What do we celebrate when we celebrate?
Birth, marriage, engagements, growing young, growing old?
I imagine a time eons ago when civilization
was birthed, settlements along waterways were forming, clans and the concept of
kinship were evolving and so what we celebrated was birth of human life and
what sustained it. We celebrated harvest festivals when we consecrated the food
that nourished us to the Maker who helped us produce it.
So what is it we celebrate when we celebrate
…birthdays, for example? For the longest time in our life birthdays are about
the gifts we covet, food we relish, in locations we desire with people who are
a part of our life at the stage that it is at. In the beginning it is parents
and siblings, as we grow up it is with friends and as we grow away from family
it is with friends and colleagues.
Is each celebration an expanded template of
the previous one with perhaps the original being a template of the communal
idea of celebration?
When would we know if we are happy in the
celebration of the celebration? I imagine we know that we already know,
although we are slow to acknowledge it. The same as in life, the same as in
every choice we make. And that’s why Robert Frost’s poem hits home:
The
Gift Outright
The land was ours
before we were the land’s.
She was our land
more than a hundred years
Before we were her
people. She was ours
In Massachusetts,
in Virginia,
But we were England’s,
still colonials,
Possessing what we
still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what
we now no more possessed.
Something we were
withholding made us weak
Until we found out
that it was ourselves
We were withholding
from our land of living,
And forthwith found
salvation in surrender.
I suspect it’s not just that we withhold
ourselves from the land of the living; we withhold ourselves from ourselves.
Those parts of ourselves that are too
uncomfortable to acknowledge how about we embrace those as the whole of us?
The child that I am still hungry for being
touched; the girl that I am wanting to flaunt my being; the young adolescent
that I am wanting to lead and the woman that I became refusing to acknowledge
each of these.
So, what if I could just let go of the
withholding and finally be just me? Oh! what a celebration that would be!
