I had three thoughts about it. Let’s see if I can remember all three of them!

1. Love is joy. i figured this out not that long ago.

See, there was some kind of car insurance commercial a while back where some therapist (this was a fundamentally stupid premise btw) talked about how there were four basic emotions: mad, sad, glad, and scared. Her point, evidently, was that other insurance companies make her really MAD (weak segue, lady) but it was a super-useful commercial up to that point! ‘Cause it makes it very easy to be like “which of these am I feeling?” in early recovery (on account of how most people in early recovery don’t know WHAT they are feeling most of the time).

And later on it made it very easy to explore how things like guilt and shame and embarrassment are all just different flavors of FEAR. I like to play the game of “If there are only four basic feelings, which one is this?” Sometimes things are a combination, like I think excitement is happiness mixed with a certain amount of fear about (for example) change.

So I was thinking about what love is. One of those emotions? A whole other emotion? An action? A cake flavor? A color? A ring size? And it occured to me that it must be joy, if it’s one of those. That seemed to make sense. We say we love things when they bring us joy, right?

I love this dress! It brings me joy! I love playing pinball! It brings me joy! I love chocolate! It brings me joy! I love Annie! Being with her brings me joy!

I very much like the idea that love=joy and joy=love. To me, it explains a lot about why people are always chasing romantic love; we so often get confused and think that it is the only way we can have joy. Think that it means being chosen and therefore being accepted and therefore being worthy and therefore being loved, finally, when in fact we are all those things totally fine on our owns.

2. Being in love is hugely different from what I thought it meant ten years ago. Back then, I thought that liking someone meant being in love. Or having a crush. YOU know – like in all those stories where people fall in love immediately. Or they’re “in love” with someone pretty that they never even met, and follow them around like one obsessed until True Love Wins Out. Because if you like someone, then OBVIOUSLY they are going to like you back, and EVEN MORE OBVIOUSLY they are the One Right Person and you will be Together Forever.

It was so easy to confuse that “high” of the crush with actual love. That is what all those movies and cartoons and chick lit novels and everything else tells us, right? You see someone, your pupils turn into heart shapes and fly out of your skull, IT IS LOVE. THAT IS ALL. And the only satisfactory ending to the store is that the heart-eyeball person and the eyeballee will be together forever. Goofy.

It dawned on me some months ago that, I think, being in love means being IN love. Some people say love is a verb, which is a totally fine and awesome thing to say – love as an act rather than a feeling. (Although a quick googling didn’t turn up one sane thing that anyone had written on the subject.) Ok: love requires that our behavior be loving, compassionate, understanding. If it’s not, then we can’t very well claim to be friends, parents, teachers, partners, or any of those other relationships that are supposed to involve some kind of love. But being IN love has to be different, or why do people get married?

It makes me think of the ocean. Being IN the ocean. Being in a loving intimate dating relationship is like that… there might be waves and tides (also the occasional jellyfish), but the love that we have for one another, the love we experience, the way that we behave with love and experience loving behavior, the depth of emotional intimacy, the complex tangle and weave of our lives together, informs and suffuses every moment of our individual beings, increasingly as the relationship grows.

I guess that being IN love has to involve loving ourselves that deeply too, accepting and believing and understanding and treating ourselves with tremendous love, because you can’t love someone else more than you can love yourself. So relationships tend to die off when they pass the point of our own love for ourselves. We escape, flee, cast them aside somehow. Or suffer at a drab baseline for many years out of fear, first.

(It’s like when people say they wouldn’t trust someone any farther than they could throw them – but different. You can’t love someone any farther than you can throw yourself! No, wait – that’s not quite it.)

3. Annie started making me breakfast before I got up, ages ago. I think I finally asked her why she kept doing that. Marveling at it. And she said the most ridiculous thing. She told me that she wanted to make me breakfast (in bed mind you) EVERY DAY SHE COULD FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES.

Now that’s love.

The jury was out for months and months. And then we visited Davis and went to Aquarius, the big hippie new age store. (actually, the SMALL hippie new age store. which was cooler when I was growing up. but i digress.)

And they had a book on rock gardening. And I was flipping through it and I saw a little essay about, of all things, Lucy Stone.

She was the first woman (ever, supposedly. EEEVER. Or just “ever in recorded Western society in places that had patriarchal name lineage stuff recently”?) to keep her own last name after getting married. She was also a big abolitionist and suffragist, and the first woman in Massachussetts to earn a college degree. Wikipedia claims that she was known as “‘the orator’ and ‘the morning star of the woman’s rights movement’, [and] delivered a speech which sparked Susan B. Anthony to take up the cause of women’s suffrage.”

I had vaguely heard of her, because Austin used to rant quite a bit about how everyone thinks Susan B. Anthony is so GREAT but she was just doing what all these other people taught her. To listen to him, Anthony was just ripping people off! Damn that Susan B. Anthony! Damn her!!!!!!!!

And she spawned a whole tradition of other women NOT keeping their own names, strangely enough, but changing their names to hers. (The “Lucy Stoners”, which is also the name of an Indigo Girls song.) Which is what this essay was talking about. The author was musing on why she had kept her first or second husband’s name, (Schaper, pronounced “Scopper”), even though it was such a pain for people to spell and pronounce. And how she could have just taken “Stoner.”

