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“Sitting here all alone. The party’s dead they’ve taken you home. Life is so hard when you’re gone, when you’re gone.”

We are off to a party today.  All travelling from our own homes to join together to celebrate a decade birthday.  A room has been booked, a buffet arranged, a round of drinks for a toast, photographs for memories of us all together.

Our parents are gone.  Aging uncles and aunts not able to come along.  Just us “children” now (with some of us already gone).  And our own families.  The next generation.  The future.

And in the future we will be gone (or unable to attend).  And the future generations will be their future.  We all go home at some point.  We are all gone at a time we do not know.

So today is special.  Brothers and sisters.  Nieces and nephews.  Partners and significant others.  Why do I still feel like a young ‘un despite that number I call my age?  Why do others see that number and think I am that age?  I cuddle our young grandchildren and feel timeless.  I hug my brothers and sisters and feel the young child I was in that moment way back then.  I talk with family and share the memories that make family “family”.  And the cycle of life is unbroken.

Sitting here all alone.

That was a the first line of a song I wrote years ago as a teenager with an acoustic guitar.  I recall a sense of emptiness inside.  Of a girl I fancied from a distance – probably one I never even talked to.  My hormonal youth had many such “conquests” of yearning – my imagination of love way ahead of the reality of actually speaking to a girl.

The party’s dead they’ve taken you home.

These four short sentences connect me with “me” back then.  For some it is sport, or adventure, or poetry, or art, or carousing and recreational highs.  For me it is a guitar and my own thoughts.

“While he was saying this, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!”  But he said, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!”  Luke 11:27-28

For others it is the bible.

My thought is this. What does the bible connect me too?

For me it used to be “The Way”. But The Way was a set of rules in this life until the next.  It used to be sitting in my bedroom alone with a guitar.  It used to be my “unspoken conquests” with God and others also saved from sin.

And now it is not.

Now it is timeless.  A cycle of life.  That one verse no longer (has to be) deep and meaningful.  Now this one “verse” (whatever “verse” really means) just a comment from one to another.  Of a family that sits around chewing the fat.  Some gone and some not yet.  Some new and babies, others wrinkled old and still babies.  Some wrinkled old and always old.  But all with a shared cycle of life.  All able to live timelessly if we want.  All connected to something real.

God is that for me.

He never used to be.  Just as love never used to be.  But now he and it is.  And I am a cork bobbing along this way and that.  I may think I control my destiny – but I found as a new parent that my role was to figure out how to keep up (with this new child) as best I could.  Our other children were no different.  All happily working their way through their “developmental stages” (at the wrong times) – usually when I wasn’t looking.

I am done thinking I control much in this life.

Other than me.  My thoughts.  My connections.  My love.  My timelessness.

I AM a cork and I DO bob this way and that and I WILL embrace each moment and I CAN embrace each connection and I am able to find LOVE in everyone and everything.

I think that’s why corks bob so much.

We dance inside.

🙂

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