The View From Here

Pop-Up Wedding

I have a recurring dream where I show up for a wedding, only to discover that I was supposed to be officiating the ceremony. The problem is, I haven’t prepared, not a word of it, and the rest of the dream is me scrambling unsuccessfully to scrape something together at the last minute… - - - - - One of the many things I’ve learned in my work with First Nations communities in western Canada is that even though the content of our personal development experience is the same every month, each new group of participants comes together to create a unique experience for everyone involved. Last week was no exception—especially Thursday night. 5:00pm Our afternoon session had just wrapped up when I overheard someone say that a couple of the participants wanted to get married. Well that’s a first. John and Alexia had been engaged for some time, and earlier in the day, Alexia mentioned to a friend that she wanted to have her wedding right there at Ness Lake. “But ...

There are two ways I could tell this story. The first would be to wait a little while longer until I have some more clarity around how this narrative will actually unfold. This is my preferred way of sharing anything personal: wait until things have worked themselves out, and only then drill down into my experiences for whatever I think might be helpful (or at least mildly entertaining) to others. Lessons learned, victories won, tales to be told. I’m not alone in this. Most of us prefer to tell our stories from the end backwards. In the middle, things are too messy and too uncertain and, well, too raw. I had a conversation once with a friend who was in the midst of an unspeakably challenging season, and we wondered together what it would be like for him to tell his story right there in the middle of it—right there where he wasn’t even sure he would make it out alive. And so the second way I could tell this story of mine is to do just that, to tell it from the middle, which is wher...

Graduation

Tonight, our youngest child will walk across a stage and receive his high school diploma, entering a new season of life for himself while simultaneously bringing to an end yet another season of life for his apparently aging parents. Neither of these is officially true, as despite having checked off the requirements for graduation, Jude will be returning to high school, like his sister before him, for a “victory lap” next fall. But the fact that his exit from this stage of life may not be official doesn’t take away from the significance of tonight’s ceremony for either our son or his parents. I’ve been thinking about the word ‘commencement,’ which, according to the tickets tucked in an envelope by our front door, is what this ceremony is called. The word means a start, or a beginning, and I suppose that makes sense as the graduates are being symbolically launched into a new stage of their lives. But then again, I’m not sure you can ever pinpoint a beginning with that kind of accuracy. ...

A Good Honest Shuffle

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