As in, The Emotions (woah, woah, you’ve got the best of my love) or “Emotion” (It’s just emotion/taking me over). Or any descriptive passage that could be properly begun with the words “I feel.” It’s been on my mind lately.
A few days ago, my BFF and I drove to Austin to attend Starr’s memorial. Such a different animal than the sorts of memorials and funerals I’ve attended before. There was genuine mourning, sure. And there was also much celebration of Starr’s life. Who she was, the lessons she lived and taught so well by example to all of us, distilled in the messages of her music and in the hearts of everyone present.
It had been a long, long time — in some cases, years — since I’d seen some of the people I reconnected with there. Every hug, every moment spent standing in front of the fire with our arms around each other brought home that this was the way to honor Starr. With love. With community. Always connected, no matter how far we may drift from each other in these individual lives we’re living.
I exchanged many a sad glance. I laughed. I sang out loud when her band, The Lovers, played their set after many, many stories told by family and friends. And I cried, though not as much as I had cried already. It felt important to remember everything and everyone. What is remembered lives on in us. Or, for short, what is remembered lives.
In the religion of my birth, remembering is important. Remembering to keep the holy days, lighting a Yarzheit candle on the anniversary of a loved one’s passing, holding close the essence of thoughts and deeds and love given and received. In this way is memory made to be a blessing to all who live.
All of this remembering — or, better yet — re-membering, as if the whole world and everyone in it were shattered and longed to be whole once more — is not mere rote. It would be nothing without feeling, without emotion.
Over the lunch hour today, I finished reading Melissa Marr’s Fragile Eternity. Warning: Vague spoiler alert. I felt more captivated by the last third of the book than any of its other parts, which is not to say those weren’t good but that the last third touched me in special way because of an unexpected weaving of emotion into the steady, unchanging threads of order. End warning.
What does it mean to bring emotion into the warp and weft of order? How does a person who prides him- or herself on equanimity deal with the ebb and flow of the heart? What is the right balance between logic and feeling? How does it shift and change? Slowly, steadily? So quickly that we give ourselves whiplash? Somewhere in between?
There is a time for more and for less, a time for sharp and bright and dark and explosive. There’s a place for gentleness, for gratitude. There’s magic in all of it — the kind of awe and wonder that goes along with being present, right now, in all of our humanity — however it feels.
The point is to feel.