This weekend, our sweet son Matt married his lovely best friend, Amy.
The groom was handsome, the bride was beautiful, the venue was architecturally amazing, the flowers were fabulous. Family and friends gathered to celebrate and share.
Most of all, it was one of those times in life where, as a parent, you stand still for just a moment and see what Love has created.
Anyone who knows me at all knows that I adore my children.
I distinctly remember falling in love with each of them as infants, looking into their precious tiny faces and being overcome with gratitude for the gift of being their mom.
Then there were all the years when they were just so cute and hilarious, constantly discovering, and teaching me to see the world fresh again through their eyes.
Years of being present for all the little moments, attending to the minutes--happy and sad, anxious and angry, excited and bored--that build hours and days and weeks and years and a life.
And then adolescence rolled in. Thirteen years of it, we had in our house. Years when we learned to let go, to coach instead of control, to support their differentiation, to accept their choices even when we were terrified, to celebrate their truths rather than our own, to breathe and breathe and breathe, and to keep hoping no matter what that we would, indeed, one day, get through it together.
And now today they stand together, supporting one another, being adults together, walking out into a future that one day we will not share, but that they will continue to create and enjoy with one another.
After the wedding, we came home and watched Planet Earth: Seasonal Forests. We did this after Libby's wedding five years ago, too, so I guess it counts as a tradition now. We have our Christmas pickle, and we have deciduous forests.
If you haven't watched Seasonal Forests lately, it's a lot about trees. The largest living organism on earth is a tree. Also the oldest living organism on earth is a tree, a tree that's been alive for 5,000 years. A tree that was already 3,000 years old when Christ was born.
Seasonal Forests is also about the plants and animals that live among the trees: baby birds that leap jump out of the nest, and spring flowers that pop open and melt away, and the leaves that grow and change and fall, all of the living things filling the earth with timeless beauty.
Monday after the wedding was my birthday. I took a nap, read a book, and Andy made dinner, so it was a 5-star day in my opinion.
During dinner, we listened to Xavier Rudd, an Australian reggae artist that our youngest got us into just recently. We listened all the way through the two albums he has on Spotify, and at the very end, there was this beautiful song called Creating a Dream.
As The Princess Bride so famously says, true love is a dream within a dream.
And that seemed particularly true this weekend.
There's the great big dream of the cosmos, of planet Earth in all its beauty and wonder, and then there's the dream of our tiny little lives inside it.
Which, to each of us, is the best and most beautiful dream of all: unique, intricate, miraculous.
My dream for my darling children is that they will
grow past us,
move on,
do better,
learn from our mistakes,
go farther in and higher up,
dive deeper into Love and joy,
unfold more mystery,
live into the timeless beauty that Love gifts to us,
all joined together,
all part of each other,
in the mystic sweet communion
of Love's great dream for us all.
And, knowing them, I believe that they will.