A new month full of the many emotions, friendships pure and golden and celebrating the greatest of these.
If you were to sit across from me with our legs scrunched in a chair and both of us cradling cups in which little wisps of steam rose and met eachothers’s eyes with determined yet gentle honesty and asked me: so what’s new?
I would begin with my brother is getting married.
Well, maybe I wouldn’t begin there, but it would get there. Eventually.
It’s a new adulthood level the whole sibling getting married thing and it feels like natural progression. But still, I can’t down-play it, it’s a world-widening occasion. Two families convening on the bridge of devotion on the choice that two people decided to spend a lifetime together. Kind of a big deal.
It’s a lot to put to words and my comprehension only goes so far. It comes with excitement and unease just as any new things do.
In this newsletter delivered to an inbox or a url, where you allow me to have typos, I am fortunate to have a space to write and meander. Also, thank you for reading this it can feel very blah-blah unpolished and off the dome but my hope is it is a breathing room for myself and you and in some way have lasting benefits.
So, my brother is getting married. And my friend is getting married to my brother. (if either of you read this you are crazy, I love you!!)
And it has flipped my world like nothing else because nothing like this has happened before and in its wake my ideas on life have been themselves tumbling, soaring, swinging gymnasts invited into the whimsical dawning that the future is transforming into. It seems like forever and no time at all, natural, sensical and without warning.
I have let go of so much form. Meaning: all of the turns of events have demanded me to be open and without rehearsed ideas or notions, and this has given new structure to my brain and spirit. Firm conclusions that have felt so safe have been shook loose and stretched, fighting me to search for flexibility and maturation. Oh this is what love can look like. Oh this is what love is. Oh this is different than anything else.
What a great insistence love is. A great ongoing priority. Not unlike doing laundry. Or eating dinner. The mundanity held together by holy duty.
I have been bashed to pieces by it all month — commitment to the another, tying oneself to a complete individual personality, the demonstration through familial care.
I’ve observed awing translations of love these past weeks. They seem to speak beyond the eye, past the obsessive hypotheticals of what it could do for me/you/us (which is where a lot of my frustration hung last month), past the shell of idolization of eros and touch and into the spirit of creature.
It can be conveyed with a tender look in another’s eyes.
It is before me now, this sparkling human-ness that has known pain and returns kindness freely, a willing participant of higher beauty.
It is a look that recognizes we are not strangers although we in the regular sense may be.
Her husband and her come in together. She has the energy to walk again, the first time I saw her she was in a wheel chair, her husband pushing her but this time he guided her to the table. He seemed entirely conscious of her in everything, her weakness and strength. He wasn’t disgruntled or angry.
Every part of him said: you are not an inconvenience to me.
Every part of her said: you are not an inconvenience to me.
Here is our path and we will walk it.
At the checkout counter I talked with her enough to know she’s been fighting cancer since 2017, it came about indirectly in a conversation on food.
When they are served their appetizer they pray over it, and I watched from a distance an ache throbbing within me.
This is love. They do not know how much a testament their love is. Proof that daily monotany and trials cannot steal steadfastness.
From this small interaction, this brushing of lives that is my weekly sweat, I could smell the aroma of heaven on them. It gave me a quick glimpse above the grinding darkness of selfish desires, and into the brightness of divine love.
I have observed many couples in a close-up, daily kind of way these last five years and to be honest it can be discouraging. Bickering, frustration, arguing and over-looking the other to find ones own preference happens a lot even and especially involving food, shopping, sitting down to eat a meal.
Being awkwardly aware of the verbal microaggressions, dysfunction and unkindness that highlight deeper unresolution as well as seeing couples separate and families change can be sad, even for the barista that is just here to greet you and to make your favorite drink. What I am saying is it doesn’t take much time to pick-up insincerity and insensitivity and praise god the opposite either — the best fruit we can grow in accordance to divine emptying and being filled. It is obvious. When I see it my heart rejoices.
Often, that rejoicing looks like tears. Love moves through us invigorating, uplifting, excercising our ability to give. Love is circulation. Acts of kindness, peace, joy.
From across another room in another state I witnessed the groom and bride slice cake and lift it to each others mouths, consuming a vow beyond our vision. We raised wine glasses trailing with white ribbons and toasted to their forever love. I have been thinking how brave it is to commit to someone, how it is always brave. How it was brave of my parents. Brave of my brother. Even in our time that paints marriage in scarier angles and offers easier, cheaper alliances that seem less consequential and by that right safer. Even when divorces are offered as easy outs when expectations and realities crash in. When living gets harder and harder and souls hurt more than heal, when there is rampant sickness and scarce health.
Even despite all that is understood and what illusions have morphed into coarse existences. Despite the fact that souls are subject to tarnish and wear and tear. They choose love and it’s brave and good and blessed. It’s a little lifetime of walking the earth why not stride in pace with someone else.
In a podcast I listened to this week they talked about the law of the gift which is the theory that people can only fully find themselves through a sincere gift of themselves.
“On the one hand we can act with self-assertion, centering and privileging our own needs and concerns. By contrast, and paradoxically, the Law of the Gift says that you become more fully human, alive, and yourself to the extent that you give yourself away. You self-actualize by becoming other-focused.”
I am blinded by my will in many ways. Even simple priorities that I determine to hold onto and shun someone else by doing so. I want to help! My heart and brain communicate, but my action revolves tightly to my own planet. My needs. I forget to ask what is needed and I forget to ask to be filled with need, to realize my source is one of being filled and taken care of (by the Spirit) to take care of others. When I exist in this it is a circular blessing. We give and we get our essence back, sacrifice makes us understand sacrifice, loving makes us intuit love. The beginning is not us and the ending is not us either. We are responsible for our participation and our letting go.
No need for name-making or fame-chasing. We show up and serve.
To quote Rohr from his book Everything Belongs:
“Our journeys around and through our realities, or “circumferences,” lead us to the core reality, where we meet both our truest self and our truest God. We do not really know what it means to be human unless we know God. And, in turn, we do not really know God except through our own broken and rejoicing humanity.”
How wide, how deep, how personal.
May we run further in and be drawn further up even and especially in the daily failures, drudgery and discipline.
More Good Things I saw Beauty In:
keeping a note and documenting daily happenings
having coffee with a older woman who is faithful in prayer
seeing a long-distance friend and meeting her husband
parking lot rainbow and reconnecting with old friend
realizing that rest is not something to be fought, it’s okay to give in
A few songs from July that I <3:
Podcast mentioned:
Every episode I’ve tuned into carries grace and love that launches the listener to spiritual grounds. This was a I needed to hear that right now word. Thankful for New Polity and to all those who are sharing of what they’ve been shared, like little lights glowing for others.
big breath as we invite the unexpected
love,
merc