A smirk: a kind of smile whose rising lips tell another story.

A smirk: a sort of sardonic pose which stands outside itself – a double-smile which smiles at itself, smiling.

To smirk: to see the seriousness within a smile which tells itself a story that is so serious, that it must smile at itself, lightening the interpretation and understanding of the story.

Who may smirk? Who has smirking “rights?”

The person who smirks sees a situation through and sees through a situation so one finds a place from which to observe observation.

A smirk: an “Ah-Ha!” expressed as a “Ha-Ha!”

Smirking rights: who has such rights has gone through the paces and trainings and finishings which certify a being, many times over.

Smirking rights: who has seen, “I tell you so,” turn upon itself – “I told you so!”

Smirking rights stand behind, beyond, afterwards, the wisdoms and trepidations of hindsight, watching in advance the process begin again.

Standing, sitting, smile turned to smirk, justifying itself in some sense of internal candidness: the smirk seen as smile knows itself as smirk.

The second night of the weekend was less serious, somehow. A wedding to unite two lives was celebrated in a new, suburban church. Like most other weddings these days, the ceremony was perfunctory: something to be done, to be gotten through, so life could proceed, and the party could begin.

It was a celebration, the people were earnest, but it lacked a seriousness that was electric the previous night.

The first night was an attempt at translation. The Japanese Noh tradition: an actor had come to tell a story cast in ancient days in Japan, had come into modern America, into the modern Midwest.

The Buddhistic sense that life is a cherished illusion, heavy, pregnant with some odd sense that life is us and within us, played upon a stage to be watched by passive lives who, while watching, live suspended in the sense of not-so-sure that we are here.

Life, flowing like the Tai Chi we had been studying, never suspended, but like the rhythms of heart’s beating bump-bump, it told a story of a heroism that life forces against the death which is our destiny.

Flowing, but with a care and expertise of every moment’s yearning, to play upon the eye’s viewing and body’s understanding.

Two celebrations of life, two nights running, yet the second promised a futurity less filled with the love of life that life appreciates.