“…take a walk
With your sister the moon
Let her pale light in
To fill up your room
You've been living underground
Eating from a can
You've been running away
From what you don't understand...
Love…
… take a dive
With your sister in the rain
Let her talk about the things
You can't explain
To touch is to heal
To hurt is to steal
If you want to kiss the sky
Better learn how to kneel…
She's the wave
She turns the tide…
It's all right, it's all right, it's all right
She moves in mysterious ways
It's all right, it's all right, it's all right
She moves in mysterious ways
Love
It's all right, it's all right, it's all right
lift my days, light up my nights
Love
One day you will look... back
And you'll see... where
You were held... how
By this love... while
You could stand there
You could move on this moment
Follow this feeling
It's all right, it's all right, it's all right
She moves in mysterious ways
It's all right, it's all right, it's all right
She moves in mysterious ways…
With your sister the moon
Let her pale light in
To fill up your room
You've been living underground
Eating from a can
You've been running away
From what you don't understand...
Love…
… take a dive
With your sister in the rain
Let her talk about the things
You can't explain
To touch is to heal
To hurt is to steal
If you want to kiss the sky
Better learn how to kneel…
She's the wave
She turns the tide…
It's all right, it's all right, it's all right
She moves in mysterious ways
It's all right, it's all right, it's all right
She moves in mysterious ways
Love
It's all right, it's all right, it's all right
lift my days, light up my nights
Love
One day you will look... back
And you'll see... where
You were held... how
By this love... while
You could stand there
You could move on this moment
Follow this feeling
It's all right, it's all right, it's all right
She moves in mysterious ways
It's all right, it's all right, it's all right
She moves in mysterious ways…
The spirit moves in mysterious ways...
“She Moves In Mysterious Ways” – U-2
I know I could be expected to write on the coup in Egypt , the messes and misses of the world, but, today, I take a departure. One I need to take more often. One from bombast and bad language thrown at far flung places and people who detract from beauty and justice. Today, I want to write about Nella Cordelia Hampton and her mom, Kelle Hampton. Because both of them move me in mysterious and beautiful ways. In fact, their whole family does.
Kelle Hampton, for those who don’t know her, is the mother of three beautiful children, a writer and photographer, a lover. A lover of life in all its pastels and shades of gray. She became famous when her sister posted Nella’s birth story. Nella has Down Syndrome. Kelle’s beatific journey is captured in gorgeous photographs and words on her own blog. My wonderful cousin Maria, my soul mate and greatest nurturer, turned me on to this woman, her life, her PERSPECTIVE (and yes, that does deserve to be capitalized). I want to thank my cousin because, yes, we all need perspective, and the transformative beauty that Kelle provides. Yes, they move me in mysterious ways.
Kelle, my cousin tells me, has some detractors. Because she chooses to love and live fully, to see and embrace beauty where others would only see and embrace heartache, she has haters. I am told they even have web sites where they bash her. I will not go there because I would resurrect Tony Soprano, may he rest in peace, and go Mafia all over them. Why do that? If they choose to spread shit, thick on, like a peanut butter sandwich that would choke rather than nourish, with nothing to wash it down, I can choose to eat manna from Kelle. If offered on a menu, which would you choose?
I can see why some might think Kelle is smoking crack, that she is full of hippie-dippie hokum, that she cannot possibly be so full of grace and love, that she cannot choose to be happy because, after all, how many of us are happy? Know that it can—and MUST—be a choice? Understand that you can choose to breathe in beauty, or continue to choke on the smoke of your own inner incinerator that feeds off your soul? Yes, it is hard to make choices and easy to let life drown you. I would rather be baptized by the waves that Kelle makes than to drown. For those water-boarders out there, those haters, I say, “ You can kill time and injure eternity with your hateful rhetoric, but you will not waste mine, my time, my moments here, each one passing leaving fewer to find the gold in a vein running through gray rock, the silver in the lining of magnificent and scary storm clouds, but, more to Kelle’s point, and mine, the majestic, the glorious in the everyday, every-little-thing-she-does-is-magic world we can all choose to live in.” Kelle says, “…there is magic in that extra chromosome. Yes, magic.” She is right. Nella is magic. Kelle could have made her existence tragic for everyone in her life. Instead, she makes Nella’s existence a gift to everyone who will accept it. If offered to you, would you take a beautiful gift or the shit sandwich? I would take the gift, eat it like a holy offering, eat it like ice cream running down a child’s chin, with sprinkles all over the place, bathe in it, throw it all over my walls like a Jackson Pollock creation, roll around on the warm, beautified earth, and be satiated.
