[Note: On June 7th, 2008, the marriage ceremony of my niece Addie and her affianced husband, Lucas, took place. I was more than a wedding guest; just over ten months earlier Addie and Lucas had asked me to perform the ceremony. There is some irony in this, at least for me, mainly because I have devoted much of my adult life to emptying myself of beliefs. I am an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church of Modesto, California, an on-line ministry apparently founded, in part, on the belief that spiritual authority is everyone’s birthright.
I was 26 when Addie was born, a young 26 by any reckoning; in a way, I grew up with Addie. She remained an especially important presence in my life during the five and a half years before my first child, Eli, was born.
The location for the ceremony was near Park City, Utah, at a dude ranch with a livery stable that separated a clearing, mostly paved, from a meadow, lush with the tender growth of green grass in early June, and surrounded by aspens whose leaves were just unfurling, green and sticky, from their buds. A clear stream of fresh snow-melt purled and chortled softly along the edge of the meadow.]
On behalf of Addie and Lucas, welcome, every one, to this wedding celebration. For those of you who may not know me, I’m Addie’s uncle Creighton. And though I have not come into my spiritual authority, such as it is, by any conventional pathways, I have performed five weddings now. I am happy to say that, to this day, each of the couples whose ceremonies I’ve conducted remain married, although I claim no credit for their success.
[During this introduction, the brides’ maids processed from the livery stable up to the speaker’s right of the altar. By the time I finished the introduction, Addie emerged from behind the stable doors on a black stallion named Teton, her white wedding gown billowing on Teton's jet-black flanks. It was among the most profoundly beautiful sights I have seen in my entire life. She rode up on Teton to the end of the row of brides’ maids, dismounted, and stepped onto the altar.]
None of us would be here today if it weren’t for many orders and hierarchies of interaction, for the marriage of mighty forces, for the co-mingling of many diverse elements – of earth and sky and water, of light and dark, of life and death. We are among a vast multitude of forms, continuously rising into and falling out of being, living not into certainty but into possibility.
And now we are gathered to celebrate the marriage of two mighty souls. Yes, Lucas and Addie, you are mighty souls. I begin here now, having accepted the priceless gift the two of you have given me. Of all the people you could have invited to lead this ceremony, many of whom now stand here with hearts full of love and best wishes and a thousand beautiful poems, you chose me. I confess that there have been many moments in the past few months when I did not feel quite equal to this immense gift – even now . . . . Yet, now, I stand among you all, upon this great earth, here in the Wasatch Mountains, as we join our hearts together to celebrate the profound miracle of your love for one another.
Now, we all get to hear another voice. Lucas' sister, Kelly Murdock, has a poem she has selected for the occasion, one that fits our “western” theme. Kelly? . . . .
[Kelly stepped up to the altar and read a cowboy poem, about two lovers who find one another in the mountains and deserts of Utah. I have yet to procure a copy of the text or to discover its source or its author.]
Thank you, Kelly. Thank you so much. That poem situated Addie’s and Lucas’ marriage beautifully within the context of the culture and landscape of America’s west, where the marriage between free-spirited independence and a commitment to care for others and for this earth has inspired the songs of poets, troubadours, iconoclasts, mystics, cowgirls, and cowboys.
Lucas, Addie, just look at you: all lit up in one another’s presence, listening to your hearts, to one another’s hearts, to the world at large, learning and growing and laughing, as you have since you first met. Many of your friends here from Southern California know the genesis of your relationship much better than I. But I have come to understand that out of the unimaginably varied experiences you brought to bear upon your first meeting with one another, you had the wisdom, good fortune, and grace to take the time to found your relationship on a deep and abiding friendship.
The etymological roots of the word “friend” reach back to the Old English noun frEo, which means “free,” and the Old English verb frEon, which means “to love.” Perhaps the most evolved form of relationship for human beings is one where we remain, in every circumstance, free to love. Lucas and Addie, you are showing us that a marriage grounded in a friendship where you have remained free to love lives not into narrowing certainty but into endlessly proliferating possibility.
