This, Our Life

"I'm digging this mindfulness thing!"

These were Greg's words this morning, after we spontaneously made-out in the kitchen, amidst the chaos of breakfast. Clean-shaven for a conference, he still looks nineteen. Or twenty-nine. Ok, thirty-five. Well, forty-one really. No matter. The man rocks my boat.

His comment made me laugh, but then seemed just right. Practicing mindfulness pretty well guarantees a fuller experience - and acceptance - of reality, whatever it may offer.

If reality is painful, being mindful may hurt like hell at first, like anesthesia wearing off. It's like coming to after getting knocked out by your own illusions.

Maybe Cupid's day job is to tear away the veil that separates me from you, to dismantle the mechitza between us so that we can sit in awe together in a temple of our own making, experiencing love without separation. Somehow, miraculously, my marriage supports this, creates this, is this. Thanks, angel.

To be mindful is to fall in love with what is, as it is. To fall in love is to open. To open is to be vulnerable. To be vulnerable is to be porous, penetrable. To be penetrable is to become one with reality. To become one is the ultimate reality.

I loved something my friend said to me over the weekend, quoting one of her teachers: There is the Relative Moment, the one where you have a zip code and a pile of unopened bills, and there is the Ultimate Moment. I'm paraphrasing the paraphraser here, but this spoke to me. I think of the Ultimate Moment not as some great big beyond, some mystical endgame, but rather as a seed, as the heart of every relative moment, always present, always available. Oneness: the heart center of every spiritual tradition I know of.

This, our life -

These are the words engraved on the insides of ur wedding rings. Shakespeare wrote them:

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt,
finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
sermons in stones and good in everything.
I would not change it.

So yes, I've been pierced by an arrow of love. Love for what is. Love for my husband, the boy he carries within himself and the girls he nurtures without. Love for myself and the tender unfolding, like a snowdrop ever turning outward, closing, taking care, blooming, poking through the surface into the light. Love for you, on the other side of these words, porous and penetrable, seeking, trembling as you turn your face towards your relative moment, your ultimate moment, as you fall in love with what's real for you, as it is, letting it hold you, if from a distance, like a sun.