End of term, Autumn Festival, and the usual moist-eyed experience of gratitude while sitting in the school amphitheatre watching my child and his peers celebrate on the small colourful stage, what looks to be an extraordinarily blessed childhood. Singing, dancing, playing music. I felt proud of our boy - he did a great clarinet solo - the intro to a Latin dance piece before the rest of the orchestra joined in part by part.
After the various performances, parents and kids were all invited down to the huge new covered outdoor sport area. A couple of locally famous musicians and percussionists were playing with a handful of the older students.
We all - four or five hundred adults and primary and secondary aged children - danced around them in a circle to stirring Greek/Israeli/ Celtic tunes, singing and clapping and swinging our partners in happy swirling chaos with little kids running underfoot .
I had the sense of participating in something archetypal, a community ritual celebration of the changing season. Wanted to store up the sweet memories, like sun-filled fruit preserved for winter. Also a ripple of something like melancholy, a knowledge of how quickly things can change, how fast children grow up, that we could all be dead tomorrow. Which made the moment all the more precious.
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| year 5 Bollywood dancers |
...Time is a tempest
and we are all travellers
travelling through the storm...
(Half-remembered song from the Autumn Festival. Everyone joined in)
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| Autumn Festival 2010 |
1 comment:
Utter happiness comes with realizing how elusive is joy.
But you seem good at that, at least lately :-)
It is a beautiful sight to see you enjoying so deeply.
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