A few weeks ago, I asked Addie and Lucas, each, separately, how they might go about answering the following question: if you could gaze deeply, one to another, and make a vow from the deepest wellsprings of your soul, what would you say? I realize now, as I feel your mighty hearts so fully present, so in love with one another, that I may as well have asked the Earth how it turns, the rivers how they run, the tides how they ebb and flow, the stars how they shine.
But you, Lucas and Addie, are nothing if not fearless. And though you may devote the lives remaining to you finding ways to give utterance to the deepest wellsprings of your souls, you spoke with your hearts, fearlessly and truly. What you said, Addie, hit an 8.7 on the Richter Scale of Love. You told me that you have remained so “in synch” with Lucas that you can immediately detect when things begin to wobble, and that you have learned to welcome even the slightest wobble as an occasion to open up, to learn, to grow, and to continue living into the possibilities you are creating for yourself and for your life with Lucas.
And you, Lucas, shared that the first impressions arising in your heart were how deeply and well you love, simply, to be with Addie, how much gentle joy you find in celebrating and sharing all you have in common. But then you said something that quaked my world with aftershocks every bit as powerful as those with which Addie had just rocked me. What you shared was that, in the time you have known Addie, you have gone far beyond an appreciation of what you hold in common; you have come to love and admire all the ways she’s different from you, and that every one of these differences is a quality you are seeking to nurture in yourself. Opening to the all the ways you and she are different is inspiring you to be more compassionate and steady and calm and accepting.
These may not be marriage vows in any familiar religious sense, but they are much more profound than anything that could be declared in any ceremony. They are inspiring me with a love that goes far beyond my humble reach with words. For I realize that you, Addie and Lucas, have been marrying yourselves to one another for years now, and that this ceremony is just one more way for you to share -- with us and with the world -- what you’ve been up to for some time now. Goodness gracious! Lo and behold, you’re already married! You’ve rendered my job as minister here today superfluous!
What is not superfluous, at all, is that you have invited all of us here today to share this fabulous day. Thank you. Thank you, so much. Your love for one another is creating for us the possibility of falling in love with our own lives, of living in ever more full and fulfilling fidelity with the people we love, and living ever more fully into our commitments to one another.
And there are many people who could not be here with us today, people whom we miss, people who, though no longer alive among us, have made this day possible. They would want to be here, I think, and, in at least one case, there is one dear soul I know for certain who wanted to be here. To the extent we carry those who are not with us today in our hearts, they are here, helping us to feel and to breathe and to love. I know that loss and death do not ordinarily come up as themes in a wedding, but you, Addie and Lucas, are not ordinary people, and this is not an ordinary wedding. Your love has deepened my understanding that death is the affirmation, not the negation, of life.
Your vows to one another are commitments to remain fearless, honest, responsible, and in good humor; they are commitments to remain free to learn, to grow, and to transform, vigorously and unceasingly; they are commitments to bring into being only what is best for one another, though you may not always know, from one moment to the next, what that may be.
Do you, Alison Addie Jane Daubner Burgess King, take this man, Lucas Graham Murdock, so deeply to heart that you will always love, uplift, and care for him; that you will always treat him with grace and dignity; and that you will always inspire him to be at his very best, no matter what else is happening in the world around you?
ADDIE: “I do.”
Do you, Lucas Graham Murdock, take this woman, Addie King, so deeply to heart that you will always love, uplift, and care for her; that you will always treat her with grace and dignity; and that you will always inspire her to be at her very best, no matter what else is happening in the world around you?
[Here, Lucas queued up a CD of the song “I Do” by Boyz 2 Men, and the grooms’ men grooved into a synchronized dance as back-up while Lucas did a phenomenal job lip-synching the song. It was hilarious and provided a balance of mirth that played way better than my wildest expectations! Then he resumed his position at the altar.]
LUCAS [to laughter]: “I do.”
