I haven’t yet shared the story of how I got engaged because
it is something that I am still processing, something that still feels so raw
and big and monumental that I haven’t yet had the time to ponder in my heart
the way I want to. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever be ready. I wonder if
people are ever ready for the events that change their lives, or if maybe we
all spend every single day waking up and realizing we don’t know how we got
here.
I got engaged on the
first of July, under the summer heat, just down off a busy highway by a creek
that ran with murky water. I knew it was coming but the moment caught me off
guard, perhaps as all big and grand moments do. Despite my desire for something
small, lacking in the grand gesture department, I felt the shift the moment
when he came to me by the water and took my hand. Maybe in that moment I knew.
I knew my life wouldn’t be the same. I knew I was walking towards my future in
a way that most women feel when they are walking down the aisle. Perhaps that
is why I lingered by the water a moment longer than necessary, whispering to
the man soon to be my fiancé, “Come, look at this. Do you see?” Do you see this
snail and this slug and this frog, this life that exists within murky waters,
that is thriving in this place that looks like a wasteland? Do you see this
water, flowing, carrying with it everything I’ve left behind?
I remember once,
during my first year of college, going to the river. I had this burning desire
to create a ceremony for myself, to let go of this heavy pain I had been
carrying since the death of my cousin, the confusion and the inner turmoil and
the desperation that had been etched into my body by his hands before they
turned ice cold. I needed a release for myself, a cleansing ceremony so I could
finally feel forgiven, so that I could stop looking for affection in strange
men and food and self-hatred, to be free of the ghost I was carrying along
behind me like it was my birthright. By that river I begged and pleaded to be
clean. I had forgotten, or perhaps I didn’t know then, that suffering isn’t the
birthright of any human on earth. That to let go, all I needed to do was let
go. I wanted to be clean, free, but what I didn’t know was that I already was.
I remember in my late
teenage years bringing with me a jar of sand and ash on a family vacation. That
vacation was a purging time for me, when I brought so many toxins into my body
it made me sick, and when I exhaled them with just as much ferocity and
weeping. The jar of ashes represented this grief that I was carrying around
with me, this mournful howling that filled my bones ever since I became so ill
I thought I was going to die. I collected this ash and howled and wept over
this empty space in my body that had once been full, over what had been taken
from me while I was sleeping. And on this particular trip, after having arrived
with grand intentions and my jar of ashes, I slipped out to the pond with the
water that flowed and was recycled and came out new, and I let my ashes slip
between my fingers. In the days that followed I shook and bled and howled, but
when I left I felt the work of refinement that had taken place.
The water, that had
represented so much pain and heartache for me, where I had released and burned
and purged and wept and vomited and begged for forgiveness, the same water that
flowed at the river and at the pond because everything is recycled and flows
and moves, flowed before me in the moments before he took my hand. And I sat
there, with my feet dangling into the coolness, on the edge of a log, and I had
a feeling that this meant something. I didn’t know what, only that this moment
and this water and this log and that slug inching its way across a rock and him
and me and the flow all meant something. I could feel the newness on the wind,
and I wanted to savor the now. I almost had a moment where I didn’t want to go.
I didn’t want to get off the log. I didn’t want to leave behind the water, the
slug inching its way across a rock, this breath. I didn’t want the startling
entry into something new, to be birthed into a world which I didn’t yet have
language for, to enter the flow.
But I did. And I
remember that last breath, the sharp inhale before I rose off the log and took
his hand, following him up away from the water. I was stepping into something
new.
I followed him up the
steep incline of shifting rocks and pebbles, the ground shaking and giving way
under my feet. And then I saw it, the words he’d written on the side of a
bridge, the words asking me to be his wife. And I felt the rebirth. In that
split second between my recognizing the words and what they meant and my yes, I
felt the starting over. And I knew I was ready. And I knew I was afraid. And I
knew with every fiber of my being that I was born for this. And I knew that the
water that had always flowed and carried my pain and hurt and agony was still
moving, and I must too. It was time to step away from the old and enter into
the new. It was time to enter into the flow that was all around me and in me
and through me.
My hands tremble with
anticipation and fear and promise and wonder as I stare down at this ring on my
finger, the one I never wanted but am becoming so grateful for. It reminds me
that redemption runs deep, that the old passes away and the new comes, that I
must be willing to step into the flow, that love wins. Love wins and love wins
and love wins and I am and I am and I am.
Adjusting to this new
season has felt thick and hard, and at times I wonder if stepping into new
waters was too much. My legs tremble and leave me aching for the shore, for
what I knew. This engagement season has felt so full of redemption and healing,
the kind of healing that cuts deep and burns through, the kind that purges the
soul and washes clean, like flowing water. It is bitter at first taste, yes,
but it is sweet. There is something for me here, and I am as sure of it as I am
sure of the wind. I can’t see it, but I know it’s there. I can feel it deep
within my bones, in the places that I once thought of as void and empty.
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