy.  Wow, I wondered, isn't seven kind of young to be so focused on one person?!  When I mentioned their precociousness to one of their Mom's, she said she had already been asked when and how she "knew" that Daddy was the one she wanted to marry.

Questions like that comes up in therapy from time to time:  how do I know he or she is "the one?"   New relationships often prompt that kind of inquiry.  Sometimes it happens once the relationship is more progressed:  did I make the right choice?  Is he or she really the soul mate I was destined for or am I supposed to be with someone else?

The curiosity of my little granddaughters is light and innocent, like their giggles and secrets.  But the questions raised in therapy about "the one" can be agonizing.  How indeed do we know whether we're on track or not?  Disconnected from intuition and inner guidance, we can flounder and lose our way.

I've lived both with intuition and with floundering.  We probably all have.  When people used to ask my husband and me how we first met, we each would tell the same story differently.  My story was more factual.  His went straight to the heart.

It was late in August, 1967.  I had just gotten on a bus heading west on Armitage Avenue, on my way back from a conference on "new politics" in downtown Chicago.  While paying my fare, I looked around and saw the usual neighborhood types, mostly Hispanic women with kids and a few assorted men.  A college student type was seated towards the back by a window, reading a book.  That was an unusual sight in this ghetto.
 

I sat down by the driver, close to the door, absorbed in my own thoughts.  When I began to feel what the controversial researcher Rupert Sheldrake calls "the staring effect,"  I looked up to see two penetrating eyes take cover behind the book. The book was Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse.

And this is the way my husband Tom used to tell the story:  He was sitting on a bus alone when a young woman (that would be me) got on.  Aside from the driver, they were the only two people on the bus.  She was the only one he could see.  (He only had eyes for me).

As it happened, we got off the bus at the same stop:  Sheffield and Armitage. We both waited for the light to change.  We were both heading in the same direction.

Could it be as simple as Malcolm Gladwell suggests in his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking?  In the first two seconds of looking - in a single glance - he knew!  Me, it took longer.  We crossed the street together.  I spoke first.  I asked if he lived in the neighborhood (he did).  He told me he was in graduate school at the Art Institute of Chicago.  I told him my sister was a student there too.  We talked.  We talked some more.  He asked my name.  I asked his.  He said Tom Seghi.  In my mind I heard the words, "Laya Seghi."  It sounded right to me.

The rest of our story evolved.  I floundered and I knew or I knew and I floundered.  It took me three decades before I told him about hearing that inner voice on our very first encounter. (The "why" for that is a whole different story.)  I preferred hearing him tell about meeting the "love of his life."   Looking back now, this chapter of our story concluded, I marvel at his vision and my inner voice and at the power of first impressions. We both knew!

Leaving an Impression

Looking on Facebook at images of Tom Seghi and what he created, a niece wrote

...of two paintbrushes (one big and one small) that look like they have been used to paint numerous canvases. They are hanging together on a blank canvas ready to paint their next masterpiece...
reminds me of you & him and all the things you both created together, Auntie Laya. What a beautiful image...

But seeing the image on a flat screen can be deceptive.  In two dimensions it's difficult to perceive that the large brush is painted on canvas, while the small brush is an actual brush. From a distance, they both look painted (or "real").  Both brushes - the painted one and the actual one - have actual wires attached, making them appear suspended.  Watching people view the brush paintings and "get" the play on reality has been a source of delight for both Tom and me over the years. 

One of Tom's favorite art techniques was "tromp l'oeil," (French, literally 'deceives the eye',  an illusion created by extremely realistic imagery that makes the subject of the painting appear 3-D).  Using paint on canvas, he loved playing with the idea of what's real.  The fruit he painted often evoked the response, "It looks so real I could take a bite out of it."



Now that he's gone, I see yet another layer of meaning in his play with the concept of what's real or not.  Just as my niece suggested, Tom and I are indeed like those two brushes,  I am here in 3-D, and his impression remains, vivid as can be, but no longer "actual." He is in one dimension and I'm in another.

Mysticism has been an interest of mine for years; I've had a natural affinity for it from early on.  A key aspect of mysticism is the awareness of different dimensions of reality. There is a world that we see and there are invisible worlds.  In Jewish mysticism (I hesitate to say Kabbalah so as not to confuse it with the ever expanding Kabbalah business that promotes its own published books, red strings for protection and holy water at high prices), the concept of RESHIMU brings to mind what Tom was doing in his painting.