May I have the rings? [Addie and Lucas whistled, and their Golden Retriever came bounding up with a satin pillow tied to his back. A ring was tied to the pillow. The real rings were in my pocket. I pulled the ring for Addie from my left pocket and gave it to Lucas. He slid it upon her finger. Then I pulled the ring for Lucas from my right pocket and gave it to Addie. She slid it on his finger.]
I now pronounce you husband and wife, wife and husband, and I wish you all the happiness and love in the world.
Addie, Lucas, you may now live, as free beings, into the possibilities endlessly marrying themselves through you. And you may now kiss one another.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Message from a Boulder in Havasu Canyon
Here is a translation of utterances made by a boulder resting in the bottom of Havasu Canyon, Arizona, not far from Havasu Falls:
You look at me now. Look at you. I know what you're thinking. It makes no difference whether you write this down or not. No difference to me. Well, that's not quite true. It's just that I've been hurt before. Though the passive voice is misleading. The wound turned out to be self-inflicted. I'll spare you that story. For now. I know how to ease into a conversation.
I broke loose and toppled from the headwall of sandstone above. It must have been 3,500 years ago or so, as you count the laps Earth makes around the sun. How little you human beings understand of time – inured as you are to the rounds of day and night that so occupy the making of a life.
Listen, I can show you time: my disparate, constituent particles blowing around forever and a day, or so it seemed at the time, amidst an ocean of dunes. My gradual subsidence, spanning millennia, beneath a shallow sea. My slow burial beneath thousands of feet of sand and clay. My rise into wind and weather over the course of millions of years. Eons of deep time, passing mostly in silence, with no apparent movement whatsoever. And then, deja vu: the earth shook. Suddenly, borne away from the stone strata where I'd been hidden from myself for so long, I fell thousands of feet and came to rest where you see me now: here, now, the solitary stone you find before you. I could show you more, but I don't want to bore you. Not that I think I have. It's just that a lot of people don't seem to notice. As if they think I'm dumb.
What, you think there's a law that says a boulder can't have a sense of humor? Or any creature feeling? You, standing there, in alarming contrast to the land around you, with your bright colors, your notebook and pen, acting as if you've never been and are not now hidden from yourself, trying not to miss or misconstrue what I’m saying, acting as if the words of a stone might carry some sort of gravitas. More likely they carry evidence of your lunacy. At least you get some credit, among those of your kind with a romantic bent, for listening to the moon. But surely you know what people will say when you try to pass this off as words you got from a stone, don't you?
If they only knew. And if they did, would it make any difference? What are they making of their biblical allotment of three score and ten, anyway? You can smell the burning and the blood from here.
And, more to the point, what are you making of yours? These are not rhetorical questions. It's ok, take your time. You have all the life remaining to you to ponder answers. Which only lead to more questions. On and on it goes. With hours that number so few, compared to mine, do you ever for an instant take your life for granted? Nothing personal, but it's not much, your life. I know, it's all you got. You could do worse. And surely will, some day. Not meaning to be harsh. I may be a stone, but I'm not devoid of irony. Or of art or empathy, for that matter, which, to my way of thinking, are all one and the same.
Pardon the redundancy, but this bears emphasis: I've been hurt. And the irony of the passive voice is that it veils the fact that I was more than an accomplice: I was principal agent. Though it's true I wasn't acting alone. Just unconscious of the fact. From the wound, I brought forth the conscious will to change what is, as if I could undo what had already been done, and with that, the will to cry out, to speak from the IS in me to the IS of the invisible realms, to be heard and understood. Perhaps that's the closest a boulder can get to time on a human scale. That's where you come in. A voice seeks an audience. It seeks to enter into conversation.
