For My Great Teacher / Benim Muhteşem Öğretmenim İçin

Chris and I – Photo taken by our dear friend Heather Kelly

Silence in me. I am looking out of the window in front of my desk. I just fed the wild cat outside that has chosen us as a friend and never goes far away. Silence in me. Is it silence? Is it sorrow? Is it peace? Is it mourning? Or all of them. A dog is passing by the street. She looks like she is searching for food. Maybe our next friend?

I am watching the beautiful steppes of Ankara from my window. This is the first time I am writing in English in this blog. My teacher Chris Seeley so often suggested that I do this and said I am a good storyteller. She thinks my thoughts should be known by more people. I often wanted to think that she just tries to motivate me, but she was such a real person for not doing this simply. Now I am writing in English, because I want my deep love and admiration to her to be known by more people. She was such an inspirer, more than any other person I met in this world. It is really so hard for me to use past tense and also it is not correct, since she is still and will be always in my thoughts.

This post is written for her, by the intention to contribute her legacy to be more known and live long. I know she wouldn’t care about that so much, but I do. Very much. If you love this blog, my writings and me, I am sure you would love her too. Though like all the Great Teachers, she was always so generous and powerful for letting others own their results achieved via her teachings, but you should know that this blog, my writings, research, new presence are a result of her mastery. Imagine being in the presence of a teacher who is more enthusiastic and open than you about what will come next on your journey and by doing that, letting miracles happen for each of you. She was ready and open to learn from everything. She was soul, knowledge and heart-wise enormously resourceful and as one thing you may not find easily in other teachers, she was sharing those generously without an expectancy. I know I am not the only one who is thinking, feeling like this. There are so many other people who would gladly accept those words as valid for them.

You cannot imagine how vulnerable I am feeling right now, for I lost a person who was sincerely mothering my creativity and inquiry in life. Today a part of me feels like a child who lost her mother, feels a bit unsafe, lonely and deeply missing. There was also silence at home yesterday evening. My husband was holding me while I was crying. I felt he deeply knows and appreciates that there are some parts in my soul even he could not know as Chris Seeley did. She was such a seer.

Her leaving the Earth was as artful and graceful as her. Though she knew that her life will end soon because of the disease in her body, she did not stop ‘really’ living until her last day. I imagine, this process was harder for the people who love her. She lived so beautifully and walked courageously for a long time on her way, so that she gracefully accepted her closure on Earth. Even by the way of her dying, she thought so many things to us.

The last and the most important, she dared to live a joyful life while accepting the World as beautiful and as merciless as it is. She had a great energy for holding many paradoxes in her life like, hope and despair, sadness and happiness, power and compassion, challenge and acceptance, knowing and not knowing… and thought us to do the same. It is so hard to say goodbye to her, but I want to and I should. I want to support her soul’s journey to the next level as lightly and peacefully as possible.

While you are leaving, Chris, I just wish to let you know that your legacy will live in me like many other people whose lives you touched. I am so grateful and feel so lucky that I met you and know you and could be known by you. I love you so much.

May peace and light be always with you! Always!

As Mevlana Cellaledin-i Rumi says,

‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.’