Fighting Words

This weekend we celebrate Memorial Day – a day on which those who died in active military service are remembered. 

Remembering. 

What a gorgeous word. 

Often turned bleak by the tendency to remember sour notes and old resentments. This weekend we’re trying to remember those who gave their lives in service of something bigger than themselves…a cause we hope they believed in.

This brings me, as often, right to the edge of all I teach and hope to be:

A warrior in search of truthful relationship to meaning and, naturally, to love.  

In this regard some days are better than others. Yesterday my husband and I had a fight. It was one of those little squabbles that blew up into an exercise in “who’s right!” Like those soldiers in the trenches, everybody dug in. I felt hugely wounded by our little moment. So did he. Why?:

Because it stood on the shoulders of the zillion other moments we’ve had in our thirty year history together, and even more, because that relationship history balances on the backs of the family stories we each bring to the marriage party. 

As always, it boiled down to our themes:

I felt invisible. 

He felt embarrassed. 

Neither of those things had much to do with the actual squabble.  

To make matters worse, I apologized for my part first. Because I knew what it was. He didn’t figure his stuff out so stayed dug in. By day’s end I was so hurt – letting other themes tumble down upon me -- I couldn’t move past it when finally he wanted repair. 

Today he was fine, wanting to begin anew. I wasn’t, wanting to further lick my wounds. So I decided to write it out. To talk to you about fights, memorializing old soldiers (like the ones who fight for us in the marriage trenches, often with deadly results) and about love. 

I love my husband. 

I’ve been feeling particularly close to him lately as we’ve climbed out from under the cloud of his cancer. Brilliantly we see the healing light looming in the distance.  We’re on the other side of the storm. We weathered it together and the journey made us stronger – each and as a relationship. Maybe that’s why yesterday was such a shock. It was as if I’d dropped down to a new level of relationship faith and had the rug pulled out…again. 

Really, though, it was just a moment and not a moment that should overwhelm all that has come before. I believe it’s important to stand your ground and fight for voice. I do that. 

But it’s also important to know when its right to stage an honorable retreat.

What’s encouraged me to move through my hurt is a poem I ran across this morning. It’s the one I myself wrote towards the end of my book about love and relationship (Our Love Matters: Find it, Fix it or Let it Go!). I offer it to you now as I wish for you a weekend of true remembrance….for both the fallen soldiers who’ve bravely represented us on the battle fields…and too for the inner soldiers that keep standing up to fight again each time we brave a new in-the-daily-world battle. 

Our job is to realize what we’re truly fighting for at any given time and to do our own inner work with passionate integrity. 

That’s the only way back to love over and again.  

Our Love Matters

Ancient hills, recent gullies and stark plains

Tender streams and blustery tides,

All sound our names

Calling us

Toward a dense gathering

Where many wait

In honest celebration.

Only we have become afraid,

Our backs nudged up against the corner,

Seeking nothing

Even from the frozen trees

Directly outside the garret window,

Where we hide.

Again our name is called.

And again.

Still in our corner, resisting,

We imagine something better.

There must be an easier way

To ease this heart

Of ache and pitch and storm.

But the brave warrior

Knows well the arduous path of true surrender.

The brave warrior

Knows well

Surrender. 

Determination arrives

Carried on the bent backs

Of those who’ve gone before.

Bow down 

We must.

Still, we hope for kind mercy.

At times it comes.

At times it does not.

We stand beside ourselves.

We consider returning to our garret.

Finally, placing our fate in Love’s hands

We become willing to suffer Love’s indignities.

We become willing to suffer.

We become willing.

We become.

How is it so?

Because…

At last,

Astonishingly,

Passionately,

We know it to be

Love most able to paint our lives

In stunning colors of glad and gold.

We know love, more than anything,

Can release us

From the shackles of our own history.

We know love offers us the truest glimpse

Of Sacred Eternal light.

And for these promises

We will suffer anything.

And for these promises

We will balance with the angels

On the head of a pin.

We know now

Without doubt,

Above all, below all, beside all

Love matters most.

Today, then,

We willingly lay our open Hearts

Upon the altar table

And with palms turned upward

We join the celebration.

Blessings, Dr. Nicki