Letting Go
With TED Global at my back, having just become homeless, an imminent trip across the Atlantic Ocean, and no real prospect of making any money in the near future, I had to let go. I let go of all of the memories of the fantastic speakers, the frantic planning of an international trip, and the preoccupation with paying rent. I let it all go, and was sitting there in perfect stillness with one thing on my mind: my future life with Cullen.
Letting Go of Plans
The wedding had taken months of plans. While I was tangentially involved in all of them, there was one plan of which I was solely responsible, and indeed, solely cognizant: the wedding magic trick. Being a magician comes with its bag of expectations, paramount, the expectation that you will always do magic. In order to appease this expectation without diminishing the meaning of the event, it was decided that I could do one magic trick, and that it better be a good one, and meaningful as well. I came up with the perfect trick, it was brilliant. It is extremely difficult, requires much planning, and was based on a vague memory of an effect I had read about in an antique magic book. It was one of those "I heard it said that one time, an amazing magician did this!" So my planning began, the culmination of which was a large amount of fishing line, a series of jigs and pulleys, a tank full of Helium, and a weather balloon. The morning of the wedding, my brother was traipsing through the blueberry bushes with me trying to get everything set up after our initial test rig had been demolished. The wind was not cooperating as we wrestled for over an hour. Sweating in the heat, with rope-burns from the fishing line, and guests starting to arrive, we gave up. We tied the balloon to a tree and let it rise high above where the ceremony would take place. It became our dove of peace, a symbol of the heights we felt that day, and will strive for together. The balloon ended up doing some magic of its own, freeing me to enjoy the company and my wedding day.
Letting Go of Places
Before our grand event in Massachusetts, we'd been living in Portland Oregon. I had a job, we had an apartment and extended family very nearby. Within twenty four hours of getting back from TED, and eighteen hours before Cullen would fly East to prepare for the wedding, we had a crazy idea. Let's move out right now, before the wedding. Circumstances had conspired for me to leave my job, and at whatever hour of the evening it was, it seemed like a tremendously good idea to move out of our apartment before August 1st, and therefore avoid paying a month of rent. A whirlwind of packing made the night a daze, and in the morning I drove Cullen to the airport. Opening the door to our apartment after dropping her off revealed the wreckage our whirlwind had laid out. I had another twenty four hours to pack everything into a U-Haul, and put it into storage... in Monterey CA, the place we had decided to call our new home. I found a willing Portlander heading South to split the 12 hour drive in a 10-foot truck, and I waved goodbye to our home, thinking fondly of Becky Blanton's story of homelessness.
Letting Go
The morning after our wedding, we returned to the top of the hill, still living the moment. We slowly reeled in the balloon, still playing in the wind. We stood there together, with a 360 degree view. We looked back on where we'd come from, our time together in Portland, Mexico, China, and in Massachusetts. Looking forward wasn't quite as clear. Cullen, about to start a brand new graduate program, and me not knowing what I was heading forwards towards. Not knowing where we would live, how we would survive, the sea of love we had felt the day before was keeping us afloat. So we decided to let go, right then and there, of our fears. And we did. The balloon floated up into the sky, taking with it our anxieties, and preoccupations.
We were left there on the hill. Having let go, we could finally take hold of each other.
Posted by Seth Raphael
