The other evening, while Chris was making dinner and I was entertaining the baby, Maple asked if we could listen to Iron and Wine. We will often listen to music together as a family while we prepare meals, which is a vast energetic improvement over the news, which is also, perhaps sadly, often on in our home as well. Anyhow, it had been awhile since Iron and Wine was on the playlist and it made all of us a little wistful and sentimental- those 2 older albums in particular where they really got every song right, you know the ones? “Our Endless Numbered Days”. I mean come on. The album title says it all. I think the other is “The Shepherd’s Dog”. Bittersweet and full of tenderness co-mingled with a touch of remorse at the fast slipping away of each perfectly flawed moment. I feel a lot of that in general and these days are no exception.
But there is this one song, Fever Dream, where the line goes: “I want your flowers like babies want God’s Love, or maybe as sure as tomorrow will come.” And it has been working and working and working on me. Like, for decades… I have been contemplating a lot lately what Wilfred’s particular place in our family constellation is. A birthday will do that to a mama. And just the retrospective, as well as looking ahead, nature of it all. It is so fascinating to me because he is such a focal point for every single one of us. Which is so interesting for a family in which he was unknown, unexpected, and absent in for so long. But as Eider is always reminding us, Wilfred is “The Best”, and I think that there are several layers to that feeling which to me feel important to remember.
I really do think that it is true that loving a baby is so intoxicating because it feels so close to God’s Love. Or whatever shape your personal sense of Grace and Wonder takes. For me, I often think of it in terms of the Infinite. There is really is this overwhelming sense that loving Wilfred, and really tapping into the energy of him as he is right in this moment is as close as anything that has ever landed me into deep connection to The Infinite. It is intoxicating and mesmerizing and holy. And before you go saying, jeez Meg! what about Maple and Eider and to that I say, there is a reason that we have in almost every tradition the stories about the loss of innocence that befalls each of us. The Christian Tradition tells it to us through the story of Eve, of course. Contemporary literature- my personal preference- tells it to us in the innumerable interpretations of the coming of age trope. I think that is one of the reasons that the YA Sci-Fi genre is so completely compelling. One of my favorites is the yarn in the classic Phillip Pullman series “His Dark Materials”. Lyra Belacua and the significance of Dust…
I digress! Maple, and then Eider, taught me this love and, along with Chris, we have been students of its origin and evolution these many years.
Which is perhaps the other piece of the story that I am hoping to convey today. Chris and I celebrated 15 years of marriage this past January. And as someone who is somewhat indifferent to the institution of marriage, I am by no means indifferent to the practice of long-term, evolving and abiding love. I was recalling the other day, that Chris and I picked our wedding date- over sopapillas with warm honey butter and whiskey “in the raw”- according to the phase of the moon. I felt very certain, at the time, of the significance and auspiciousness of what moon we were married under, and that it would be in our best interest to exchange vows and yoke ourselves to one another during a waxing full moon. I wanted us to be moving toward fullness, through all of the ebbs and flows, waxings and wanings, of our lives together.
I had forgotten that lunar call. But I think within that original intention a lot about our relationship all these years later can be well understood. We have set our course to be oriented to wonder in its fullness. Even as phases come and go and we each, all five of us, continue to grow and evolve and change. I think we set a course that was oriented within the context of a desire to stay in the flow of The Infinite. As it reveals itself to us in waves and over time.
I remember once, years and years ago, Christina giving a teaching in Warrior One about alignment being a tool of understanding that: “makes the unknown, known. And in so doing, brings the infinite closer” I think that is really it for me. Especially with love. The more I let love in, but perhaps with even more potency for me, let my own LOVE out into the world in the form of my friends, and peers, and family, and babies, the closer and closer I feel in each moment, to God’s love.
The other day, one of my student’s commented that she was really enjoying the way that I was working this theme of “winning” into my teaching during this time. I had been unaware that I had… which, my friends, is completely demonstrative of why I love teaching and mentoring and this dynamic current of learning that truly flows both ways. Anyway, I have been feeling into that in all ways, assessing her assessment for myself, and I concur. It is the theme that I am working right now. In all aspects of my life. Call it gratitude or giving thanks or taking note or glass half full but I am acutely aware right now of all of the many ways in which I am winning in my life right now. Despite the anxiety and the fear and the grief and the powerlessness that I can easily overwhelm me and often does, the more that I center myself in the field of open-hearted and open-handed love, the letting go of my heart into the Infinite, the more and more winning I am.
love to you.
x,m