People Watching
Celebrating a Different Kind of Freedom
Cain Park gradually filled with mostly elder millennials and a few gen xers sprinkled in there, all gathering to hear a lineup of artists sing under a pavilion of brick and wood and late June light. After a week of humidity and rain, the sky cleared, a light breeze cooled the atmosphere, and the trees offered their branches and leaves for shade. We reclined in low-seated beach chairs facing the stage, and waited for the show to begin.
At this age, we are beginning to understand how older couples can sit for lunch at a restaurant and not speak to one another the entire meal. It isn’t because they are angry or irritated; they have just said everything they could have said to each other by this point in the day. Silence can be a veil lifting, curtain tearing invitation into the sacred.
Or it can be just cutting up your chicken breast and digesting what’s in front of you.
In the midst of the din of the crowd, we sat in comfortable silence. In front of us, there was a guy wearing a Tommy Bahama hat and shirt. Two guys in shorts and button down shirts stretched out on a blanket a couple feet away lying on their backs with their knees bent staring up at the sky. A woman held a baby and chased a toddler, both youngsters wearing noise canceling headphones. There was a woman in dreadlocks, a man in jean shorts, a man dancing with wild limbs, a lean woman in cutoffs and a tank top that show off her tattoos and sculpted muscles with both arms up that reminded us of someone else we know. She was standing next to a balding man in unremarkable clothing I’ve already forgotten. And plenty of other men and women of varying shapes and sizes sat and stared straight ahead, bobbing to the beat, so many people unlike us, distinct from us, just like us.
I watched the crowds dance and nod in jubilation along with the artist on stage, belting out melodies and lyrics of love and peace, protest and justice. And for a moment each body was just flesh and bone, clothed skeletons of dust, so many bodies, each dancing towards their inevitable graves. What does it matter, thin or large, hairstyles or tattoos or brand names, when we are all just dancing towards our inevitable graves?
Ants crawled up and down my leg and into my purse. “Why are there so many ants?” My friend asked.
The ants replied, “Why are there so many people?!”
I brushed an ant off of my leg, and he scurried away, his whole life changed.
Then I saw the Wind gather the leaves in the trees in a warm summer embrace, and the Wind caressed each numbered hair on each head, and the Wind danced between raised hands, and the Wind blew people together into warm embraces and glad smiles and wild dances, and the Wind delighted itself between the raised arms of the woman with the tattoos and jean shorts dancing with abandon, and the Wind carried the music of love and peace, protest and justice, into the ears of all the hearers, and the music and Wind made sense to all who were there, it bound and connected us, it told us of a higher plane within us, one of love and joy, peace and justice, knitting us into all creation.
The next day I watched a remarkably different crowd gather, a crowd of young and old. There were men with makeup and wigs and people in rainbow fishnet stockings and people with beards and a man in a sparkly colonial costume, and a girl with black dyed hair and drops of plastic crystals decorating her eyelids, and children with rainbow buttons and bubbles, teenagers holding hands and resting their heads on their partner’s shoulders, women with short hair and men with long hair, and the Wind blew here, too, among all of the people who just want to be seen and loved, heard and known, who just want someone to reflect back to them the image of God that abides within.
I looked them in the eyes. I gave them my best smile. They smiled back. And the Wind danced, calling out the image of the Cosmic Christ within each festival attendee.
People watching is easy. We are just bonded bundles of dust, yes, but it’s stardust from the original Source of All Things, empowered and held together by the Light and Substance that holds all things together, the Light and Substance that is Love, drawing all things toward itself.
And in that Love, we are set free indeed.
It will all fall away. The substance of all things will not fall away.
Nothing matters. Everything matters.
“In the Eternal Now all men become seen in a new way. We enfold them in our love, and we and they are enfolded together within the great Love of God as we know it in Christ. Once walk in the Now and men are changed, in our sight, as we see them from the plateau heights. They aren’t just masses of struggling beings, furthering or thwarting our ambitions, or, in far larger numbers, utterly alien to and insulated from us. We become identified with them and suffer when they suffer and rejoice when they rejoice. One might say we become cosmic mothers, tenderly caring for all.”
- Thomas R. Kelly, A Testament of Devotion
Loved this as usual Sarah ♡♡♡