I am perched in a canopy of green. A creek that feeds the Russian River sends the hush of its waters on rocks skyward, catching my eardrums. I’ve been watching tiger-striped dragonflies and swallowtail butterflies alight on the fragrant fir branches and withering bay laurel blossoms. Stellar’s jays are stealing cherries from the tree nearby. They are leaving the four I placed in a bowl and set on the railing, alone. I don’t have to explain what an offering is to them.
Logan and I are tucked way back in a slice of redwood heaven to celebrate…no, celebrate is too active of a verb…we are here to rest into our first anniversary. Over the past week, we’ve traveled north and west from Tucson, stopped in the Bay Area to hug ones we love, avoid fireworks, and experience the shapeshifting presence of water as fog, as ocean, as bay, as river, and now, as spring-fed droplets on our tongues.
To me, we are in right relationship with something when we let ourselves be changed by it. I suppose this is the surrender that goes hand-in-hand with love.
Yesterday, I sat beside a flowing, crystalline stream, inviting my consciousness to shift into like kind. Smooth, sun-kissed stones radiated their warmth into my body, lifting words out of my heart and mouth, and diffused them into charged particles hanging between Logan’s chest and mine, invisible bridge of our own sunlight. I sank deeper into my seat and self, receiving the flow of his words as they passed through this private, middle space between us.
This kind of intimate truth-telling is alchemical. The poet Adrienne Rich speaks of it this way:
An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
To tell you how this union has transformed me, I point to the places where Logan and I don’t agree. At my core, I am an optimist and I tend to reflexively see how something could be possible before I argue how it couldn’t be. In its shadowy extreme, my personality type is susceptible to conspiracy theories and spiritual charlatanry. Logan, on the other hand, is insatiably curious about everything, but his initial filter for new ideas is one of reservation and skepticism. Maybe you’re beginning to see how we balance each other.
He is how I explore and complete most of my ideas, his mind a lab space and testing ground for my questions. He challenges my thinking more than any person I know, fortifying psychological guardrails while I probe some pretty out there shit. Here in my current vantage point with no active intellectual tension between us, it’s easy to describe this dynamic in a positive way. But in the thick of it, my ego kicks and screams when I’m not met with immediate validation.
In a world where the echo chambers are only getting louder and the powers-that-be tell us about all the ways we should be afraid, all the ways we should pull away from those who don’t think or behave like us, all the ways we should insulate our thinking, a relationship that encourages me to not do that is lifted out of the ordinary into what I’d consider a higher calling of love and devotion.
And while this particular vestige of love’s operation on me comes forward now in a coherent pattern of words, there is so much that remains without language. So much that comes through in only short images of recognition through symmetry:
Like the elderly couple Logan sees walking down the sidewalk near our hotel, their pinkies hooked. When he tells me about it, we smile and laugh about how we hope that will be us, arthritic hands and all.
Like hearing Annie’s Song by John Denver while picking out fish and wine for our anniversary dinner. Suddenly my dad is playing the same record in our living room, for my mom, who’s peeling vegetables at the kitchen table.
Like driving north on Highway 5, we listen to Nick Cave tell Rick Rubin about his relationship to his wife, Susie — “that it is a kind of entanglement of the most beautiful kind. I know you're not supposed to say that. I know we're supposed to lead separate lives and be separate people, but me and Susie, for better or worse, are utterly intertwined.” Logan reaches for my hand, our fingers lace, palms pressed into one another’s.
And like four days ago, tracing the winding roads from Marin Headlands down to the Pacific, remembering how my Mini Cooper — packed like a clown car with my stuff, my mom, and her dog — made the same serpentine descent five years ago when I moved up the coast to Portland. At the time, I had followed a vision to come to the Pacific Northwest, took a job that made no sense from a career perspective, and stood at the edge of a confluence of unknowns. Windows open to the scent of eucalyptus groves and salty air, Mom and I listened to Alexi Murdoch’s “Orange Sky", a searching and tender love song. The lyrics are simple but repeated, in the way that a prayer would be.
In your love
my salvation lies
in your love.
That night, I dreamt of a man walking along a shore, during the most spectacular, tangerine and amber sunset. He was holding a guitar, singing to the waters.
Memory tries to create themes and narrative, to string together experiences to form a sense of continuity. Magic, on the other hand, is an eruption both into space and into self. It breaks open the possibility of limitless elegant solutions and dynamic, poignant change. - Lou Florez
Thank you for reading & being witness to this incarnation of Love. Sending you redwood perfume & canyon twilight.
-Lydia
Thank you for this beautifully tender share, the redwood perfume and twilight!
😭- tears flowing!
It hits right at the griti- that place in the heart that holds unexplainable feeling of longing for home. 🥂 Cheers to yous~ celebrate… no, celebrate is too active a verb… rest into … the paraphrase perfectly incomplete as you’ve transported this witness to a beautiful place. 💗💞♥️