Video Kismet in Philly

“This is my wife, Lyubov.” I looked up at the round-cheeked woman with big brown saucer eyes and shook her hand.

Russkaya, shto li?

“Da, russkaya.”

She switched back into English and I don’t think she even noticed we had exchanged that little bit in Russian. Her husband explained that we were discussing the possibility of working together on some video projects. With his new camera and various equipment, he felt comfortable shooting just about anything. What he didn’t know was how to organize the pieces – what questions to ask, what shots to get, how to edit it all together. I knew how to direct and produce, but I wasn’t too skilled on the technical side of things. We could be a match! 

Falling Into Love, Gradually

September. My summer love project is officially over, and I haven’t had any dramatic breakthroughs. I was getting a little discouraged, but I remembered something that Reverend Michael said once in a sermon, that the changes sometimes come gradually, unnoticed until we look back and compare who we were then with who we are now. I decided to continue the project into September, October, November – to fall into love! I mean, if you think about it, love works in any season.

My first experience at Agape International Spiritual Center last January was stressful, particularly doing the affirmations. We had to lock eyes with another parishioner and repeat after Reverend Michael, something like “I see you. I see who you really are. You have potential. I know because I have it too. I see myself in you...” Saying the affirmation wasn’t hard in and of itself; it was the eye contact that killed me.

Starting Summer Love!

It’s August 2 – day 2 into my Summer Love Project! Reverend Michael at the Agape International Spiritual Center in Los Angeles is always saying that we need to ‘be the light in the room,’ to ‘be love,’ so I decided to make a challenge for myself. For the month of August, I am going to make a concentrated effort to be love. I’m hoping that a month of practice will make it a habit for me.

I can’t say that I totally understand what this means. In general, when I find myself turning inwards and shutting down, closing myself off from others, I think of my niece and nephews. I remember how excited Noelle was to give me a delicate gold necklace with a tiny volleyball charm or how Sage laughed and laughed as he scooped up sand from the sand box and dumped it on his head. My heart fills up with love; I imagine myself hugging all five of them at once, and then I try to breathe into that feeling so that it stays with me in all of my interactions. I’m sure that feeling love for them and gratitude for what they bring to my life helps me by raising my vibrational level. (It must, right?)

Home at Agape

In my continuing KLOVE quest to find “heaven in 2011,” I decided to check out the Agape International Spiritual Center in Culver City, near west Los Angeles. Its founder, Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith, was a featured speaker in the film The Secret, and I had always been meaning to attend a service there and check it out.

I got to the 11 am meditation on time, but with all of the people leaving the earlier service and arriving for this one, a good fifteen minutes had passed before I parked and found the center. Once the meditation portion of the service begins, doors are closed until it is over (I learned), so I lined up with the other latecomers along the railing outside the door. After my experience the previous week with the twenty-person congregation, I was amazed at how many people filed into the line. I’m terrible with estimating numbers – 100 maybe? The queue snaked back into the upper parking lot and coiled around and around the maze of temporary line dividers.