“…how amiable the gorgeous advantage of the newly born.”
I am somewhere over the Midwest as I type this, returning to the West Coast from a weekend in Boston. Val and I made the trip to attend a very special wedding. Seeing two dear friends–both kind, courageous men–exchange vows with each other, and blessings with all in attendance, renewed my understanding of what marriage is all about.
We stayed in the Omni Parker House Hotel, home to Emerson and Longfellow’s Saturday Club, and spent what little time we had on this trip getting acquainted with American history up close. We visited beautiful old churches, and made the trip up to Harvard–a school founded by Puritans to unite scholarship with spiritual pursuit.
Though most of us made the trip from California, Massachusetts turned out to be the perfect place for this kind of wedding. It was the first state to abolish slavery, a haven for religious diversity, salvation to the starving Irish, a haunt of Franklin, and later, the Transcendentalists–peopled with the inheritors of great wisdom and fierce compassion; steeped, on every Boston street corner, in our nation’s founding ideals.
We also made this journey to meet a very special wedding guest–the two grooms’ newly-adopted daughter. At lunch today, I got to hold her. She is the first baby I have held in my arms since our son, James, died four years ago. And yet the experience was pure joy. When she opened her eyes, and looked in my face, she started smiling, and laughing, and delight seemed to bounce between us, gathering up our faces in grins and giggles.
I picked up a hard-to-find book of poems by Marvin Bell at Grolier’s just outside Harvard, and have been reading it on the plane. A poem that begins, “The dead man encounters horrific conditions infused with beauty,” also contains the phrase: “…how amiable the gorgeous advantage of the newly born.” I read it, and thought of this lucky little girl, who will come to embrace love’s many facets as naturally as she forms her radiant smile. And arcing now across a small, dark section of globe, fresh hope lights up inside of me–for myself, for my country, and this beautiful, incomprehensible world.
7 Comments
I have been following you casually for about a week now. I just read the above post and came across your reference to losing your son, James. I can’t leave this post before saying that, even though I don’t know you, I am sorry to hear of this. I understand this happened a few years ago. Hopefully, there has been healing. Some, anyway.
Thanks for your kind wishes, Tony. Holding our friends’ new baby girl was indeed an important step on my journey of healing from grief. And it was marked, unexpectedly, not by tears but uproarious joy.
Interesting. From the short time that I have been following you you seem to have an intrinsic faith in your tone. It’s nice to see. I think, sometimes, to be an artist of any type is to understand that, without any suffering or challenge, there is no inspration. To be an artist of any type I wonder whether we need to trust the ebb and flow, the good and bad, that life deals us. I have found it nearly impossible to do anything else and have found, in the long run, the joy prevails.
Tony, it occurs to me that one could do worse than to cultivate an abiding faith that, in the end, the joy prevails. If dedicating our life to art can aid us in that, then surely it is all worthwhile.
Agreed.
Robert,
enjoyed this latest post…studied, like so many others, with Marvin while attending the workshop (some years ago now). But I can hear in my head his voice reading from the Dead Man Poems. And taking care of an adopted child recently, I was struck by how much love the family holds out for these children, and what a brave adventure they (parents/children) embark upon. Grateful on behalf of the children for the love awaiting them.
It gives me hope, too, Tania. Thanks for stopping by.