A Partnership Like No Other

By Mary Reiman

Last week I officiated a wedding. Now those of you who know me are saying...what? You? I know you might be wondering what that lovely young couple was thinking. I was asking the same question. Of all the people they could have chosen...

FYI: I wanted to write about this for my most out-of-the-box moment in May, but it had not yet happened, and I didn’t want to get ahead of myself...or jinx anything! 

Let me be clear, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to completely describe how honored I was to be asked. At the same time, I won’t deny being terrified. Such a mixture of emotions!

When they invited me to dinner in March, I thought they might ask if I would cut the cake at their September wedding. Well, obviously, I did not know what they were thinking. Yes, I was stunned. And yes, I was nervous. And yes, after we wrote the script I practiced for many weeks. But practicing in front of the mirror is not the same as standing in front of a family that you love and admire, wanting to make sure you don’t trip walking up the aisle before the ceremony begins, or lose your voice...or faint! Yes, all those scenarios crossed my mind between March and September!

Welcome Family and Friends. 

Thank you for being with us today. On this day of joy!

It is love that brings us here today.

That’s how it began. The first words of the ceremony.

What was most important for me was that each and every word of their ceremony be what they wanted it to be, determining what was most important to them, and to their hearts. Not that the exquisite flowers or the beautiful setting or the stunning dress or the lovely decorations were not important. But for me, it was about the words spoken. That was the role I hoped to fulfill. Speaking the love.

Creating the ceremony involved writing the script, finding the perfect words to describe the love I saw, heard and felt when talking with them. Contemplating the perfect words needed to describe this beautiful relationship to all in attendance. 

I watched them interact in March. They were blissfully happy. Listening to the early discussions, thinking about everything that needed to be done, moving through summer and into fall. There were more conversations than they might have wanted with me. And they were still blissfully happy. 

And then suddenly it was September and I was standing within inches of them as they made these vows.

I ask you to be no one other than yourself.

Loving what I know of you and trusting what I do not yet know,

I will respect your integrity and have faith in your abiding love for me,

Through all our years and in all that life may bring us.

Yes, it all came together. They were beaming, as they did when they sat across from me in March, enjoying every moment of their wedding. The feeling in the air, not simply because the air quality was better, or because it was a lovely outside venue on a gorgeous September evening, but truly, because of the love in the air. Love. Joy. As simple as that.

I also had the vantage point of watching the faces and listening to the wonderfulness of their friends attending the wedding. They and their friends inspire great hope for our future. They are all smart and funny and excited about where they will land in the world as they leave college and begin their professional careers. They are looking forward. They will make our world better. Most importantly, they exude the great value of strong friendships.  

I have not talked to them since the wedding. They have flown off into the sunset. As it should be. But my hope is that the ceremony was everything they had hoped it would be, and more. And that their life will indeed be filled with the love and joyfulness and laughter that was shared by all at their wedding. 

I don’t know why they picked me. But I will be forever grateful.

Thank you, my fine young friends, for allowing me to be part of your life’s journey. It was indeed an honor to witness the beginning of your partnership.

A partnership like no other. Where the best part of each day is your time together.

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Fighting for dreams

By JoAnne Young

“Hope lives in the shadow of this state’s Capitol,” I wrote in a Journal Star article six years ago. “It resides in the blocks that surround the Capitol square and stretches into Lincoln’s more irregular neighborhoods.” 

I wrote about the people who lived in that shadow, a seventh-grader who attended a parochial school across the street, a school that has since closed. I wrote about a young community activist living in an apartment in that shadow, with no car and no bike, who walked every work day to her job as a paraeducator at a Lincoln school. A family living paycheck to paycheck, who stood in a line each month at a Lincoln church to get food. 

 

In that shadow, those and many others who lived and worked and went to school there had hope. Their hope was for jobs and housing assistance, for prison reform and health care that fit their needs. For the rights and freedom and choices to live their lives without the dictate of politics. 

 

Now I see, when I visit our imposing Capitol, the shadows have moved inside. I apologize to our founders, but I roll my eyes each time I pass under the words: Political society exists for the sake of noble living.

 

I have always loved our Capitol, the carved marble and tile, the words etched in the stone, the principles it was built on, the hope it could offer. I had an office there for 14 years. I’ve sat in the Rotunda many nights after closing … 8 o’clock, 9 or 10 … when it was quiet and dimly lit and smelling of the soap used to buff the floors. There, I could marvel at its creation, its beauty and meaning, and how lucky I was to be there. 

 

Now, I see it more often in darkness. An absence has settled in, of love and openness for all the people who have a right to claim it. Hope has been covered over by political agenda. 

 

In that darkness, though, are fragments of light. Sometimes it falls on the messages we shouldn’t miss. The darkened library light perched beside our law books. Virtues of hope, courage, wisdom, justice, joining hands at the top of the dome, where fourth graders are told to look and learn. The life-giving winged figure casting seeds and flowers across the landscape despite the shadows closing in. 

 

The writing above the bench in the locked Supreme Court, seen through the glass dimly: “Eyes and ears are poor witnesses when the soul is barbarous." 

The Greek philosopher who is quoted there is the same who is credited with the idea that the only thing constant in life is change. We can't go backward or stand still. 

 

This is a condolence message, as it were, for all those who have been wronged by events and decisions in this arrestingly consequential building, those who have been shoved into its shadows. 

