All by Richard Rossner
Seventy-year-old Richard Rossner was fully vaccinated when he went to a Los Angeles club to hear his son’s band play. He was careful to social distance and didn’t think he was vulnerable. That was Tuesday night; by Saturday morning, he couldn’t get out of bed. It was Covid. Then his wife, who was also vaccinated, got it. Now that they no longer test positive, they are grateful, but the after-effects leave Richard tired and cautious.
Life is slippery. Just when I think have it in my grasp, it slithers away like an eel. It twists, writhes and slips from my grip, leaving me empty-handed. And feeling empty in many ways.
That’s when I ache for someplace of intense safety and familiarity to regroup.
by Richard Rossner
“There’s a disturbance in the Force.” - Obi-Wan Kenobi
My uncle died today. As soon as I heard the news, I felt the depth of Obi-Wan’s statement. It’s been happening a lot lately. My mother died last June.
Where can we find holiness?
Sometimes I feel like I am in a grand hide-and-seek game with the Creator. Just when I think I’ve found the deepest of the deep, He escapes me. Just when I’ve found the perfect light, the right sound, the special spot for a spiritual experience, a hiccup or sneeze ruins the instant.
Then again, moments in life occasionally arrange themselves to create spontaneous experiences that become life-long memories with deep teachings that touch the soul. They sneak up on you like the first warm smell of Spring that subtly tickles your nose. You have to stop to make sure they really happened. To miss these moments would be to miss the juiciest slices of life.
In 1994, I had just moved from Los Angeles to Scottsdale, Arizona. The Northridge earthquake shook up more than the foundations of my West L.A. town home. I was shaken to my very core. I wanted out. I had been blinded by too much show biz (I had been a writer on a hit show), too much disappointment (I was off the hit show and didn’t bag another staff position), and I was finally tiring of too much life in and out of the Hollywood fishbowl.
I fell in love with my wife, Rahla, when I realized how much we had in common, including the name George Van Tassel, the grandaddy of UFO-ology.
I remembered hearing him interviewed on a radio show about encountering aliens when I was growing up. But Rahla actually met him in the California desert near Twenty-Nine Palms. He showed her an alien landing site, which included a structure he built called The Integratron where aliens rejuvenated after a long interstellar trip; a UFO library and bookstore carved into the earth under the world’s largest freestanding boulder; and a luncheonette. She learned that Van Tassel had been Howard Hughes's partner, and they were going to build a landing strip for Hughes’s giant Spruce Goose fleet -- until the aliens showed up. They named the site Giant Rock Airport in honor of the aforementioned boulder.
Along with our wedding vows in Los Angeles, Rahla and I promised that one day we would visit the Integratron and Giant Rock Airport.
We moved to Scottsdale after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, but were forever driving back to Los Angeles. On one trip, we decided to leave early and fulfill our Van Tassel vow.
"What a long, strange trip it’s been."- Robert Hunter, The Grateful Dead
Life is a trip. It the biggest journey anyone ever makes. And how do you prepare for the journey? You don’t. You can’t. Oh, you may go to life’s Tourist Information Center, a.k.a., school, but it doesn’t really prepare you for what actually happens. It’s kind of like looking at a Rand McNally map to get an idea of what it is like standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon. It’s not even close to the experience. In fact, life is such a strange animal, that you may only be able to begin to understand it in retrospect.
I am 60 years of age. I don’t feel old. I feel like the same person I was when I was seven, seventeen, or twenty-seven.
Let me amend that comment. I feel the same, but some things are definitely different. Uncomfortably different. Maybe even standing on the cusp of disturbingly different.
When I tried to think my way through this puzzle, I realized a universal truth. During the course of our life, I decided that we live and take a touring trip through three different worlds. The Hindus call them Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Creation, Maintenance, Destruction. I call it a hard lesson to learn that requires a lifetime to really understand.
The first world is the world we are born into. It is the world of our parents.
