Saying “Yes” to Life
for Nicole
A few years ago I was asked to be one of the presenters at a big conference commemorating the 25th year since the passing of Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist. I was flying in from Chicago to New York and the planners had arranged for someone local to pick me up at the airport and drive me north to Woodstock where the conference was to be held. Unbeknownst to either of us there had been a glitch in the communications.
I arrived at LaGuardia airport and looked around eagerly for my new friend, Nicole Miller, who was going to ferry meet up to Woodstock. I watched and waited but no one arrived. Thank goodness for cell phones! I called her up and asked when I might expect her. There was a long pause at the other end of the phone and then a hesitant voice said “I was expecting you tomorrow.”
My exclamation of dismay was loud and genuine. I explained that I had no other means of getting up there and that I was expected at a planning session that evening. Nicole replied that she was off teaching a class but could get to the airport in 45 minutes – and she did. “Do you need to go home and pack a bag?“ I asked her as we flung my small suitcase into the trunk of her car. “Nah,“ she said. “There isn’t time, so let’s just go for it!”
And we hit the road, giddy as two school girls playing hooky. We stopped for dinner and soared into conversation, our words like wings. We swooped into Woodstock in time for me to attend my meeting and spent the next four days in a swirl of music and storytelling and poetry and dancing and rituals by firelight.
Nicole was gifted articles of clothing by generous participants who recognized her act of sacrifice in leaving home without a bag. When she lamented that she’d laid out special jewelry to bring along for the occasion, I immediately plucked the handmade pendant from my own neck – the one I’d specially laid out for the occasion - and placed it over her head. We both burst into laughter, feeling ourselves carried along by the spirit of the gift expanding itself and amplifying our joy.
* * *
Whenever I think back on that event I am struck once again by the generosity that characterized its inception, what sustained it, and the effect it had on all of us who attended. Like the opening chords of a great symphony, Nicole‘s bold gesture of abandoning herself to the moment stands out in stark relief to the cautious ways we mostly live our lives. Her willingness to be carried by the river of necessity and then be lifted up and carried along by that river is a bit of mythmaking brought to life.
So much of the time we are dying to be in control of what happens to us, when we would do better to let go of that vanity. When I am feeling stuck in the doldrums I think back to that moment and am reminded of the power of simply saying Yes! to life.
This clumsy living that moves lumbering
as if in ropes through what is not done,
reminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.
And to die - which is the letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day -
is like the swan, when she nervously lets herself down
into the water, which receives her gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after her, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,
more like a queen, further and further on.
– Rilke translated by Robert Bly
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Rebecca Armstrong, Feb. 13, 2019
