sgtpepperI have spent the last three days in a love-fest, surrounded by my entire family as they gathered from New York and Utah and Venezuela to celebrate the wedding of a beloved nephew.  There were dreadlocks and three-piece suits, there were babies and 80 year olds, and there were more than a few ex-husbands (lol).

(The couple cherished the opportunity to publicly celebrate their union even as they acknowledged in their wedding vows that this basic human right is not yet available to all.)

We entered the wedding space as disparate elements in the lives of these two people.  We were work friends, aunts and cousins; we were old roommates from college.  As we sat and listened to their vows, there was a palpable whoosh of love that surrounded the couple. If you can be present in the moment, there is something so tender and so vulnerable, so hopelessly, helplessly optimistic about two people joining together, that you can’t help but open up your heart to that love.

The wedding couple was the glowing center of it all, and we, this motley crew, joined together to surround and support them with the beautiful energy of our love.  Each individual expression of love was magnified in community, and it was as though we were spinning circles of love, orbits of kindness, around them as they stood before us.

David is the glowing life force of goodness at the center of our little universe here. Each of us came here as a disparate element, but the combined energy of our passion can support and magnify our experience.  It’s as though we are the orbiting planets around our sun.  Sometimes the planets spin out of harmony and clash and collide. Feelings of being slighted or not being understood can cause a wobble in our orbits and debris flies off in different directions. Planets have even been known to directly collide, with unfortunate destructive results. But the sun at the center of this system simply continues to glow with passion, to sparkle with humor and perhaps would even be amused at the flailing of the circling spheres.

Maybe it’s useful to remember that we are but small planets that orbit this miracle of nature.  We are indeed the fortunate ones in that we can feel the warmth.  The passion and dedication that we feel is a beautiful thing.  We all come from different places but we’re all pulled in by the same force.  There is much more that unites us in our love than divides us.

Perhaps it’s also useful simply to remember what it was that first connected us with David.  Each of us has a story, a moment when something changed and we were pulled into this gravitational pull. What was your moment? What is your story?

All you need is love, love…. Love is all you need.

~ davidfanLIZ