I just returned home from a weekend away, the first (other than a family vacay 4th of July week) in ages. A year ago, I was invited to officiate at a wedding for a couple I had never met face to face, but rather, through the marvels of modern technology and the phenom of Facebook. A few hours ago, I was on a boat, afloat on the Potomac, cruising past the Washington Monument. The weather could not have been better. The sky, cerulean blue, with skittering clouds as if casually applied with the tip of a paintbrush. Temps in the mid-70s made it a pleasure to walk from the hotel to the location where the boat was docked. The one oops in the day was that I traipsed 15 minutes in the wrong direction since I started out turning right instead of left on my way out the door and ran out of walkway and had to reroute (well, the GPS did) and head back up the wharf. Good thing I had planned for extra time to get there. My conscientious but sometimes plate-spinning ADHD brain has to carefully outline the steps to navigate through the day, lest I drop a few of them. The construction in the area had me detouring a bit. Such is life.
Throughout the day, I was immersed in love soup. The couple and their family gathered from around the world. They were conscientious about safety protocols. Bottles of hand sanitizer were on every table. People were vaxxed and masked. Before the ceremony, the bride approached me with a white tissue paper wrapped box tied with a purple bow. She told me I had to open it before the ceremony I was about to officiate. It contained three objects, each beautiful and practical; gorgeous chakra-colored earrings, a beribboned magic wand that she designed for me that had the same stones wrapped around it, embellished with a Goddess pendant, and tipped with an amethyst crystal, and a purple mask. How did she know I would be wearing that color? I switched out the earrings for the ones I had been wearing, donned the mask and tucked the one I had been wearing in my purse, and hugged the wand, planning on using it to do some healing work in my own life.
When I did a bit of research to discover safe ways to use such a powerful divination tool, what Google initially delivered were many articles on another type of magic wand used for other purposes. As I found what I was looking for, one of the suggestions was to hold the wand and ask what energy it projected. A very clear message, as I felt a glow around my heart, was ‘love and healing’. The heart is more than a cardiac muscle that keeps us ticking away the moments of our lives. It is a repository for memory, containing our experiences, good, bad and ugly. It can be shuttered tight or burst wide open. Mine has experienced love and loss, as well as medical intervention when it threatened to give up the ghost in 2014, or rather, turn me into one when I had an unexpected heart attack. I look forward to seeing what ‘love mischief‘ the wand and I can get into together.
As I often do, when officiating the joining of a couple and their families, (I have come to learn that when you marry a person, you, in a sense, marry their family) I take time to sit back and muse about the reality that I didn’t know these wonderful people existed until the day arrives that they reach out and ask to bring me on board and here I am taking part in one of the most important days in their lives. We were each going about our activities until we were brought together. How blessed am I?
As I am typing these words, the Simon and Garfunkel song Bookends Theme is playing, delighting my heart.
And what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence
A time of confidences
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They’re all that’s left you
Remember the love
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Photo courtesy of the author