“Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
– from sonnet 116 William Shakespeare
I yelled these words to my husband across a glacier in Iceland, whispered them in the rain forest in El Yunce and cried over them while watching a doomed love grow between Marianne and the dashing but dumb Willoughby in a scene from the movie Sense and Sensibility.
I’ve tried to live these words in our relationship. Because you don’t make it through the covenant of marriage without a little rattling. Love, commitment, the promise is made for shaking. Inherent in love is the promise of testing and trials.
I focused on being the ever-fixed mark. I forgot the mark lies at the center, the very bullseye of my heart. I forgot I’d get tired of being a target. Holding it down in love is hard.
Today is as good as any to check in with my heart. I’m paying attention to slight differences, however small. How marriage changes, how I am changed through choosing to go through life one part of a whole. If I’m smart I’ll choose to see the beauty in the many shades of my marriage. I’ll steel myself with the truth of our many shades of gray. It’s the journey through the spectrum that makes us real. I see consistency in complexity. And I see God.
Appreciating the difference is intentional. It’s the challenge and choice to play with texture and tone while staying in the same box. To walk through each shade as it were, with passion and hope. And grace. Gray is the perfect choice for our marriage. It’s solid but ever-changing. The subtle degrees of difference detected in hue from day-to-day, week to week…from year to year – are a gift.
I got a manicure for my birthday and almost cried. The acknowledgement of self care…simply catching myself in the middle of it, almost made me cry. My littles love me up all day long but this was different. The technician cradled my hand and I melted in the simple grace of being held. I need more of that. My marriage needs more of that.
We push through weeks of skating and science and architecture and music concerts. Somewhere in the middle of all that are meals to cook, children to bathe, hugs to give. We’re knee-deep in this parenting thing and we don’t always make time for self-care. Days go by before we remember we haven’t touched.
We crawled into bed the other night with no children between us…only the 50 shades of gray that come with any marriage that lasts almost 20 years. There’s pewter, blue, ash, silver, slate, battleship gray and sometimes charcoal…almost black. Sometimes I find myself trailing off into the abyss of a blinding black hole. Sometimes love is hard. I don’t know if I want to get lost in it or face the fight to get out. This year love isn’t shiny or smooth. But it’s solid. I’m grateful for that.
I curled into his arms and breathed deep the smell of home. I held him and let myself…be held. A little bit more and a little bit more. Longer. The longer we’re together the more aware I am of loves complexity. Love takes time and I’m still getting to know the man I gave my heart among a field of flowers on a sunny day in June. I’m slowly flowering again to his embrace. Our love is like the night sky. The darkness before midnight and the morning after. Our love is a garden…growing. We’ll need at least another twenty years to harvest all Gods promised.
This love thing of ours was never black and white. It was always shades of gray. I knew that walking down the aisle holding a bouquet of wilting peonies. I knew it.
So today I remember…the lavender gray of twilight and the hope I found in a few still thriving branches on the Christmas tree we threw out last week. And there you have it – our love is a surprise.
I want to notice the nuanced, shaded, degrees of change in our love. The barely perceptible but beautiful changes. It’s something I can trust. May each shade be a layer, another layer of love.
Let your handmaiden find grace in your sight…#GiveMeGrace
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