Being Humans in the Universe

A ski acrobat wearing star-spangled pajamas flies up into the air in a very excellent attempt to overcome gravity and zoom away to Hawaii, where it's warmer and you can get a tan instead of a broken arm when you land on a frozen slope from 55 feet in the air.  He is wildly celebratory when he lands.  It seems likely that, so high has he gone, in the blink of time it takes him to spin and whirl in dizzy pirouettes above the dark tree tops, he actually made the trip to the tropics and back again, taking advantage of some frozen time warp.  He roars, and the people all round, whose necks had nearly snapped as they watched him come soaring back from palm trees, crystalline beaches and salt spray, shriek with surprise and excitement.

A thin, earnest young man in a baggy neoprene suit, a round helmet and huge goggles gazes down at the world spread beyond his skis to the distant mobs of screaming frozen fans.  Their painted faces and dazzled eyes gaze back up at him adoringly.  Then, as if prompted by a new idea he hadn't considered ever before, he shrugs, hops down off his perch, squatting like a crazy fly with big long laminated feet, and slides easy as you please down two parallel tracks in the snow.  He springs up into the cold as if shot out of a cannon.  His fingers, in big gloves held at his side, tickle the air.  He leans far forward, nearly kissing his ski tips, surveying the passing countryside like a skinny god suddenly borne aloft, looking for a good meal.  Almost incidentally he alights, on a whim, and slides to a halt near the admiring throngs.  Their full-throated roar shakes the snow from the tree tops.

Young couples, wearing outlandish costumes -- Halloween disguises pale in comparison -- frantically perform ravishingly passionate dances to operatic scores.  Arms clad in spangled spandex nearly detach from the spinning bodies of the skaters and take flight.  Shredded charmeuse skirts and bodices lift and float with every dramatic turn.  Legs bend, curve, lean and stroke in unison and the music powers over and around the audience which is rapt and thrilled by the drama before them.  Hearts soar and then flowers are strewn to the ice, cast there by enchanted and happy girls.

A hockey team wins its game and becomes delirious with the unexpected joy of victory.  Every woman on the team rushes out on the rink and tackles one another, bear-like, screaming, laughing, crying and screaming again.  They shake their J-shaped sticks at the crowd in the stands, who are banging on the walls and screaming, too.  All the women on the team, in a spontaneous mood of celebration, spread apart from each other and then turn, flop down on their bellies and slide around, like seals on arctic ice floes, glad to have not been eaten by the opposing team.

In all the arenas of celebration, the world allows for happy insanity and wild abandon.  The stupidity of war and horror of starvation and all other disgusting privations visited upon humans by other human beings does not exist here, pushed back far into the shadows by thousands of yelling, screaming, shouting, banging, clapping, whistling, cheering, crying, laughing and shrieking-with-happiness living souls.  All at once, the whole place lifts up off the ground and flies around the universe and all the powers and forces gathered there realize we are something special, we are embodied magic and we deserve something more than to be turned to ashes and left to eternity all alone.