evolution.

yesterday was my tenth wedding anniversary. ricky and i were married september 2nd, 2000, and it was one of the loveliest days i’ve ever seen and been a part of. it had rained two days before the big day – which is weird, on the last day of august, in california – and more rain was enough of a possibility that a good friend (and amazing costumer) made a delicate silk jacket to wear over my wedding dress in case the weather stayed strange. but the morning of our wedding i awoke to perfect blue skies and puffy white clouds, and when i walked out of the kitchen to our backyard early-early with fresh coffee in my hand, the air was so soft and fragrant i could taste its perfume on my tongue.

and here, now, ten years have passed. three thousand days and nights, give or take some hundreds on the plus side. take a thousand or more off the three and fill those nights with a snoring dog, a child wrestling for covers and sometimes, if i am lucky, long legs stretched diagonally across the bed that moved with ricky and i from one house to another and then another. the bed is mine now, the legs are mine. i feed the snoring dog and languish many too many kisses on the child; it all makes sense and i am happy within it. yet still i work to reconcile and make sense of a picture that is very different than the picture i had in my mind and in my heart when i said, those thousands of days ago, “i do, and i will, and will again, joyfully.”

don’t get me wrong: i am joyful, i wear it and i feel it and i work to create it. not just for me but for my small family and an ever-growing handful of loving friends that share my life with me. and here, another important point: the breakdown of the marriage ricky and i created and agreed to and shared didn’t take place in a single moment. we evolved towards marriage, evolved within it collectively and singularly, and eventually we evolved away from it. bad things happened to us both and by us both, but the overriding occurrences and circumstances, the ones that i feel and remember, were laughter and learning and time with friends, and animals, and family. we bought and created a home together. that home was a safe haven for us, and our friends, and an array of dogs that needed a place to be loved, most especially our own dogs. we made a baby together and have watched her become a person together these past seven years. and we have tried, with our teeth gritted and our tempers barely in check at times, to do the right thing. for maya. for us. for our tender history, and future. for love.

but what now? how far can evolution carry itself in to something that has less structure, less attachment, less visceral commitment? and the mores, they also work against an evolution of connection: more autonomy, more freedom, more choices, more knowledge of what i want and don’t want, will and won’t do, choose to avoid and embrace, even celebrate. i ask and i wonder and i release and then i reconnect, because the connection with ricky my estranged is so seasoned and comfortable and steeped in familiarity and filled with love. it would be so much easier to break this down, rip it open, stomp it to shreds, if there were more anger and animosity and tension fueling the shift.

but there is love. and with love, i have learned, slowly and with some pain, comes responsibility. and there is maya, our beautiful spot of light that needs us both, present and whole and kind. and there is rick, the one i love and wish only happiness. and finally, there is me. with my heart that beats deeply and always works to love well. and my mind, that still turns things over and over until something makes sense the way i need it to. and my body, which is different from the body i seemed to inhabit for so long (you know, the one that never tired, or felt pain, and could pull off the daisy dukes), the one which reaches deeper and sways differently and whose touch has been informed by parenting, and comforting, and longing, and loving. so i decided, regarding this landmark set of days, the ones i have felt hovering out there on the horizon for some time now, to trust and surrender and allow for what may be. because the what-may-be’s are exciting, and delicious, and rattle up my spine, when i give in and give over to the possibilities of what lie ahead.

and with such a surrender, the visceral connection – the one that has held us and kept us engaged and loving but also kept us from what will come next – grows faint and weaker and sits outside the day to day movement of my life just a bit more. i can look at it and feel it and know that it is there, but its pull isn’t strong in the same way, and i know other connections have been made – are being made – just as they should be. for life evolves, and holding on with my tightest grip to something that is changing has never altered its course, it’s just kept me attached and resistant. and if i am attached and resistant, how will i ever untangle my arms and my heart enough to wrap them around my next lesson, my next laughter, my next love?

a one-sided conversation with donald miller who is not my friend.

i love anne lamott. i don’t usually call her anne; instead i am taken to saying annie lamott. not because i am a kookoo stalker fan who thinks i know her. i just really love the name annie. it’s one of those names – the ones that inspire comfort, conjure up images of childhood friendships, saturday sleepovers, the smell of suntan lotion, walking along quiet suburban streets with friends in a distant summer. such names are soft on the breath, round in the mouth. maggie is another one, and sara, and kate, a little bit. i love annie liebowitz. her work, and her name. i can imagine imogen cunningham as a cate, like that, with a C.

so there is the name. annie. i saw annie lamott speak a few years back with elizabeth gilbert at ucla’s royce hall, and they were sweet together, having never met. different women, very different writers, based in different faiths, or perhaps on different paths towards faith, shared or otherwise. there were so many women there, and hoards of them – including a few of my friends – lined up with armloads of books to have them signed, but i didn’t.

