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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels September 10, 2004 I'll Shut Up -Right After This Tears, love, champagne and the force John Darling We get to the part in their wedding where she repeats after me: to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness ... then her throat catches. Tears fill her eyes. She looks to me for help. I smile and whisper - you're supposed to cry. It's good luck. That part "gets" a lot of people who are marrying, the words about sickness and health, richer and poorer. I've had some couples ask me to leave it out because it's "negative" and you don't want to affirm sickness and poverty. I've responded - are you sure? Do you really think you two are going to get through life without those or something just as challenging? You want a friend in life. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, that, not romance, is what you have. Sickness and poverty in the vows are just metaphors for them loving you as they go deeper into learning about your fears - and all that stuff that lives in the depths with your love. The bride gets back on track in a flash. Then she says, this is my gift to you. Forward comes Aunty Malia, the hula teacher in Ashland, dancing the Hawaiian wedding song before the couple. Her movements are of utter voluptuousness mixed with shyness. She's a feminine shaman, smiling, summoning, holding and unveiling the ancient powers of love, nature, community and happiness. The groom, dressed in sporty black, wearing a goatee, gives his usual understated, twinkly-eyed smile. At the end, he bows. We all do. It's instinctive to bow to this. You lower your head to efface the ego, to open to the universal that touches us all. The guests cheer and as we break out the champagne, I converse with him in his native Greek, the few lines I can remember from when he schooled a small group of us at my house every Tuesday night, with many a toast of ouzo. "E matera eine kali," I say. This is what I always say when I see him - and about all I can remember from the classes years ago, though I still enjoy reading the classics with bilingual pages. It means: mother is good. Only fitting I would remember those words, sprung from the land of land of primordial goddesses - Athena, Demeter, Aphrodite, Artemis. As the "liquid stars" (champagne) imbues happy cell receptors, I find myself seated between two men I'm getting to know. We check out each other's occupations - professor, screen door installer - and they seem to know what my work is. You seem a very sensitive man, says one, referring to my writing. "You betcherass I am!" I retort. We all crack up. I can't stand solemnity. With that, we're off, one relating a tale of a cab driver in New York last week who cut right to the core, wanting to know who he was, what he valued in life, how is love showing up in his life, then got out of the cab to give him a big hug. Yes, things are changing, we say, the world is opening up, people are being more honest, opening their hearts to ... it's hard to put words to it, but we all know what we're talking about. One cites an article in the Vancouver Sun last week saying Ashland has become the spiritual mecca of the West Coast. Well, a newspaper would say that. A "thing" has to be happening in a place at a time. As if Ashland were where you came to be spiritual. But the taxi driver gives lie to that. It's happening where it happens. It happens inside you. That evening, talking with my friend O., a Star Wars freak, he says, hey, strong The Force is with me, but big cycles of anxiety and depression I keep having and something wrong with me I keep thinking there is - and tell me that, a lot of my friends do. I giggle at his Yoda-speak and, letting The Force surround and penetrate me, I venture, hey, keep your focus on the thoughts you are having because, as Yoda said, the Dark Side of The Force lures you in with fear - fear creates hate, hate creates anger and anger creates suffering. Things are changing, I remind him. This is not like it was 10 years ago or even five. Just look at the geopolitical scene now - it makes Star Wars look tame. Behind it all, The Force grows stronger and demands more of us, while it gives us more. If we can handle it. If we can't, it comes across as stuff like anxiety, depression, confusion, self-esteem issues, feeling uneasy about being different. So, there's nothing mental about you. We're all going through more and it's forcing us to learn how to use The Force. Gets it, he does. Relieved, he is. With all its anxiety and depression, is this journey not better than sex, drugs, religion, likker, tv, prozac, a new girlfriend and all the other fixes? Well, he allows, some of those can be fun in the short term, but over the long term, no, nothing can touch the life of a Jedi warrior. And what does all this do to romantic love, which so often seems the center of the universe? Why do the Jedi or Zen monks and the shamans of Don Juan's lineage rarely, if ever have spouses? We don't know. It's changing. It's hard. I'm finding more people say they love more but want the form less. They have to keep to their center and love themselves first and always, then two such people can share that - and only when they can both share it. Is this the work of The Force? What isn't the work of The Force? I search the term on the Internet, finding it has parallels in all religions, ancient and modern, whether used to mean nature, God, wisdom, love or Tao, the ineffable "way" of things. Elusive, answers are. Worth a thousand answers, a good question is. Then, in an e-mail from Zane Kesey, come these words from his dad, Oregon's badboy tripper wizard Ken Kesey: "The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer. They think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer." Contact John Darling, an Ashland writer and counselor, at [email protected]. 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