to turn, turn will be our delight

After getting in line at 6:30 in the morning, and being, with my group of 7 dear friends, one of the very last people to make it into the sold-out showing of the inauguration at Oakland's Parkway theatre;

after watching President-Elect Obama emerge from the White House with President Bush, with just a few moments remaining of the latter's devastating possession of the title;

after squealing at Michelle's gold and the girls' vibrant blues and oranges, and at Jill Biden's Boots!;

after laughing at Rick Warren's flourish on Sasha's name, and shouting "except the gays!" every time he made some comment or another about equality and freedom;

after Aretha simply was the queen;

after Vice President Biden's swearing-in on the biggest Bible ever, thereby ending the reign of the true evil mastermind of the last eight, destructive years, now crippled and confined to a wheelchair;

and just before Michelle held out Lincoln's bible in her two gloved hands, to aid her husband Barack Hussein Obama in assuming the office of the Presidency of the United States America --

this is where I really lost it.

What came through for me, in this most beautiful adaptation of "Simple Gifts," was a sense so pure and so strong of the human heart. Rising above the joyful din of the day, the lilting music from the inaugural platform required no words to convey the simplest and most redolent of human longings -- to be good on this earth, to do good hard work and live in communion with others, to transcend separation.

Today we say goodbye to George W. Bush and the searing wounds he inflicted on the world, on our own nation and our national psyche. Our collective hemmorage would have been stanched today had Hillary taken the Oath of Office, or even, in some way, John McCain. But that Barack Obama assumes the mantle of the Presidency brings a great, earth-moving healing for us that we can only begin to grasp in our imaginations.

The first few lines of a new chapter were written today. None of us know how the story will continue to unfold, and I am personally certain that our fragmentation will persist until the masculine principle which pervades our politics, our commerce, our very way of being becomes balanced by the feminine. But I know, too, that a turning has occurred today. It is a softening, a re-membering of what has been frozen in a traumatized rift for decades and centuries. I weep today for the way that this inauguration, this President, opens the hearts of the people to one another again. We look into each other's eyes -- eyes set into brown faces, Muslim faces, queer faces -- and instead of snarling mistrust, we recognize in one another what lives within each of us. Heart, soul and spirit rising, yearning, reaching out to love. Eyes that watch the horizon, summoning in the simple gifts that are our birthright on this sacred earth.

I am so proud to be an American today.

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.