Firsts

(Some people have asked why this picture with this particular musing. If I say my friend Deb is fully alive, you'll understand at the end.)

I hadn't known what I would write about first here, what would summon my heart, what would be the first cracked twig or bruised moss on the forest floor to show me my direction this writing year. Firsts are important, and contain unfoldings.

And somehow I wind up at an online article about the recent Kennedy Center arts honorees, among whom was Bruce Springsteen. Bruuce. Who can't be 60 and who is.
Who wears his medal and ribbon almost as comfortably as a t-shirt and jeans.

And a YouTube video of him singing "Born To Run" in Turin, full of concert energy and heart and heat and joy. My eyes filled with tears and my tight, beleaguered heart let go into celebration, even as I asked, even as I wondered, "What could I have done if I had had my health? How large could I have been?"

I watched the crowd, surely swayed with them to the rhythm that held us all, knew myself to be smiling at the same time a cry was torn from me. Tears fell, as I went from video to video, from city to city, exulting in watching a supremely talented good man enact the magic that transmuted the art of performance into love given and received. I looked at the faces in the audiences. Each one beaming, a brighter than normal icon of its normal visage through which clearly shone a light that both reflects and attracts. I remember Iraneaus, the fourth-century Greek father who is noted for having said that the glory of God is the human person fully alive. May glimpsing and limning the glory that I just partook of and witnessed call me onward during this new year.