Nothing Ever Becomes Real

...until it is experienced. - John Keats

 

 I didn't take a video of any part of this performance.  I didn't wait in line to meet him after the show.  Instead, I savored and enjoyed being surrounded by this moving performance and let it be as it was... just a moment.  It would have been neat to shake his hand, the very hand that creates this music that I hold so dear.  Instead, I walked out, holding the hand of someone that I hold so dear.  And that was all the better.  

The performance tonight did not play any of the music that I had become so attached to.  It would have been simply amazing for that to have been.  However, that did not take away from the actual experience of being part of a live audience, his audience.  It was still amazing because like the quote above... it becomes real.  

Just like it was far more amazing to travel to Portland and to find, touch, and photograph the very tree that I had spent thousands on to hang on my wall.  Just as it was amazing to find the waterfalls... to smell the air, to feel the mist.  Not only does it become real, it becomes your own.  

My New Yorker is very real to me.  What we have is very real.  But in many ways it is real in our own little world.  This little world does include my son.  However, that world needs to expand.  I have met a handful of his friends.  All for a rather short time, but it all went well and it was great.  On Friday, he will be meeting a bunch of my friends.  On Saturday though... my son and I will be meeting his sister and her family.  Soon it will be his parents.  And in May, he will travel with me to meet my family.  

The idea of having our own little world sounds romantic and intimate.  But I don't want that.  I want our world to be our ability to fuse together our individual worlds.  I want the people who were significant to us before we met to maintain their significance.  I want to meet these people and I want to step into his world just as I want him to step into mine.  I want to expose what we have and to share it with our family and friends so they can experience us, as us.  And it will become just as real to them as it is to us (and hopefully I can step out of the dreamlike surreality that I have actually found and met my amazing!)