I understand why you would project the logic of your own small making onto the world at large, then endow that projection with sovereignty over all else, including yourself. It's a sort of spell you cast in the vain hope of avoiding pain, a spell that works only as long as you believe it will. But that belief, as infinitesimal and evanescent as the life given to you, cannot outlast the pain. Of course it takes more than the words of a boulder to break the spell. That's up to you, entirely. But I got news: you don't have to wait till you're dead, though death's a sure-fire way. Do you understand now what’s at stake? No time to lose. I say this not to make you cry but as your friend.
I nearly forgot who I was talking to, and a rock forgets nothing. That I know of. Somehow along the way you must have learned to take others’ lives lightly, while conceiving of your own flesh, nerves, blood, and bones as substantial and inviolate, a solid-seeming wager against impermanence and loss. Let me tell you, that's a wager you're sure to lose. Not to lay it on thick with the cliches. I do what I have to, to get my point across. Circumstances being what they are. Less than ideal, if you don't mind my saying so . . .
You look at me now. Look at you. I know what you're thinking. It makes no difference whether you write this down or not. No difference to me. Well, that's not quite true. It's just that I've been hurt before. Though the passive voice is misleading. The wound turned out to be self-inflicted. I'll spare you that story. For now. I know how to ease into a conversation.
I broke loose and toppled from the headwall of sandstone above. It must have been 3,500 years ago or so, as you count the laps Earth makes around the sun. How little you human beings understand of time – inured as you are to the rounds of day and night that so occupy the making of a life.
Listen, I can show you time: my disparate, constituent particles blowing around forever and a day, or so it seemed at the time, amidst an ocean of dunes. My gradual subsidence, spanning millennia, beneath a shallow sea. My slow burial beneath thousands of feet of sand and clay. My rise into wind and weather over the course of millions of years. Eons of deep time, passing mostly in silence, with no apparent movement whatsoever. And then, deja vu: the earth shook. Suddenly, borne away from the stone strata where I'd been hidden from myself for so long, I fell thousands of feet and came to rest where you see me now: here, now, the solitary stone you find before you. I could show you more, but I don't want to bore you. Not that I think I have. It's just that a lot of people don't seem to notice. As if they think I'm dumb.
What, you think there's a law that says a boulder can't have a sense of humor? Or any creature feeling? You, standing there, in alarming contrast to the land around you, with your bright colors, your notebook and pen, acting as if you've never been and are not now hidden from yourself, trying not to miss or misconstrue what I’m saying, acting as if the words of a stone might carry some sort of gravitas. More likely they carry evidence of your lunacy. At least you get some credit, among those of your kind with a romantic bent, for listening to the moon. But surely you know what people will say when you try to pass this off as words you got from a stone, don't you?
If they only knew. And if they did, would it make any difference? What are they making of their biblical allotment of three score and ten, anyway? You can smell the burning and the blood from here.
And, more to the point, what are you making of yours? These are not rhetorical questions. It's ok, take your time. You have all the life remaining to you to ponder answers. Which only lead to more questions. On and on it goes. With hours that number so few, compared to mine, do you ever for an instant take your life for granted? Nothing personal, but it's not much, your life. I know, it's all you got. You could do worse. And surely will, some day. Not meaning to be harsh. I may be a stone, but I'm not devoid of irony. Or of art or empathy, for that matter, which, to my way of thinking, are all one and the same.
Pardon the redundancy, but this bears emphasis: I've been hurt. And the irony of the passive voice is that it veils the fact that I was more than an accomplice: I was principal agent. Though it's true I wasn't acting alone. Just unconscious of the fact. From the wound, I brought forth the conscious will to change what is, as if I could undo what had already been done, and with that, the will to cry out, to speak from the IS in me to the IS of the invisible realms, to be heard and understood. Perhaps that's the closest a boulder can get to time on a human scale. That's where you come in. A voice seeks an audience. It seeks to enter into conversation.