i am a poor star-gazer. i don’t want just a handful of seconds to deliver what for me would be a few well-rehearsed lines, or my very special deer-in-the-headlights brand of shyness, or worse yet, an exchange with someone i find dreamy who might not make eye contact with me. so i waited for my friends outside in a favorite sweater under a spring sky on a beautiful los angeles night, and i saw some celebrities and ran in to a new friend and saw annie lamott signing books and thought, wow, sharing coffee at a table somewhere cozy and light-filled with that woman, well, that would be some conversation. and then i thought, i am okay loving her work up close/in my bed/on my couch/in tears/in laughter, and loving annie lamott, the word weaver, at a distance. it’s not a rush, but it is intimate. she is just one of those writers.

a friend of mine became a fan of annie (when fans still existed. why are fans no longer de rigueur these days? why can we only like someone or something? it seems much too mild a sentiment for the cyber orgy that is facebook), and i loved that – just saying, i like you and your work so much – and so i became a fan, also. but that was really that. i have grace, eventually on my nightstand, but it has been a sporadic journey for me, entering that book, and so i have been love-bombing other books, other authors. i admit, i can be fickle that way. my annie love has been at a low. until this week.

this week, perhaps because of my annie lamott fan-ship, i had a little tag on my facebook page suggesting i visit donald miller.  it must have been because i like AL and AL likes donald miller. i really don’t need or want any more facebook pals, but knowing nothing about this donald miller, and the fact that AL does, i clicked to visit him. his facebook was okay but a bit too business-facebook-page for me, and so i clicked around a bit and somehow ended up on donald miller’s blog. i scrolled through a few posts, and felt myself smile. i also felt the hair on the back of my neck go a little electric. i read, and was comfortable and compelled and joyful immediately and all at once. here was someone – a man, a lovely, inquisitive man – asking questions, exploring faith, loving his dog (who is a lucy like my dog is a lucy), allowing prose, however time-locked, to flow from him to the world around him. it is brave. and simple. no offense annie, but i want to have coffee with donald miller now.

but i jump ahead of myself. so i find the blog, this donald miller’s blog, and i am warmed and terribly curious and i read a bit, and i peruse google to find the skinny on his writings, his books, his bent, the depth of his religious faith. is it so deep that a conversation with this man would exist on an immediate angle? the kind of angle where one’s words and stance keep sliding off because there is no room for a perspective that is counter-intuitive to his? can someone who writes a book titled Blue Like Jazz have some kind of religious myopia or is there allowance for beliefs that are based in other faiths? i think, until i read the book, and then maybe another, i won’t know.

but i do know i welcome this conversation, and another, and another. i am not a traditionally religious or god-fearing person, but i believe wholly and without sway in the rhythm of the universe, its finite balance(s), our connection to all things living, energy-based, breathing, mysterious. is that god? maybe. throw in the largest sprinkle of kindness and calming, deep breaths, and it makes sense to me, this god.

for there is magic. and history. and stars aligned and tidal pulls and moondust and stardust and other pulls that exist for no reason except the fact that they exist. why do we notice one, and not the other? why does one touch of a hand do nothing when the touch of another hand can make our hearts race and our breath catch? what is it to recognize someone we’ve never seen before? the deep recognition of shared experience – however impossible – the thing that whispers in your ear “i see you. i get you. i come from the same place as you.” my first experience of so glaring a duality was my immediate connection to signe – the person who has lived in my heart, the very center of it, since we met almost thirty years ago as teenagers in central holland. it was what i imagine it would feel like to meet a sister you’ve never known you had, so visceral was the bond. it made no sense whatsoever, and compelled deeply, in an instant. she was the light version of me, or i was the dark version of her, and fairy dust was simply swirling around us.

i am lucky in this life. i have people surrounding me up close and from different continents that love me without condition. my body moves and carries the same lines it did when i was a younger soul and lighter in years. my mind searches and questions and wonders with ferocity. my heart pounds in joy and in sadness and in lust and in empathy (so much in empathy it can shadow all else) and the sheer force of all that is so infinitely gorgeous and tragic and difficult and joy-producing every day of this lifetime. my face can still make the open man catch his breath, look away from me, and look back again. i humor myself to wonder and hope that it is that empathy and soulfulness that pours from my eyes, rather than their green or the slice of a cheekbone. this makes sense, for physical beauty wains, i believe, in the exact moments a different beauty takes over. the beauty that is about experience, emotional intelligence, spirituality, a more seasoned knowing. young beauty is breath taking; older beauty is sublime, informed, produces breath. oh to be a woman in the world who can inspire questions, create breath, and yes, even breathlessness.

so donald miller, you who questions and believes and mentors and put thoughts in to words, words that even your lucy can claim, when will you write about this side of spirituality? the spirituality of relationship. of aging. of grace and knowledge. of the passage of time. perhaps you are too young. or perhaps you already have. if i am so lucky to find that is the case, i will read your words, and if they resonate, i may read them again, and i will wait to see how magical this world really can be. for though you may not know it, i have taken a seat before, and will do it again, in the light-filled coffee bar, with hot milk and coffee in a perfect porcelain cup, and a book, or a notepad, and the pale bend of my neck curving over either, waiting for a face to walk through the door. the face of the man who has some answers but still asks the questions all at the same time. the questions i imagine annie still asks, ones even she may not yet be able to answer.