The Carousel of Life

The colors, the texture, the weaving, and the knots. This is how it all started: one coincidental chance meeting. There are forty stories that make this tapestry; there are dozens and perhaps hundreds of others that have come and gone and those yet not revealed.

Here I share with you some of the beautiful moments of life that have revealed themselves to me as chance encounters but in each there has been a vivid revelation and realization, from the white cane that showed me the way of life to the cat in the bag who has helped me see. It is through the threading each of these stories together that I sit here now.

In each moment as life reveals itself, we are able to see or to let the moment pass by. Join me in seeing how moments realized have so much to tell and so much to give.

Each of these stories are one hundred percent real and true. I have changed the names of the people, but the characters, the thoughts, and the gifts that were given to me through the chance encounter all remain real and true.

Please help me weave the next part of this tapestry by sitting with me for a while, reading these stories, listening to them, and sharing them. Simple and real... Perhaps but just perhaps you will start to see how in your own life a chance encounter has changed your life, and perhaps you will take a moment to say hello to someone you may not have otherwise, on a bus, on the sidewalk, on a plane or just passing by.

Thank you for passing by. Touch this tapestry full of color, full of texture, full of revelations revealed just through a simple hello, a simple smile.

Introduced By Deborah Williams

In one of the encounters Bahareh describes in this collection, she talks about cutting open an apple in half along its diameter rather than down the length of the stem. She explains that when you cut the apple that way and it falls open, the seeds inside form the shape of stars.

As she tells the story, the star-seeds inside the apple become metaphors to describe the inner self, but I think the image of the star-seeds might also be a way to describe the collection of moments that are contained in this book. Bahareh is a woman of many gifts and one of those gifts is the ability to connect with the people the rest of us might dismiss-the bathroom attendant with a chipped tooth, a tattooed man on the beach, a little boy in a restaurant. Her interactions with these people reveal the star-seeds inside them and thus help us consider what might lie inside ourselves as well. 

When Bahareh lived in Abu Dhabi, we walked together once a week along the Corniche or along the Saadiyat Beach, and I always came away from those walks with a renewed sense of optimism about the world. That optimism is not the false smile of good cheer; Bahareh is fully aware of the darkness in the world, as some of the encounters in this book reveal. No, the optimism you'll find in this book comes from a stronger and more real place, precisely because it has seen darkness. It takes tremendous strength, given the tumult in the world these days, to resist cynicism or ironic despair, and to choose instead the search for light.

What these encounters show us, of course, is that light is all around us, if we can just open our eyes. The American writer Edith Wharton once said, "There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it." I think that this book serves as both mirror and candle, lighting and reflecting the world around us in