I understand why you would project the logic of your own small making onto the world at large, then endow that projection with sovereignty over all else, including yourself. It's a sort of spell you cast in the vain hope of avoiding pain, a spell that works only as long as you believe it will. But that belief, as infinitesimal and evanescent as the life given to you, cannot outlast the pain. Of course it takes more than the words of a boulder to break the spell. That's up to you, entirely. But I got news: you don't have to wait till you're dead, though death's a sure-fire way. Do you understand now what’s at stake? No time to lose. I say this not to make you cry but as your friend.
I nearly forgot who I was talking to, and a rock forgets nothing. That I know of. Somehow along the way you must have learned to take others’ lives lightly, while conceiving of your own flesh, nerves, blood, and bones as substantial and inviolate, a solid-seeming wager against impermanence and loss. Let me tell you, that's a wager you're sure to lose. Not to lay it on thick with the cliches. I do what I have to, to get my point across. Circumstances being what they are. Less than ideal, if you don't mind my saying so . . .
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Havasupai Country
For nine days in February, along with fifteen students, three fellow teachers, and one alumnus from my school, I journeyed over a thousand miles, by van and on foot, from Las Vegas to Havasu Canyon to the Grand Canyon to Bryce Canyon to Zion Canyon and back to Las Vegas. It was our school's Winterim, during which time teachers lead students on various excursions -- from France to Guatemala to community service projects in the Tacoma region to college trips to backpacking and camping trips such as ours. My group gathered backpacking gear and flew from Seatac Airport to Las Vegas, where we rented a caravan of passenger vans and drove across the Hoover Dam toward our first night's lodging in a motel in Kingman, Arizona, which served as a staging area for our journey to the rim of Havasu Canyon the following day.
Havasu Canyon is a tributary of the Colorado River at the Grand Canyon's western part. The trail head, Hualapai Hilltop, overlooks the canyon from a vantage point more than 6,000 feet above sea level. As we closed our packs and hefted them to our shoulders, we could see snow from a recent storm brightening the shadows and setting off the lineaments of the north-facing buttes and sandstone cliffs, tawny and rust-colored landforms jutting into the clear sky, the bluest of blue. After descending two or three miles of relatively steep switchbacks, the trail eased into an open canyon that narrowed with each step along the six or seven mile walk into the village of the Havasupai Indians, who have lived and farmed in the canyon for thousands and thousands of years. Here, where the trail enters the village, the luminescent blue water of Havasu Creek flows into the canyon. We were greeted with views of old and new homes, yards with ramshackle fences surrounding horses and donkeys and mules and cows and the occasional goat, quite a few friendly dogs moving untethered and free, and gentle smiles on the faces of the Havasupai people.
The contrasts between the suburbs of Tacoma, where most of the students on our trip live, and the Havasupai Reservation, which depends largely on horse, donkey, and mule trains to bring in supplies and carry out mail and refuse, tells of two Americas: the America of egregious consumption, running on gasoline, credit, and greed; and the America of its indigenous, sovereign peoples, who live distinctly on the margins. The Havasupai people, for the most part, still inhabit their ancestral homeland: Havasu Canyon is remote and difficult to access, on land that happens to have no minerals to mine or forests to clear cut.
On our third day there, we hiked down to the Colorado River, following a route that meandered around and through pool after pool of turquoise blue water. We camped in the cottonwoods between two grand waterfalls, where we had a great view of the lunar eclipse during the night of February 20th -- the darkened full moon, filtered down to the color of blood by the earth's umbra, heightened the brilliance of the stars. And in the light of the preceding day, you could see cottonwood trees crowned with green buds, the grasses and early flowers breaking thick and lush through the soil’s winter crust.
After leaving Havasupai land, we drove through a full-on blizzard as we passed by the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, so our views were limited to a frenzy of snowflakes veiling ghostly shapes. We drove on through the storm across the Navajo Reservation toward Ruby's Inn and Bryce Canyon N.P. in southern Utah that afternoon, then hiked a loop in Bryce the following morning as the storm cleared -- it was magical swishing through crystals from one of those fabled desert snowfalls, amid almost unearthly colors and weird shapes called "hoodoos" -- like the lumpy towers of sand castles, pink and orange and red and hundreds of feet tall, drizzled through the fingers of giants, pointing toward clouds breaking to a deep blue sky.
