I enjoyed very much the first day of Nowruz, sending and receiving greetings and exchanging photographs and seeing many a haft sin tables and to see the happy faces of so many of my Iranian friends . The entry of Nowruz in Iran coincided with 1106 pm the day before where I was .. so the night was short one for me..as if by coincidence I had to attend to the medical problems of people near and far and felt exhausted by the time the second day of Nowruz came around and I wanted a day of rest
I decided to do a spiritual cleansing. First of all I shut myself in my room with a view of the trees still green in their brilliance and observed silence for a long time , then listened to soft music of the sufis, which the Buddha Bar recordings had released. Read a little bit of the book by Amin Malouf of the Leo Africanus fame. As the mind calmed down and fortunately there were very little disturbances by the phone and messages and I decided to light some sage, the oldest plant on the earth, say the Indigenous people. The smoke wafted through the room and I felt a cleansing in my body and in my mind.
I thought of my dear friends in Mashhad, Tehran, Tangiers, Paris, Miami,Little Rock, St. Martin, Havana, Mexico City, Malaga, Toledo, Melbourne, Haifa and Cochin
I introduced Nowruz to many of my friends who had no prior knowledge of this ancient festival. I told them to watch the White Balloon the very first Iranian movie that I remember watching of Jafar Panahi and Abbas Kiriastami. Then I thought, whatever happened to the little girl, innocent and confused and frightened in that movie, Aida Mohammadkhani.
Mohammadkhani received her master's degree in clinical psychology from Alzahra University. She received her PhD in 2018 in Cognitive Neurosciences in the school of cognitive sciences at the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM). Her research focused on the orexin system in opioid addiction. From 2015 to 2017 she was a visiting scholar at Rutgers University in the laboratory of Dr. Gary Aston-Jones. Currently, she is a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Stephanie Borgland at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute of the University of Calgary
Do I need to tell you that Iranians are impressive ?
