First Comes Love

Falling in love is a private business—a mystery and a blessing, a fickle arrow that sometimes works out for the best, and sometimes leaves you crawling on all fours and trying to believe that everything happens for a reason.  Sometimes it just plain breaks you, but sometimes it transforms you.

Today is Andy and my twenty-year wedding anniversary.  It is not the anniversary of falling in love, as I say, that is a private business narrated by private communiqués, arcane memories of places and shared experiences, trips and tumult and near break-ups and fears and angst-filled sleepless nights and dreamy wanderings through castles and tundras and dreams of rose petals and slow coming to trust that it is okay to trust.

While I was not dying to get married, per se (seeing it as bourgeois convention and possible hex on love), I now look back at our wedding with incredible fondness.  We were young, and broke, but we fought to keep it true to our spirit.  And in that spirit our friends made a chuppa (or wedding canopy) for us, out of many squares of silk, decorated with love and then sewn together into one cloth.

Those we loved (but of course not all, for some were already dead, and some were yet to be met, some yet to be born) gathered around us in a circle, standing in the fading dusk under a grand tree, the one Andy had grown up under, and we were married.  The rabbi spoke of tallness and shortness coming together (for Andy was always tallest in her class and me always shortest), a dear friend held a lighter in the deepening dark to light the way for the ritual’s completion—a nearly missed kiss, dual breaking wine glasses.

Through our wedding I realized that while love is private, things like weddings (and later parenting) are ways in which we join the group.  They are not the only way, but they are one way in which we join with those who have come before us and consecrate our own individual, ego-imprisoned, often pain-embodied selves to something larger.

Falling in love (especially after a very lonely childhood) and being loved back taught me the basics of how to be loved, transformed wishing into believing, but it has been parenting (and being a therapist) that has taught me truly how to love.

I was uncomfortable with the idea of a wedding where the message is, “Aren’t we special?”  But I was transformed by the love of the group and the feeling that, “Isn’t love special?  Doesn’t it encompass us all and ripple out to include every bird and beetle and chalice moon?  Doesn’t it come from the source of the river that dreams us?  Doesn’t it make sense to love that river and its source, even if we cannot understand it?”

Twenty years brings aging, changing, the melancholy of loss; but it also brings wisdom, the deepening of love and reverence for the present moment, the realization that we look with the same eyes as we have since childhood, taking in more and more, but always, in essence, who we always were.

Thus I write these words in the deepest gratitude I have known.  I am thankful for the blessing of love and I seek to share that with all who cross my path in whatever manner those threads touch and weave and pulse with spirit.

It’s been well over twenty years since I fell in love, and I’m more in love with Andy now then ever; but I’m also in love with my children, with life and the world (despite how piercing and harsh is its pain, its confusing teachings, its constant whisperings of impermanence).

There may be different kinds of love, there may be different kinds of light—but the truest love falls like light, on everything without judgment nor hesitancy, without fear or desire, like a clock that winds down selflessly to its own non-existence somehow knowing that no longer “existing” is not the same as being no longer true.

So, in the spirit of true love, I dedicate this day to my beloved, Andy, but in the service of us all and all our collective children, from the ant and the beetle (and for all we know they love us in their way) to the sun shining softly on the bark of trees.  Let’s gaze with the eyes we’ve been given, touch with the hands we inhabit, savor our portion, whatever it is, and find pleasure in it.  This, in my view, is good.

Namaste, Bruce