We then drove to Zion N.P. -- all but two of our fifteen students ventured with two co-leaders and me toward Angel's Landing, a grand sandstone fin jutting about 1700 feet above the Virgin River below. We broke trail through the snow to within 100 meters or so of the top, but it became too treacherous to proceed, clutching as we were to chains and handrails the park service installed back in the 30s to aid climbing. Zion was absolutely amazing - I'd never seen so much snow there; the cliffs were heaped with white quilts, festooned with mighty icicles and silver strands of waterfalls; several of the waterfalls disintegrated into mist as they dropped a thousand vertical feet in free fall!
Havasu Canyon is a tributary of the Colorado River at the Grand Canyon's western part. The trail head, Hualapai Hilltop, overlooks the canyon from a vantage point more than 6,000 feet above sea level. As we closed our packs and hefted them to our shoulders, we could see snow from a recent storm brightening the shadows and setting off the lineaments of the north-facing buttes and sandstone cliffs, tawny and rust-colored landforms jutting into the clear sky, the bluest of blue. After descending two or three miles of relatively steep switchbacks, the trail eased into an open canyon that narrowed with each step along the six or seven mile walk into the village of the Havasupai Indians, who have lived and farmed in the canyon for thousands and thousands of years. Here, where the trail enters the village, the luminescent blue water of Havasu Creek flows into the canyon. We were greeted with views of old and new homes, yards with ramshackle fences surrounding horses and donkeys and mules and cows and the occasional goat, quite a few friendly dogs moving untethered and free, and gentle smiles on the faces of the Havasupai people.
The contrasts between the suburbs of Tacoma, where most of the students on our trip live, and the Havasupai Reservation, which depends largely on horse, donkey, and mule trains to bring in supplies and carry out mail and refuse, tells of two Americas: the America of egregious consumption, running on gasoline, credit, and greed; and the America of its indigenous, sovereign peoples, who live distinctly on the margins. The Havasupai people, for the most part, still inhabit their ancestral homeland: Havasu Canyon is remote and difficult to access, on land that happens to have no minerals to mine or forests to clear cut.
On our third day there, we hiked down to the Colorado River, following a route that meandered around and through pool after pool of turquoise blue water. We camped in the cottonwoods between two grand waterfalls, where we had a great view of the lunar eclipse during the night of February 20th -- the darkened full moon, filtered down to the color of blood by the earth's umbra, heightened the brilliance of the stars. And in the light of the preceding day, you could see cottonwood trees crowned with green buds, the grasses and early flowers breaking thick and lush through the soil’s winter crust.
After leaving Havasupai land, we drove through a full-on blizzard as we passed by the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, so our views were limited to a frenzy of snowflakes veiling ghostly shapes. We drove on through the storm across the Navajo Reservation toward Ruby's Inn and Bryce Canyon N.P. in southern Utah that afternoon, then hiked a loop in Bryce the following morning as the storm cleared -- it was magical swishing through crystals from one of those fabled desert snowfalls, amid almost unearthly colors and weird shapes called "hoodoos" -- like the lumpy towers of sand castles, pink and orange and red and hundreds of feet tall, drizzled through the fingers of giants, pointing toward clouds breaking to a deep blue sky.
We then drove to Zion N.P. -- all but two of our fifteen students ventured with two co-leaders and me toward Angel's Landing, a grand sandstone fin jutting about 1700 feet above the Virgin River below. We broke trail through the snow to within 100 meters or so of the top, but it became too treacherous to proceed, clutching as we were to chains and handrails the park service installed back in the 30s to aid climbing. Zion was absolutely amazing - I'd never seen so much snow there; the cliffs were heaped with white quilts, festooned with mighty icicles and silver strands of waterfalls; several of the waterfalls disintegrated into mist as they dropped a thousand vertical feet in free fall!
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