Transcription
Around the Cosmic Campfire by Tony Wright
Chapter Eight: Mark Mirandi
When my husband and daughter and I were living just outside of Nashville, we kept in touch with two sets of friends who had known each other for many, many years: Bill and Joan, and Mark and Sally. We used to live in a wonderful renovated antique house in a neighborhood near them in Sylvan Park, and we all partied and had meals together and admired each other's gardens on a regular basis. They got to know my young daughter, Emily, when she was in the tender segment of time from crib to first grade. They were more or less her godparents; not knowing exactly what that role entailed, we just sort of softly declared it.
We moved out of that neighborhood and out to the suburbs to a vast apartment complex called Iroquois while we were having our woodlands house built. It took about a year to navigate a nearly mile-long driveway and to push out the forest and direct three stories of living quarters there. Our friends Mark and Sally had since left that area too and moved out to California. He had gotten interested in Native American spiritual matters and lore, which was a little odd for him, having grown up in the city of Boston proper. He had not been around much of the great outdoors to explore it hands-on. As he went west, he was enjoying doing vision quests and sweat lodge meditations, learning all he could about Native Americans and being on the land.
We got the shockingly impossible news one day that Mark had gone up to Northern California to do a vision quest and, while in the sweat lodge alone for the quest duration, he had died. There seemed to be no signs of struggle or problems that were discernible, and even an autopsy showed absolutely nothing. He was only just barely beyond 40 years old. We were all in terrible shock, as it made no sense at his age, and we were left with so many questions and feeling so much loss. We here in Nashville were gathering a small service for Mark in order to light candles and say some words, and we knew that others were doing this simultaneously in his new community in California as well.
It seems so surreal. By living in the apartment complex during the building of the woodlands house, I would drive Emily to her elementary school, and there were some times she could take the bus home, but only as far as the McDonald's across the main intersection from the apartment complex. I would stroll over there to meet her in fair weather and walk her safely home. One day, I met a woman who was also waiting for her girl to exit the bus at the McDonald's. She was the mother of that little girl Emily had recently claimed as her new friend. Lisa, and Mangala, as she revealed to me, was her Hindi meditation name, lived at the far end of our quiet apartment street in a townhome. Our girls could walk easily to each apartment without any danger, just to play together. They became good friends. Mangala and I started to know each other from the necessary communication it takes to navigate kids around the neighborhood, and I found that she and her husband, Chuck, or Maruti, were very spiritual people. We could talk for hours about philosophies and beliefs and about the health matters of our kids. It was really special to me.
One day, in talking about spiritual matters and prayer time, I happened to mention a good friend who had died in a sweat lodge in California a couple of years earlier. She sort of perked up and said that was odd; she knew someone who had done that as well. A white man dying during a Native American vision quest was not a usual thing, and we looked at each other with feral brows and decided to go deeper. It turned out that she was living in Massachusetts at the time of Mark's death—Boston to be exact. She and her husband had lost their apartment, so they were staying with some spiritual people they didn't know very well until they could get on their feet. It was not easy to find someone to take in a scantily employed couple with three young kids. One night when they were staying there, their new hosts had a farewell party honoring a man named Mark who had died in his vision quest in California, and they had a candle ceremony for him.
What I said over and over: Really, could that be my Mark? Turns out it was. So the woman I had only just met, who just moved to my apartment complex—the complex that I had only just moved to as well—the woman and her family who had just moved to our town, who knew no one yet and mostly kept to herself, who randomly struck up a conversation with me at a McDonald's while we were both waiting for our kids—boss a woman who had just come from the city, having one of the three candlelight services in the U.S. for my friend at Boston—his hometown—and almost accidentally, she was at one of Mark's services far away from me as I was at one of his services here in Nashville. Amazingly, she just found me out of the blue. We later confirmed it was my Mark they were having the service for up in Boston. The fact that we both did that is extraordinary enough, but the fact that we followed some strands and found each other and even were led to that random conversation where we discovered that we had done this is more than a little spooky, for sure. I will just call it supernatural and for certain very godly. There are no accidents.
She and her husband ended up in that segment of time helping me when I became very ill. I am forever grateful to them. Welcome to my world of never-ending synchronicities. She and her husband divorced, and she moved from the area long ago. I still hear from Mangala from time to time, and we are wonderful soul mates. The people I meet against all odds seem destined to become forever friends with me, and once we do meet, it is a deep caring and spirit kind of love. Whenever she and I and my plethora of other long-distance soul friends talk on the phone, it's like no time has gone by at all. The God connection proves itself to me time and time again. I feel assured that Mangala and I were on some higher frequency and were both transmitting and receiving; our God stations were tuned in to each other, and our connection worked out perfectly and in sync with the divine. What a beautiful example of there being no time and no space as we move around gently, almost mysteriously, in our lives, our angels helping us find each other on our journeys, I believe so. We can ponder endlessly, but it will be fun when perhaps someday, as we leave this lifetime, we get to truly, truly know.