A PERSONAL AUTHORS NOTE:

DUSTYBEAR: 
I met Mustafa Kazemi with a mutual friend, 
on Twitter...and LIFE, as they say, CHANGED. He was very personable and I liked him immediately...
but at that point I knew nothing about him.

Over the next few days, I kept feeling drawn...
and finally one night while I was working in the kitchen I found myself almost unable to keep from going into my office and getting on the computer. 

I went to twitter, and to his TL. From there I went to his blog and THAT is where I found the link to his pictures. The ones he had taken and had had a friend and fellow journalist take during the now infamous firefight at the hotel in Kabul previously.  

The following is what I wrote then:

NOTE: I remember the night I was reading an account Mustafa had written, and then I brought up an attachment. It was a picture of this young Afghani cowering under a sofa with, in his own words, bullets whizzing over his head. Then another similar picture...taken out in, I think, a combat area, and I suddenly found myself with tears trickling and then STREAMING down my cheeks...
as I sat looking at one of the most HEART & GUT-WRENCHING pair of images I've ever seen. Without warning I heard myself thinking, OUT LOUD... 
"I pray for you Mustafa. 
OH GOD, I pray for you..."
those words adding imagery and a depth of emotion to my tears, and then I tweeted him these RIDICULOUSLY INADEQUATE words. 

 "Stay safe, Mustafa, please stay safe" without having either the words, the courage, or even the awareness to be able to articulate WHY I was now feeling the way I was.

Maybe it's merely the thought once expressed by writer Oscar Wilde: 

"FOR ONE MOMENT OUR LIVES MET...

OUR SOULS TOUCHED." 

and the touching moved me to tears.

At the end of the day, I think that that is perhaps the most searing reason why I think Mustafa is SO important to this moment in our two countries' history. His words, his pictures, and the depth of emotion he brings and inspires...along with the expertise, the training, and the innate gut instincts and talents he draws from and utilizes in his work CAN maybe begin to help both of our peoples to start moving toward a more meaningful tomorrow. 

Hopefully, eventually, to emerge...friends.

Mutual understanding and a better and much more personal appreciation that 'war is indeed Hell.'

NOT A DAY goes by now that I don't worry and pray for Mustafa. But in truth it matters little what I, sitting in my big comfortable home in the United States, thinks or feels...
compared to what he is sometimes going through. The flashbacks, the emotional pain.
The PTSD. Just the horror lived day-to-day of someone who knows he may or may not make it through to tomorrow.  

As I wake up with Mittens safely and snugly ensconced on his feline throne next to me, and purring. I wonder. What is HIS waking up like?

Touching...lives and emotions in ways that aren't designed or manufactured or crafted or fabricated out of some idyllic imagery...but are merely there. You don't understand it. You can't articulate it. But you just know that's the way it is...and somehow that's okay. 

Sometimes?  The things that burrow DEEPEST into our souls and psyches DEFY description. They don't need one. It's plainly enough that they exist and it behooves us to merely embrace them.

Like a painting in your mind of what you think and how you feel, and how you react. The colors vibrant at times, other times muted. The textures ranging from smooth as silk to as gyrating as a bowl of jello on your lap while traversing a gravel road. They often inter-weave and interact...just for kicks of course. Keeping us a bit off balance, but hey. That's life, right?

Hard to explain...easier to just let it be. Life in full color and vibrating with the intensity of your own inner core. Sort of an inner-being paint mixer, if you will. The difficulty of trying to live within a cocktail blender. Attempting to live a normal life while war rages all around you. Swirling and whirling and keeping you slightly off-balance.

Then again, the why or how IT IS important is why I am writing this at all. With all that I have and enjoy, with NO possibility of anything of consequence except perhaps a stray fly...
whizzing over MY head, how can I possibly understand HIS pain and frustrations and yet? 

Strangely though I do. 

Perhaps with my natural empathy or perhaps, something more. Something Mustafa brings that others don't. Perhaps, I will never know, but no matter. Yes, it does NOT matter what this silly AuthorBear, this Dustybear published author, writer, journalist THINKS. 

Not to you and perhaps not to Mustafa.

But it matters what all of us  who are NOT in Afghanistan think, feel, and do as it relates to both that country and it's brave people. A people who deserve PEACE just as much as we do & who need friends, too. Just as we do.

FOR THAT REASON, THIS IS A STORY I WANT VERY MUCH TO WRITE.

To tell the story of Mustafa, in the hopes that in doing so, it will bring more clarity to the people of THIS country about HIS country and its people...precious little of which is known outside its war-torn borders.

I will close this as I close out each day now...
sometimes with a bit of mist in my eyes and sometimes only in my heart, but...

"STAY SAFE, MUSTAFA. 
PLEASE, STAY SAFE...

for YOUR sake, but also for OUR sake.

For ALL of us who NEED you to help us to be a bit more human, in an often violent and frequently quixotic world."

P.S. Those images I spoke of as affecting me so deeply. I can honestly say that NOT SINCE looking at the pictures I had shot of the bodies floating in the canals in New Orleans after Katrina had anything moved me quite that much. 

I remember looking down from the rooftop and from the helicopter in New Orleans and just having the overwhelming urge to cry, to vomit, to SCREAM. 

I wrote a book about it, in fact. I've never been able to get myself to submit it to my publisher though. Maybe someday. It's just too personal.

BOTH had a sense of just how horrid reality can get sometimes. 

How dangerous, how DEADLY...
and both had an impact. True enough.

Db

written with revisions 071412