Tickled by the thought of looking wise, the idea occurred to me to assemble a picture log of some of the 'looks' I've had to adopt in my life.
I begin with a photo of myself as a computer animator working for Master Software in Myrtle Beach in 1983. That's me on the left in the blue sweater. I guess that's my geek look.
Four years later I was making a movie. My attire conformed to the occasion. That's me with my crew in my first beard. 1987.
Fast forward another five years and I'm in my high planes drifter apparel. A house painter with panache. Drinking white wine with my girlfriend Sarah, who also had panache, on our Crescent Beach patio. 1993.
Circumstances eventually brought me to graduate school, where I looked around to learn how to dress appropriately. This was taken of me at the University of Arkansas in 1999. The all-American guy with a road map to success.
Another 9 years passed, 2018, and I found myself giving a series of talks back in Myrtle Beach. It was only natural to don some teacher garb for the occasion.
Most recently I've been writing the book I've had in mind all my life, a philosopher's book. And I suppose that I have taken on the garb of one who writes such a book.
Life can be seen as a series of hats we don, and our many lives find us donning even more outrageous ones. A sailor's, a dictator's, a hero's, a horse thief's – Meher Baba says we've lived them all.
But Baba tells us we are really none of these hats, and they are only provisional masks we assume along the way of a very long journey, one with a very special purpose. For as the Rano chart in God Speaks says round its perimeter, this entire world we appear to find ourselves in is really: The Creative and Impulsive Imagination of a Formless and Colorless God, to Know Himself as Omnipresent, Infinite, and Eternal.
And to teach us this, Baba had to descend and put on his Avatar hat.
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