The Spiritual Side Of Celebrating Fifty Years

I am waking up Saturday morning and yup its there!

Icey white covers everything outdoors.
OMG! 

It's gonna ice for my anniversary celebration!

Inclement weather: Emergency Plan B has gotta move into place!

Of course I call Sue, as planned, and as I do almost every morning; my devoted Spirit Sister and the occasion' s chief organizer. 

We are prepared for this eventuality; AccuWeather, our trusty weather advisor, has already fore warned us. We are prepared.

What next, we are asking each other?

Ummmmmm.  Pause. 

I'm calm, relaxed, at ease with life's ups and downs and turn arounds, like I would never have been fifty years ago.

Yup, the Icey mess is here, no doubt about it!

"Just checked the news online,” I tell Sue.

“Baltimore pileup on I 95 (one of our major highways), sixty-seven car pile-up, two dead.”

No one should be out on the roads in this.

Even if it clears, roads will remain slick in spots, black ice and fog would make for a dangerous return home, after dark, as it likely would be.

“Gotta cancel our celebration and reschedule. Let's look forward to a day in the future of sunshine and flowers.”

In the next moment, after we get that straight, I am asking Sue, “Who has confirmed, who needs to be called immediately, who second?”

We are into Plan B! 

Then --- the moment when it all turns around. 

Really turns round right!

Sue tells me she has news that is just gonna knock my sox off!

She sure is right!

Later, on Sunday afternoon, when our turning has come full circle, Sue and I are singing -- 

Tis the gift to be simple; 'Tis the gift to be free; 'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be; And when we find ourselves in the place just right; It will be in the valley of love and delight.

Yup, our celebration has turned into that! 

We are “in the valley of love and delight!”

See our picture!  I am happily ensconced in the midst of my honorary daughter Terry and granddaughter Maggie.

Plan B has brought us, instead of Saturday's pre-planned event, to a quiet Sunday afternoon at home in my lovely mountains. In our picture Terry, Maggie and I are looking at pictures in my Beloved Father – Daughter scrapbook (the scrapbook itself worthy of many tales to come). 

Four generations celebrating ME! You realize how close the spirit level is, at times like this, when a deceased parent shows up for a celebration.

How totally lovely, warm and cozy. Just as this celebration was meant to be!

Of course, I am disappointed about what was dismantled from Saturday's planned occasion; especially the other people I care about and didn't get to see. But as an introvert, I love small groups. Maybe someday, before too far off, we can revisit the bigger plan. But today I am full on what I did have for my celebration.

Spirit Sister Sue, also an introvert, enjoyed our small, cozy gathering. There she sits, watching us on the couch, rejoicing in having orchestrated the –

BIGGEST, BEST SURPRISE IMAGINABLE OF MY 50th anniversary celebration!

My daughter Terry has flown clear across the country from California to be here to celebrate my 50th anniversary! OMG! OMG!

It almost doesn’t get any better than that!

Terry and Maggie not only have traveled three thousand miles to be here with me on this day; my wonderful, tiny “honorary family” has traveled throughout an afternoon of revisiting memorabilia with me and listening to my stories of adventures and years past, laughing especially at the funny ones. Along the way we even admire the bronze plague Terry made up for me for the day we celebrated my 25th!

Meanwhile another Spirit Sister, Joan, my BIG sister guide who continues to pass on the teachings of his culture that Murat would have us learn, has informed Sue that she and my Kebzeh family in Vernon was to also be celebrating a special occasion on December 17. Just about the same time as we had been scheduled to do. Their celebration would include some of their adepts "turning," the Dervish turn, based for them on Murat’s traditions being related to the roots of Sufism.

Whirling dervishes perform a meditative, prayer dance to express emotion and achieve the wisdom and love of God. The dance originated in Turkey, in the Islamic sect of Sufism, which was founded by Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi. Murat was influenced by these Sufi traditions as he grew up in an Abkhazian diasporo in Turkey, following the early twentieth century invasion of Abkhazia by Russia which sent his tribal mountain people there.

We got their spiritual vibe even if we were a day late, catching up to them on our end.

So my celebration day was all so very good! And so simple.

A day to remember when we, perhaps, find ourselves, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

I am aware of our oneness; the universality of our celebrating.

West coast has merged with the East. Jew has blended with Muslim.

G-d is good!

More than any other single element, the spiritual side of my celebrating fifty years brings me joy and a great sense of unity!