To be sure, and very clear, Kelle does not live in a fantasy. She creates the wonder, discovers it in everything she experiences, but does not fool herself that life is always beautiful. In fact, she writhes in pain, struggles like all of us, only she puts it out there to be taken in, if one wishes, to be instructive, to be inspirational, to give us all a little window that does not only frame hope, it gives us a way to it, a portal through which to grab it, hungrily, honestly, as the mere mortals that we are. And, as in Yeats’s poem, The Second Coming, there is nothing “mere” about being mortal, being here.
Let’s be honest. We are all experts in hate. We know it intimately. We see it on every news broadcast, in every paper, in the too-hard-to-take cruelty toward animals, the elderly, the poor, the ill, the earth. But what about love? Philosophers have struggled mightily to define it. Everyone looks for it. Many complain they cannot find it. How many more “Christian Mingle,” “E-Harmony,” or “Match.Com” ads do we have to see to know the desperation? Well, love is within and all around us. If we choose to see it, reach in and grab it, wrap our arms around it. If you love your kids, nieces, nephews, any kid, actually, what is more important—allowing them joy by splashing around in mud, getting sand in your grout work, glittering your hair, your food, your floors—or, keeping your house pristine, the mess unallowed, as the kids nurture deprivation and Mr. Clean gets rich? Well, love is messy. Joy is messy. Living fully is messy. It’s Mr. Clean or happier kids. It’s a little more work to get to love. Is any journey straight and neat? Are there no stones or bends or boulders in the road? It’s the rocks and the road, the stumbles, falls, and scars or the not going, the not striving, the not living at all. If offered the choice, which would you take? Do you only see the muddy, stony, scary forest, and not the beautiful tangles and trees making trellises of light to hang memories on? “What’s your focus?” as Kelle says.
I spent hours yesterday reveling in Nella, Kelle, their family, their lives. I found her to be more honest than I can sometimes dare to be. So, what brought me to Kelle? Well, here’s some honesty. I feel so broken by the world sometimes. I was talking to Maria about pain. She directed me to Kelle's lovely blog. I began to feel the heal.
I love broken things, broken kids, broken people. Because I am one. But, I got help and made a tapestry out of my own shatterings, one as beautiful to me as the Unicorns that hang in the Metropolitan Museum .
So, I went in pain to Maria, to whom I always go for everything. Maria knew just what to do. She told me I had a choice about how to see things, how to deal with painful fractures of the heart. Be the bigger person always or as often as you can. Choose happiness, Choose love. We spent nearly five hours on the phone, she reading Kelle to me, me crying, and headache and all, going to my computer to see the beauty she was relating.
Yesterday was Independence Day in more ways than one. I spent the day with Kelle and her family. I spent the day looking at pictures of Nella. I spent the day flying free, with beautiful words and pictures taking me on a wonderful journey. I spent the day in Nella’s almond eyes, feeling the softness of imperfection so perfect, I cried with gratitude for so much beauty.
I spent the day falling in love.
Thank you, Maria, my great, great love, and Kelle, her family, and, most of all, Nella. I slept in your eyes, Nellabean, your smile, seeing your little pink hands and knitted hats, your too-small-to-be-possible socks and feet in my dreams. You are the wave of grace who turned the tide.
You move me in the most beautiful ways.
You move me in the most beautiful ways.