Having had one set of friends describe these posts as too cerebral,  another friend this week said that he read my blog but didn’t understand it!  I expect that is only true of the post which talked about the awareness of oranges! However, as this week nothing has immediately come to mind I thought that, instead of diving deeply, I would take a lighter touch and simply describe the curious factors leading to the wonderful day I have just experienced.

One of my favourite modern spiritual writers is Eckhart Tolle. He published his first book “The Power of Now” in 1997 and since then it has been translated into 33 languages and sold over one million copies in the UK alone, according to the Waterstones Web site. When I first read it over 15 years ago I was struck by the truth which I recognised and which seemed deeply profound. Over the years I have turned to Tolle in all kinds of situations. I have listened to his audiobooks in the car on the way to work and in bed at night when my mind might have been over active.  A few  years ago I joined his Facebook group of which there are over 166,000 members. It is sometimes interesting to read people’s posts and very occasionally I might add a comment. As a result of one of my comments, a couple of years ago, I received a friend request. Now, I can feel suspicious of friend requests from people I do not know, but I was intrigued and found the page of the young woman who had made the request. She lived in Syria. I thought it would be so interesting to have a friend in Syria so I accepted the request and made a contact.

Since then we have exchanged the odd message and seen each other’s posts. Last September in a message I ‘jokingly’ suggested she might come to England sometime. I got a reply “I am here!”. That week she had arrived in Oxford. She had been given an award by the British Government to come and study here for a year  on a change management course in London. After a short stay in Oxford she moved to London and then we locked down. All her learning has been on-line and she was forced to spend much of her time in her tiny room so at the start of 2021 she decided to go back to Syria for a while to see her family. But she recently returned, refreshed and renewed and with new ambition. 

 

Today we met in Oxford. It was a truly wonderful day. The sun shone, the trees were adorned in spring blossom, we ate lunch and then wandered down by the river. She is only 28, forty years younger than me!  Yet we seem to share so much. She shared with me a view on the history of the situation in Syria and we have talked about the joys and challenges of being a woman, of philosophy and of spirituality. What magic!  I would never have thought that I could form a friendship with a young woman from Syria but thanks to modern technology this has happened.

What a small world we now inhabit and what unexpected joys it can offer. The picture is a tapestry made in Damascus.