The Dummy on Destiny (plus some poetic waxzing)

HALLELUJAH! Jami is finally back from protesting proposition 8 and I no longer have to carry the burden of superfluous miscellany.

Today I think I'll go for substance. (YaY JaMi!) (And j/k about the proposition 8 thing!)

(And mahalo Barbaloot for reminding me to tell you how I really feel about destiny. I almost forgot.)

DESTINY:

Destiny is like a rose--by any other name it would smell the same. Destiny = providence/the grand scheme/the upstairs plan/the man/the man with the plan/the universe/the secret/the secret universe/and finally . . . the invisible red thread.

Destiny is the invisible red thread. The ancient Chinese understood that.

I poked fun at the thread yesterday, but if I am being really honest, I like the idea. I'm romantic like that. I would even say I'm a super hopeless romantic. And what's more super hopeless than being bound forever to your loved ones by an invisible string of red thread? Or blue thread for that matter.

But that's what's so cool about hope and destiny and love. It offers reason to the unreasonable. It offers explanation to the unexplainable. It offers comfort to the uncomfortable.

The invisible red thread is destiny, but it's also love. The purpose of destiny is learning and the purpose of love is learning.

In fact the purpose of life is learning. If life is our classroom, then God is our principal and destiny is our registrar and love is our major. All the courses required to graduate would be forgiveness 101, patience 315, kindness 202, long suffering 400 . . . you get the extended metaphor.

The longer I live the more aware I become of how exquisitely complex love is. How delicate and fleeting--yet sturdy and everlasting. How plump and spoiled--yet famished and modest.

The after shocks of love are so deep and wide and far reaching not even a poet can measure them.

Isn't it remarkable that invisible red thread can hold together what circumstances can't?

Life is a bully. Life separates. But a delicate thread is tough enough to bind souls together forever.

It's a soothing thought when you're suffering.

I recently heard a poetic love story about Thomas Jefferson, who suffered intensely from losing his parents, his best friend, half of his children and his beloved wife by the time he was 40 years old.

In May of 1782, Patti Jefferson was dangerously ill. She was dying. Jefferson nursed her tenderly for 4 months while she lingered. In September they sat together on her death bed and wrote out a quote on a piece of 4X4 paper from one of their favorite novels, Tristan Shandy.

The quote begins in Patti's handwriting:

Time wastes too fast. Every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours are flying over our heads like clouds on a windy day. Never to return more, everything presses on.

Halfway through the quote, Jefferson picked up the pen and finished the quote:

And every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which follows it are preludes to the eternal seperation which we are shortly to make.

Jefferson kept this quote in a secret compartment of the drawer beside his bed along with a lock of her hair. The paper was folded and refolded hundreds of times.

I can't help but hope he knew about the invisible red thread.

Small comfort, I know. But even small comforts are welcome blessings when you're in pain.