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It is today our second anniversary: my love, my friend, my teammate, my wife, my sweet and fiery Kelsey.
You chose all these images (see my Insta), and I’ve made no attempt to order them. Memories are like that, anyway.
I met you when I’d lost and given up most hope if not all. And your love was full and bright and shattered everything I knew and pulled me up by the roots.
Love is hard, love is easy. Love started easy for us, but even then it meant meeting as if by fortune through my words and her dear friends and family and her travel and our change and fear and excitement and risk.
But sure yeah then it was all butter, vegan butter. It was licking the butter of heaven off a silver spoon: true love, discovered, waited for, for so long too long just long enough.
Love that’s complementary, with open and full communication and joy and exertion and biking to Niwot and back and biking in the snow and making love and more and more and more and Gather, Gather Family humor and showing one another our favorite treasures in this life we’d lived before we’d found one another. David Whyte put it well.
This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.
But shortly after the proposals of joy (one in green at the Purkhong in Vermont, one beneath the Green Monster in Fenway) and the wedding of families and communities and hearts…
…we discovered more change and loss and health situations and money challenges (it takes money to make all of this possible, and thankfully my life’s work provided not only a healthy though dwindling salary but the time and flexibility to devote myself to serving through the change and loss and change and loss.).
Honestly half of what I long for now is rest, ease, reading on a proverbial beach, time at a hot springs, massage, the chance to melt and cry and let go and cry and celebrate and I’ve missed my friends and aged sangha. But too discovering a new city and living in both is a two-sided delight, or torture, if seen half full or half empty.
Working nights, Willa’ing by day. Sleeping hard from 2 or 3 or earlier or even later, to 7:30 most mornings, once in awhile later thank god. We’re a good team for our Willa, almost always a great team for our Willa.
Change is exhausting, and fun, and hard, and harder than I thought it could ever be. But we’ve stuck with it, and one another, through hard times and change and more change and heaps of change. The only wisdom I have is to hold on, to keep trying, to hang in there as my father-in-law put it. And what do we get out of staying on the path, together?
Not too many smooches, these days, but a few. Not too much cuddling, these days, but 15 minutes interrupted 15 times.
We’ll figure it out. Whatever you want, babes. Home again. Home with you, and your red raw heart and humor and hard times and good meals and teamwork and whatever comes next in my career and writing and trying to be of service to this world of ours, and our children’s futures.
And what do we get out of staying on the path, together?
Among so many other things, now: Willa.
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