To quote from a website about Jewish mysticism (www.innerorg/worlds/reshimu.html) , the reshimu is compared to the fragrance of the wine which remains in the glass after having been poured out of it.  The reshimu is the consciousness of knowing that one has "forgotten."  It is the consciousness which arouses one to search for that which he has lost, the awareness that God is "playing" with His creation, as it were, a Divine game of "hide and seek."

Tom is in the invisible world now but he has left a profound impression here in this world - in the memories people hold of him, in his artwork, in his children and grandchildren that carry on the life he engendered in them.  For me especially, the question arises about how to traverse the different worlds, how to stay in touch with what I lost.   What is real? I ask myself, and I remember the Taoist dream of Chuang Tzu:

"I dreamed I was a butterfly, or was I a butterfly dreaming I was me?" 

The Circle of Life and Death

This brushstroke, a sacred symbol in Zen and a common subject of Japanese calligraphy, represents everything and nothing.   Infinity and enlightenment; the void and emptiness.  The space it encompasses and the space encompassed by it are of the same oneness.  Interrupting the oneness is the circle, the wheel of life and death.

As I try to absorb the loss of Tom Seghi,  the love of my life,  the image of this simple circle comes to mind.  One life. One single brushstroke.  Like what he created with his own deft hand, something I watched with awe on many occasions, his life itself was a singular, elegant and quiet revolution from start to finish.

Although his death happened suddenly and unexpectedly, when I turn back to look at how he had arrived at that point, it seems he had reached a remarkable closure.  The day before he died, we flew into Chicago and rented a car.  For the first time in the forty four years we've been together, he suggested that we drive to his childhood home in what was once the heart of a working class Italian neighborhood. That  home was at 2533 S. Spaulding, the downstairs apartment of a two story duplex.

The only time I had seen that building before was in snapshots taken for his family photo album.  I especially recalled the picture of him as a newborn, cradled in his mother's arms as she stood on the porch steps with his father and sister, his Italian immigrant grandfather standing by the door.  Another was him smiling broadly, a mere toddler on the porch.

In the intervening years, the neighborhood had become run-down, now primarily a neighborhood of Mexican immigrants.  A frequent display of graffiti indicated gang activity which explained the wrought iron fences that were put up after Tom's family had moved away. 

The owner of the building lived upstairs.  He responded graciously to Tom's request to walk through his  home:  "Thank you for coming back, he said. "I sit upstairs and wonder who used to live here before me."

Knocking on the door of the first floor apartment, where a sister and brother of about 10 and 12 years old were home alone, the landlord explained the reason for our visit and walked us through.  "Is it smaller than you remember?" he asked Tom.

"No," Tom said,  "it's exactly as I remember it; nothing has changed."  He then proceeded to engage the children, "That's the room where my sister slept, and that's where I slept."

Afterwards we went upstairs to the owner's renovated apartment.  Tom told him how less than a month before, we had taken a trip to Italy with our son, met the remaining Seghi's there and together visited LaSega, the mountain hamlet of their ancestors.

The owner was receptive and encouraged the conversation further.  Tom then shared the experience of visiting the small town of Coalgate, Oklahoma where his grandparents and relatives had immigrated TO.  By actually stepping on that land, the stories his father had told him about growing up in Oklahoma, had come alive for him.

Retracing his family's itinerary,  from Italy to Oklahoma to Chicago, Tom shared how especially fulfilling it was to bring his son Danny back to Italy to learn where the Seghi's came from.  As they stood together in the family cemetery of Ospitale, overlooking the mountains of Emilia Romagna, Tom had pointed out the gravestones of the Seghi ancestors. "This is our past," he said, "and you are the future."

"Yes," the owner nodded knowingly.  "It's so important to go back to where you come from, to stay in touch with that connection.  Even though time passes, the connection is always present."

Tom had come back to exactly where he had started, like a salmon returning home.  Navigating great distances against incredible odds, and realizing so much in the process, it seems he had just completed that beautiful sweeping movement of his life.  A full circle.

I write this on the final day of "Shloshim" - the 30-day mourning period from the day of burial - traditionally observed in Judaism.  Since Judaism teaches that a deceased person can still benefit from the merit of good deeds done in their memory, it is the privilege of those of us who knew him to act in ways inspired by the unique person that he was:  loving, humble, confident, gentle, creative, peaceful, forgiving, and attuned to beauty.   May his soul be elevated by our actions.

As always, please feel free to share your comments and read those of others.  We each have a perspective that is ours alone.