 

It is also a get-well-soon wish, that the light we see when the curtains are pulled back can heal it. We are not children, but on their behalf, we have become tethered to this state’s survival. My children were born here. Two of my grandchildren were. They have all left now. I want them to have something good to remember besides a state that turned its back on so many.

 

We can’t stay huddled in the darkness where selected officials believe they represent us. Represent me. In a place where, for me, trust is being peeled away session by session, election by election.  

 

“No matter how fast light travels,” says writer Terry Patchett, “it finds the darkness has always gotten there first and is waiting for it.”

 

Dreaming, says writer Jean Genet, is nursed in darkness. But then those dreams have to find the light, or else they fade. We can’t remember them. In the light we can remember the people who have rallied on our Capitol steps, who have fought for their dreams in hearing rooms. Who have reasoned and sometimes shouted their needs in the Rotunda, begging, “please don’t make us leave.”

 

In the light of this building, people have acted out their fears and watched as others acted out their power. 

 

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness,” wrote poet Mary Oliver. 

 

It took her years to understand that it would turn out to be a gift. 

 

Darkness can be debilitating, such that action seems pointless, someone once explained. Pointless but enormously necessary at the same time. The opportunity for hope exists in turmoil. 

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A Hum in the Universe

 

By Marilyn Moore

It’s there…a hum in the universe.  Hummmmm, ambient noise, part of what some astrophysicists call a cosmic symphony, evidence that the universe is not static, but rocking and rolling, changing, expanding, shifting shapes….and singing.   A low-pitched hum, way lower than humans can detect, but “heard” by gigantic telescopes, measuring emissions from hundreds of thousands of pulsars.  Telescopes in every continent of the planet, except for Antarctica.  Planetary agreement among the astrophysicists that indeed the universe is humming.  

The source of the universe’s hum?  Most likely it’s from gravitational waves, coming from the spiraling and merging of pairs of black holes throughout the galaxies.  Perhaps the black holes are dancing?  I like the image of dancing, great big, huge black holes, dancing in space, a dance that makes music….it reminds me of the Northern Lights, that danced the night away…I wonder if they were making music…

Last summer the James Webb telescope let us see the universe in ways never seen before—we could see the birth of stars, billions of years ago.  Again, they were dancing….and exploding with life and light and energy and, dare I say, joy.  This summer, we learn that the universe is humming…another cause for wonder, at a time that I need a little wonder in my life.

I think, though, that while the astrophysicists are just now able to quantify, and verify, the humming of gravitational waves, there are those who live amongst us that have somehow always been aware of the universe’s hum.  They most likely did not “hear” it, at least in the sense that we think about hearing a spoken word, a trumpet’s note, a child’s laughter, but they have sensed that hum, a deep-within-the-soul visceral connection to the universe.  Across continents and across cultures, indigenous peoples drummed, and still do, to an internal beat, to a deeply felt vibration, that connected them to one another and to the earth.  I sense that harmony in the words of Black Elk, in the drums of the Masai and the Ponca.  Perhaps that is what those we describe as “old souls” are sensing, are feeling as the source of wisdom and groundedness.

And the critters….what about the critters?  If you’ve been on the prairie on a summer day, or in your own back yard at close of day in late summer, you hear the buzz of bees and the song of the cicadas.  I don’t think they hear the hum of the universe any more than people do, but perhaps they sense the vibration, and they join the chorus.  Or a flock of birds, on the ground, who seemingly without warning and without signal, all rise in flight together.  Are they responding to the universe’s vibration?  What about migratory animals, the zebra, the wildebeest, the Sandhill cranes, the Monarch butterflies…do they move with some thousands-of-years-old pull, in concert with gravitational waves from black holes?  

And finally, what about us?  People, that is.  If there are gravitational waves that create an ambient hum throughout the universe, is that hum embedded in us, too?  In our cells?  In our DNA?  Do our cells hum at a level that can’t be heard, but can be felt?  Do we give off energy, that either repels, or attracts, those we meet?  Is my sense (sometimes) of being “at one with the universe” a function of my cellular hum being the same, or in harmony with, that of the universe?  And when I’m out of sorts, has my cellular hum jumped pitches?  Can I fix that, because I always like to that I can fix anything?  Or do I have to just stop, and let myself be drawn back into the universe’s hum?  

I think about that hum, and I wonder what the note is.  If the astrophysicists have written about that, I haven’t read it.  I think they’re focusing on other questions…but I wonder what note it is.  In my mind’s ear, I’m hearing a C, many octaves below Middle C, much lower than the C the 32ft. pipe on a pipe organ can produce.  But I hear a C.  I hear it in a classical music context, because that’s what I think of.  Others may hear it in jazz, in ballad, in rap, in a march, in a lullaby, in a folk song, in any of music’s many forms.  But throughout all, it’s the universe’s hum….a single tone, wrapping all of us together.  Imagine, we're bound together by the gravitational waves, emanating from colliding and merging black holes throughout the universe....in a summer when much seems to divide us, I'm glad to know there's a hum that holds us together.

And like the images from the James Webb telescope last summer of the exploding births of stars and galaxies, the discovery of the universe’s hum this summer is one that I can’t quite wrap my mind around…it’s bigger and more complex than my brain can understand.  But my soul gets it….and I am grounded in the hum.

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