He Was A Beautiful Gift

There are a million pictures of John Lennon for the grabbing but I like this one. It is of John in his last days, smiling as he lays atop his wife, who is also smiling and one of the reasons I love the picture is because I see part of John's legacy as the love story he and Yoko wrote and lived.

He would have been seventy today. We all know that.
Seventy.
And you know, I'm not going to do that thing where I say, "Oh, if he had only lived!" because I feel so damn lucky we had him for the forty years we did.
And when I say we, I mean this planet.
How long can you expect a streaking star of such light and glory to stay unburned in our atmosphere? I'd say forty years was about the highest number we could ask for.

Seventy years ago he was born and his mother and father didn't know what to do with a child and his Auntie Mimi raised him but his mother bought him his first guitar, played Elvis records for him. She died when he was seventeen, hit by a car as she walked.

Every sort of tragedy and by all rights, he should never have become what he did, which to put it plainly and simply (and to quote Yoko) was a man who changed the world with his mind.
Not with science or with math or with medicine or with political office or military means but with his mind and his music.
And his life.
Which he openly shared with the world including his honeymoon to Yoko.
Bed peace.

Look. I can't focus enough on what John Lennon meant to this world to write sense. I'm swept up in memory and in grief (still, after all these years) and joy, too. And thinking about how artists may be the ones who change things the most, even though we don't realize that. Don't even give art the serious recognition it deserves, accord it the credit it should be given and artists? Well, what does our society do for them?

It seems to me that the artist is born with some inner sense of something humanity needs. That art may be the Divine. That the artist may be the most deeply religious among us. The true Holy Ones.

No. I'm not making sense. This is all too much for me to grasp this morning. It's like trying to think of what lies beyond infinity. I can't wrap my brain around that. And I can't wrap my brain around how it was that four boys from Liverpool, England came together and with their minds they changed the world.
They did, you know.
I'm not just saying that. If you weren't born when the Beatles were making new records, if you didn't live when their trajectory shot into the upper ether and drifted down on all of us and changed the way we thought and dressed and opened our eyes and minds, you can't understand.
But look-
This man
and this man
(and that's how men looked when I was growing up)
were so afraid of this man
that they unleashed the entire hell hounds of every sort of illegal and underhanded, completely dunderheaded methods available to the USA and FBI to get him out of the country.
And guess who won?
With what?
His mind, his music, his guitar, his love.

His life.

We had him for forty years. We still haven't given peace a chance.
I haven't given up hope.

I was taught by a powerful teacher that love is all you need.
And I am SO glad he was born.
There is no way I would be who I am today if he hadn't been and you may or may not realize it, but you wouldn't be either. And this would not be the world we'd be living in.

Take my word for it. I was there. In a manner of speaking.
And I am so grateful.

So. Happy birthday, John. We miss you like hell but it would be highly ungrateful to wish we'd had you longer than we did. Selfish.

Yoko has the right to wish that and Sean and Julian, too. But not me. I was given far more than I deserved. And so was this crazy world. And maybe one day we'll wake up and we'll give peace a chance.

Maybe. And if we do, it'll be at least partially because the light of that bright glory star which was John Lennon still hovers above us, below us, through and through us.

Hard to imagine, isn't it?

It's easy if you try.