Joy of Kids

The wedding is a little over a month past. It took about three weeks, maybe four, to re-acclimatize ourselves to the world. I understand weddings now: the pomp, the pageantry, the ritual, the celebration. To create another reality, if only for a time lasting no more than one day, is to participate in the greatest Art which transforms the human soul... again if only for a brief time.

And it seems to be brief, usually. We are not transformed by the great Feast. The momentum of the past forbids us to let ourselves be transformed; we even have been taught to fear radical enchantment which leads to a change of being, so we always come home... we always return from vacation and de-pressurize our bodies by a gradual return to the mundane, allowing the gases of freedom which infused our blood to gradually leech away, become inert, so we do not suffer from a fatal decompression as the state of freedom leaves our bodies.

Oh, not so me. The wedding created a tent of veils, painted with wizardry, blown in the wind, remaining dry in the rain and sheltering us from the wet with intermittent slaps of fabric of the Jinn against elemental storm.

I have seen and read Romeo and Juliet many times, and have been moved to joy and tears, but the effect was always transitory, the experience did not move me in the sense of chess: a move to a new locale, a move with finality and importance in the ultimate outcomes!
The experience of having a family and raising children, then seeing them start a life of their own has, however, changed me immensely. Friends have become multi-dimensional and mysterious; I value the few I have with a new sense of community - although I haven't whispered a word of this to them.
And children! Ha! I tell people now children  are a blessing: the good and the bad. They smile and agree, but I wonder if they have any idea what I mean. I mean Children, not the the 4 hour-long Mike Todd or Abel Gance or D.W. Griffith version; I mean a lifetime of involvement and intertwining....... the infinite director's cut!

I never, ever in my life had any feel for the intricate filigree of intertwining threads that hold life together until my daughter was wed; I never saw life in more than merely 3-dimensions until there was a "separation". I do not feel regret; I cannot say the commonplace "I did not know what I had until it was gone". No. It was something very different: as I felt the separation, I felt the entire process of my life, from birth to family to families of my children: I saw an infinite garden carpet of life being rolled out ahead of me into the future, and the carpet was woven by the joys and happiness, the tears and sorrows of the entire family of humanity - not mine alone.
Being in a sense "alone" - my daughter moving away - I suddenly was no longer alone.
And the carpet is still beneath my feet.

To not know Unity until there is Separation is a paradox, and as I have mentioned elsewhere, paradox - by disrupting the commonplace - is the underpinning of the Most Uncommon, the Holy.


pix: Catherine Schutt / the War Memorial, site of the reception.

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