He wore silver rings on every finger and his fingernails were longer than they needed to be for a harpist. He wore black jeans and a black pirate shirt. His clothes made him look like a Victorian vampire trying to fit into these modern times. His hair was trying to grow long, but it was fluffy soft down flying around his head instead of hanging. The music he and Maureen played was beautiful.

Sometimes I feel so lucky that I found South Valley. I took a test on Belief.net and it told me that the only religion that I could possibly feel comfortable with would be Unitarian Universalist. I found the closest UU church on the Internet, emailed Sean, the reverend, and decided that I could be happy there.

Two weeks ago, we had our Water Ceremony, which marks the beginning of the church year for us. We start our year in Fall, just like the schools. We are supposed to collect water from wherever we visit over the course of the year and bring it to the Water Ceremony. It represents how we separate in our lives and how we come back to the church to share our journeys.

This year, Mike and I forgot to collect water from any of the many places we visited. We could have brought representational water and shared the stories of our travels, but I decided that I didn’t want to share this year. I remembered what Hugh Elliott said, “All people want is someone to listen.” I decided that I was going to listen this year. It felt good to just hear the stories and not worry about formulating our own.

The vampire/harpist isn’t a member of our church, as far as I know. He was asked to play by Maureen and they played beautifully together. I had no idea that I could enjoy harp music as much as I did that day. When we sang our hymns, he came back to the front row and sang along, but the rest of the service, he sat at his harp, ready to play, when he wasn’t playing. I kept thinking, “Isn’t our church wonderful? Doesn’t this service make you want to come every week?” I didn’t see him last week, so I guess he doesn’t feel the same way as I do. Damn…