MonuMental

For two years now I’ve been fortunate enough to be holistically bound to the most magical creature through life, through love, through law, and through marriage. Every day and every week we water seeds with the joy of the present with hopes they will blossom and grow into a fruitful tomorrow. We nurture the very soils of our souls and plant gardens for our future. It’s really I who am the most lucky because she’s a truly unforgettable, beautiful person. There’s no person I spend more time thinking about than she.

I love our life not only for the things we have, but the things we don’t. The things we are working towards make me equally happy because these gaps in how we live, in what we do, in what we own – we will fill them in together. There’s such an abundance of things we have yet to achieve and as we move forward we’ll change and improve both of our lives through joint-efforts where each endeavor and every victory is an additional step up the mountain on this lifelong hike.

Over the years I’ve known her I’ve been inspired by her actions, her words, and often simply her presence so much to the point I jot down brief instances in little notes I keep to myself. The best day of my life, is any day when we’re at home just me & her. You can’t beat it. Her heart is elysian. She is assiduous about those close to her and shows it in her every surprising thought and idea that reveals a genuine appreciation for others and the desire to actively contribute to nearly every facet of the world as it revolves around her. It’s rare for her not to jump in to any situation and not want to help or take part.

We aren’t plastered across social media. We don’t post on Facebook boasting to the anonymous world how great is the other person. Neither of us feels compelled to aggrandize the other which just cheapens the core value of the object to which one is trying to over-assert. Greatness doesn’t require that kind of publicity and neither of us require such superficial cheerleading. The romance of energetic feelings and the sentiments that arise from personal experiences with one another are always welcome in the real world however.

She is also not my best friend. She’s better than my best friend. I’ve had best friends. They change. Some of them fail to even be friends of any caliber later. When people say “I Love You. You’re My Best Friend!” I think it’s great if you love your best friend, but that’s no compliment for your spouse who is, in my opinion, meant to be much more than that. When I got married I didn’t want a best friend I wanted a wife. I wanted a partner for life. I wanted the other half of the equation with whom I would team up and walk this amazing journey of days until we come to the end of the road and take our final rest. Of course I wanted somebody with whom to make jokes and go out to eat but can’t I find that in nearly anyone? I wanted my 1st wife, not my 5th best friend. Friends are islands. My wife is a continent.

She’s quite amazing. She impresses me on a reoccurring basis. And her husband is pretty great on occasion too.

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You can love an old man

You can love a cranky old fart

You don’t have to like all their ways

but you can still love the heart

You can love him like he’s an old drunk who shoots off his mouth

You can love him because you know he’s out of touch

You can love him because his life has been different than yours

You can love him for all the things he lacks

You don’t have to excuse everything he does

You don’t have to look away from everything he says just because of who he is

You don’t have to ignore the things he has said

You can hold him accountable for the things

You can help him improve

You can love the person he is because he is still a person

You can love him for what good he has done in his lifetime

You can love him like a ludicrous product from a crazy world

You can understand that life taught him lessons we have not had the experience to learn

You can acknowledge that he may have been exempt from learning many of life’s best lessons

You can love an old man no matter how belligerent or angry

You can love an old malcontent not for the mal but because of the content

You can give him a break for being wrong

You can love him for his mistakes

You can love an old man because somewhere deep down we all are good

You can give him the chance to be better

You can love an old man

You can love a cranky old fart

but don’t make him president

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It’s hard to look closely and recognize everything that we have lost on the small scale. Usually we do keep ourselves focused on the here and now when we could instead benefit from gazing at the larger picture. But that’s not the case here. I’d like to look closely and focus on the minute details that, once isolated, are easy to excuse. To focus on these grains of sand is difficult though because they incessantly start to blur until you can only recognize the beach that they pile together to form.

The beach is just easier to see.

All the things we’ve lost are thrown carelessly into this oblivion. Each singular identity becomes lost into the greater appearance of the coast.

We all know people either like or don’t like the beach.

As the winds shift our lives around in the swirling fates of unpredictable destiny I can see the traces of the dead.

As the sea laps its gasping tongue against the shores of what is gone it creates a middle ground that is neither living nor dead. No soul has ever sustained their existence in this trench of the void for very long before having to commit to the sand or the sea. We saw my grandparents traipse this watery slope as they left their life of the ocean to the sedentary dunes of the beach. To the still land where rest is complete. We saw my uncle slide gradually from life to land and now the times of his life have left the tides to remain off shore where they dry and scatter in the winds that influence us all. Yet occasionally a soul will leave the mighty deep, where colors and textures drift freely amongst the varying temperatures and life, to cast itself upon the rinsing shelf of the surf, where the turbulence of change, and the pressure of the life left behind tries mercilessly to pull back its lost treasure into the bath of boundless possibilities.

Rarely has one washed up onto the middle ground between awake and asleep so early and remained for so long. The blank space between here and there is no place to take up residence.

That is a soul lost to nothing; not to death nor to complete loss, but a wanderer to nowhere – a place of waste. For a time that, itself, becomes waste. We’ve lost beautiful souls to death – the loss that unites us all. It’s on rare occurrence we lose a soul purely and purposely to the beach itself. That is not its place but that is where it remains.

When a ball tries to roll into the sea it rides the edge of the water as it laps back and forth on the sands until it is ultimately cast back to the land where it belongs. When a buoy attempts to float onto the beach from the rolling ocean the endlessly moving surface of the water gently pulls it back to the wide open sea where it too is meant to be.

When a body washes to the shore the natural cycles of the Earth attempt to pull it back to the drift of the waters, to return it to its natural place in time. Its timely progression will occur on schedule as it is meant to occur along the path of its natural rhythm. We’ll all be pulled back to sea until the time is right to be cast from its lively waters and deposited into the drying, decaying sands and soils of the land.

I don’t know what this one body is doing, disregarding its aqueous alignment and repudiating its remaining days burgeoning amongst its peers until it is delivered felicitously from the depths. A voluntary despiriting of desperation. A martyr for martyr-sake.

Don’t wish for the beach ahead of your own schedule. Don’t wish for the beach before it is your time. The beach just might accept you.

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