What do we celebrate when we celebrate?

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

BY ROBERT FROST

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!