"Take me to the end so I can see the start"

I'm still recovering from an extraordinary (trust me, that is an understatement) weekend. It was both exhilarating and exhausting. I could maybe spend the rest of my life writing about it and never be able to convey the intensity of being surrounded by so much support, love, crying, laughing, breathlessness, and a good amount of intermittent weirdness thrown in for seasoning. It was church after all. No church worth its salt (yes, that's an intentional Biblical reference) is free of weirdos. At the very least, as soon as I cross a church's threshold, I can be assured it has at least one weirdo: me. In fact, I've always assumed that the word "weirdos" got excised from the original scriptures pretty early: "Where two or more [weirdos] are gathered in my name..." More people would enjoy their encounters with the Bible if that stuff had been left in.

But I digress. I could have picked a zillion songs to offer for you to ponder the mystery of life, either your specific life, or life in general. This song is as good as any, although I disagree that there's only one way to mend a broken heart. Perhaps I haven't yet plumbed the true essence of the song if I'm repeatedly getting hung up on that one line. Regardless, one thing I know is that no matter whether an ending is expected, there is a suddenness to endings that is bumpy, at the very least. Remember those movies about the Apollo space program? How when those early space capsules re-entered the earth's atmosphere there was a good amount of uncontrollable shaking, unbearable heat, and the not-exactly-minor fear of dying on impact. Those are features of every ending I've ever had, it's just that in my endings, I'm not wearing a protective suit, sitting in a space capsule, with a parachute to help break the fall as I smash into the ocean. Astronauts have always had it SOOO easy. (;

Back to the song, I find it so much easier to bear endings, like the one I am now navigating, when I can remember that the end of one thing is always the beginning of new territory. The Wailin' Jennys sing real pretty, and I love a bunch of the other lines in this song "Beautiful Dawn," including the one I selected for the title of this post. Don't settle for the less-than-stellar audio of the song as presented here. Download it and then: Listen. Rinse. Repeat as necessary.