Close your eyes. Oh…wait a minute. I need you to read this – OK, pretend you’re blind Stevie Wonder in an art gallery. Only this is an art gallery for ALL your senses. This is where Mom Nature does all her best stuff. So, you are sightless, but every other sensory avenue into your brain is jammed with traffic. You hear the whole universe breathing into your ears, you taste the air as if it were golden nectar, heady aromas and exotic fragrances tease your primal nature to awaken, and you are embraced by the warm softness of sawtooth grass and cooled by gluey drops of dew. Welcome to summertime on steroids here in the northern hemisphere where the choice is to open your windows or leave the AC chugging from dawn till dusk!

Whichever hemisphere you live in, consider opening some new windows that you’ve never opened before. You are, after all, growing wiser and less intimidated/dominated by social pressures, the media, and all those other usurpations that we gradually grow away from as we age. (Aren’t you?) Whoever it was that said “life belongs to the young,” must have suffered from hormone envy and a severe case of lemming fever. The young travel in herds, and herd passion is mostly insecurity. True passion is keened by exclusivity and independence. Who wants to parse out their satisfactions and meaningful existence to groupthink or the mindless limitations that enslave social insects? Especially in America.

So, about those windows…c’mon, you can do it. Open them. What’s to fear? Mosquitoes? OK, I get mosquitoes on account of they think I’m a drinking fountain for blood. So make friends with some dragonflies and post them on your sills, because most of those closed windows will lead to transcendent events in your life. Harry Potter opened a window and in flew an owl with an invitation to magic! Rapunzel let down her hair (figuratively and literally speaking) out the window and passion ensued. Windows allow previews of coming attractions and the options of escape and freedom.

I’ve opened so many windows that I’m not sure which side of the glass I’m on. Mostly, I’d say, I’m outside looking in. It’s not that I don’t want to share what’s inside, but either the rent is too high or the light that attracts me flickers unsteadily whereas the light in nature is pure and constant. Moreover, the most fulfilling people I know live at least part-time on my side of the glass. Allow me to introduce you to one…

There are people you know you are meant to meet in life. Something like the hum of a tuning fork issues from them and finds you through the ether and you suddenly realize you are radiating the same hum. Doesn’t matter how far away they are. Even if they are in Oz and you are in Minnesota, the resonance is as clear as the rush of air in a seashell. That’s the way it was with Grant Soosalu a dozen years ago.

He called me “the Sullymeister,” I called him “the Wizard of Oz.” By any name, that legendary Australian somehow ran across something I wrote and knew we had a kinship. You wouldn’t see it on our resumes or in the widely divergent paths we struck in life, but that’s just the point: if freedom from being labeled was itself a label, you might call us brothers from another mother. Grant’s credentials are much more formal and respectable than mine, but we share an eclectic interest horizon to horizon from physics to metaphysics. That said, most of the legion of followers who have trained in his inspirational workshops around the globe know him as the author and pioneer of mBraining theory. His first phone call from Down Under was to interview me for either a podcast or a chapter in a motivational book – not sure which came first – but we ended up talking for something like 2 ½ hours. It was galvanizing, and I hung up the phone knowing a profound friendship had begun.

How I wish it had begun much earlier in his life. Injuries and a final health battle forestalled so many adventures we didn’t quite pull off. There were the plans for an 11-day ocean kayak odyssey from island to island in Tonga, and a retracing of a Genghis Khan route through Mongolia on yaks, and a trip to visit me in the United States. Happily, that trip to Minnesota that had to be canceled on account of illness would have been their SECOND trip, because Grant and Fiona, his lovely soulmate of 30 years, DID come to visit me in 2011.

And that was a golden week of explorations on skinny skis in Crow-Hassan, ice fishing at a resort, holding court in restaurants into the wee hours of dawn, and brilliant conversations that carried us through nights that left us limp with laughter. It isn’t where you go or what you do that makes a difference in life, it’s who you go and do things with. That message has been brought home to me over the years, and in particular three times recently when adventurous visitors whose dynamic lives took them around the world came to visit and each proclaimed that the time we shared in humble settings was the highlight of their trip. Grant and Fiona were a perfect example of this, a blend of satirical wit, scintillating insights, and free expression. Like I said, there are people you know you are meant to meet in life.

Sadly, those health issues I mentioned have taken Grant Soosalu beyond the veil now. The loss to those who knew him and those who would have known him is immeasurable. Nevertheless, the positive momentum he generated in this world will go on. A man like that leaves footprints and echoes wherever he goes. Thank you, Grant Soosalu. Our time together was way too brief, but the rewards are indelible.

Some photos below from some transcendent days we had together, and you may recognize the grey outback hat Grant is wearing in some of them, exactly like the one he gave me in 2011… [I have dozens of pics from those celebratory times, and there are more posted on my July 27, 2019, entry on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/thomas.sullivan.395) – just click the link and scroll down to that date!]

Laugh, love and live large!

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan