To Life!

Denver.  What I’m about to share happened just outside this Colorado city, but the story actually starts almost 20 years ago… in Mexico!

My wife and I were on vacation. Which is where we discovered the joy of being. 
 

On the first day of our holiday, we lay by the pool, plugged into our music and eyes fixed on our books. A few days later we performed the same ritual but divested ourselves of the earphones and just read.

Toward the end of the week, the books slipped out of our hands and we simply lay there, roasting in the sun.

If anyone asked, we confided, “We are being—just being.” 

And it felt deliciously good, our only movement breathing out and breathing in, and that, of course, on automatic pilot. 

How seldom we slow down and appreciate just being.

Our presence matters

Coming of Age is all about encouraging people 50+ do something for the community that will benefit the community and help them feel they have made a difference, enhance their sense that their life matters.

But what I think we sometimes need to remind ourselves is being on the planet matters. Not just taking up space, consuming, and being entertained—more a sense of our presence… and that that has meaning.

This thought was driven home for me in Denver earlier in the summer, when my wife and I attended an Orthodox Jewish wedding (on the very day of our 39^th wedding anniversary as it turns out!).

You may know the Jewish toast, “L’Chaim!”—“To life!”  This event was all about it.

Dance, Dance, Dance

When the male guests huddled with the groom for the signing of the engagement contract (the marital contract followed shortly thereafter), the ritual was frequently punctuated by all the guys locking arms and dancing around the table.

(After this contract was signed, the future mothers-in-law entered and smashed a dinner plate, symbolizing the impending change in their relationships with their children, who would soon take responsibility for sustaining each other.)

And then more unmitigated joy when the men accompanied the groom when he went to veil the bride (The women and the bride, I have on good authority, had been up to their own joyful activities until now). 

But the men didn’t just file solemnly behind the groom for the veiling ceremony, we danced him there.  Dance, dance, dance.

The Unbridled Bride

The wedding ceremony was a variation on this ode to joy, tempered at moments to be sure by other thoughts and feelings. It was clear, however, that joy-- the joy of life itself-- was what this event was all about.

But it was after the ceremony that this celebration of life really rose to new heights.  Men and women ate together but each group danced independently, separated by a partition.

The women leapt and shouted and played games expressing unbridled joy (even and especially the bride.)

The men twirled and whirled and put on fancy robes and walked on their hands and otherwise made incredible merry.

It brought to mind, of all things, something Irish: lines from the poem “Among School Children” by William Butler Yeats: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance/How can we know the dancer from the dance?”  

How wonderful it is to get so in touch with the joy of being alive that you hear life’s music and are moved to give yourself totally over to it and become one with it.

To Life!  Indeed.