engagement

Six more weeks of engagement; it is so sweet. Friends and family continue to celebrate our love to the hilt with awesome generosity. If the wedding is half as lovely as the run-up has been, we will soar with happiness. I dream almost every night about the actual day. In the dreams, things go awry, people get angry or disappointed, timing is all wrong and the salad doesn’t taste good. It is fascinating – amidst all this joy – how the mind supplies worry and how the subconscious decorates it.

But engagement is a bigger word than worry – literally more letters and syllables. It means active commitment, being in gear, built into or attached to another part, being occupied, a betrothal. I’ve spent plenty of time being engaging– charming and attracting people to me, smiling and saying the right thing. Engagement feels altogether different from that. There’s a seriousness to it – like honing musculature and reason for nearness to another person. Max and I are in gear – step for step – navigating our promise and the pending ritual of its expression.

I like it. Engagement has substantiated me. I have new strength because of it. I am discovering attention in tension’s absence – like a need to take people at their word, an ease around conflict and a growing admiration for those who rush to forgive, who aren’t easily offended and who joy in others’ joy. Perhaps that is because I am marrying someone who practices these things like breathing – in and out – habitual and uncomplicated. He has taught me so much about how to live well.

I want to take the world’s hand – like I will take Max’s – assuming that it has great plans for us. I want to engage the world’s possibility, it’s unique expression in me and see its fundamental beauty, not its faults. I want to stand in front of my friends and family without worry or tension, trusting love, it’s unending reserve and it’s benefit.

A week ago, Cal and I lay at the ocean’s edge, our hair matted with wet sand, freckles bursting on our faces and sun tossing handfuls of glitter on the smooth tide and I said to her, “I want to be as new as today. Just as brand new as this day.” So here’s to engagement: being occupied with hope, bathed in gratitude for this once in a lifetime day and tipping the scales toward love.