Her conclusion was pretty much “Um… but I didn’t… so.”

But I thought this was a pretty clear sign from the universe. We are both really into stones! And look! Lucy Stone! And a whole essay on how this chick should have used it as her last name! (Obviously we weren’t about to use “Stoner.” That means something DIFFERENT now.) And then we could have the married ritual of changing names and sharing a name! Plus then I wouldn’t have to spell my name ALL THE TIME! (Only HALF the time.)

So Stone will be our married name. Eek!

So, Danica suggested that we each write about what love is, and then post our own and read one another’s.

I feel like this is one of those writing assignments (most likely a test) wherein I will forget the VERY MOST IMPORTANT THING and therefore fail. (Ask me how many times this has happened to me versus how many times I have fantasized it.)

And that’s what love is about: tests you can fail!!!!

Oh. I mean.

Let me start with what I have believed (and no longer believe) about love, at various times in my life:

• Love is doing for other people what you would like them to do for you, in the hopes that they will return your love.
• Love is doing what other people want (or, more likely, what I think they want.)
• Love is making sure the person you love is never mad at you, because you never do anything wrong at all. Ever.
• Love is selflessness, i.e., identitilessness.
• Love is merging with another person, so that you will always always always feel safe.
• Love is being happy.
• Love solves everything, heals all your hurt, and makes it so you will never feel pain again.

I could tell you my path toward a new understanding of love (e-mail me if you want to hear more!) but suffice it to say that it involved a lot of steps. (12.)

Here is what I understand about love, with the caveat that this will ever remain a work in progress. I love that I get to discover this as I go along.

I have a tattoo on my left arm of a heart with the word “love” in it. I completely believe that God is love. (I John 4:8, mangofarmers!!!) I love Love. (Which has already stopped looking like a word to me.)

Love is spiritual. It is the closest word that we can come to express the experience of Higher Power’s care, compassion, grace, kindness, mercy, gentleness, power, and goodness. It is ever available to us all. It is the ground of our being. It is the foundation of all life.

And it is a verb that we get to do interesting embodied things with, like making love, of course, but also like making breakfast and calling the insurance agency and making money to support a family and growing things (if you love to grow things) and snuggling with animals, your beloved, and your children and writing letters and dancing and telling the truth and staying. It is a responsibility and a commitment that we get to keep, to ourselves and to those we love. It is suiting up and showing up, as they say, for whatever is in our lives. And I’m not just talking about arguments or disappointments in our relationships with others; I’m talking about loving myself enough to show up for my rage, for my fear, for my joy, for my discomfort. In fact, the only way I can show up for any of the things that come up in relationship, much less showing up for anyone else, is by loving myself. Loving myself in the way I fantasized someone would love me. Loving myself like a child. Loving myself as best I can and accepting the love of the Goddess the best I can.

When I was younger– and not just when I was a little kid, but through my adulthood, into early recovery– I thought that “romantic” love was the most important, most special kind of love, the kind that would “save me.” I held out the hope that one special person would give me love and make me whole. Instead, I am finding that I am already whole but that I get to explore and grow in a new way through a romantic, committed, loving, intimate relationship with another human being. I don’t think it is “icing on the cake;” I think it is a gift that I am incredibly happy and blessed to have. My love for and with Dani is beautiful and fun and joyous. This morning, I had a moment of lying there in bed with her, thinking, how is this possible? How wonderful is it to be my own self with this other unique self who delights me so! (A: Very very wonderful!)

I love love, the feeling, especially the spontaneous outpouring of emotion that sweeps over me. It is spiritual and physical and fun and poignant and wonderful. And I love the kind of love that doesn’t depend upon that emotional response for its power. And I love that I can have both. I absolutely don’t buy into the story that you can have one (passion) or the other (mature love). I think that intimacy can continue to grow, if you nurture it and work on your own shit.

Love is bigger than what I am writing and bigger than I can understand, and that delights me as well. I love that I will never know, that I can’t contain it, that I get to just be in it, to the best of my ability.

I love you, readers. I love you all.

Click to enlarge… but if you are reading this and I have your email address, you probably got a fancier version already.

And once they ARE done, we get to wait like a month, maybe even two, for them to actually get printed and assembled. This is a far cry from my ambitious vision of sending them out four to six months in advance, but it doesn’t really matter. We have ordered and paid for the wedding rings, and reserved and paid for the site; everything else is just dressing.

Those are the bands. This is so not what I was going to talk about. We’re getting them about half as wide, because those are really wide. Birch symbolizes awesome things like writing (people used to use the bark for paper), and new beginnings, and fertility, passion, energy, growth, stability, and witchiness.

ANYWAY. Registry.

We registered first at Crate and Barrel, solely because we happened to go by there and discover that they were having little parties in February for registering couples. They promised us a free heart-shaped bowl PLUS food and music and those little guns that go “beep!” – how could we resist?

We thought they would be way too schmancy and expensive, but then it turned out there were a lot of things for seriously a dollar. So that’s okay. And we found and agreed on dishes in blue and burnt orange, which are our wedding colors!

We picked out silverware, too, since our current silverware is a very motley collection. That was way harder. We ended up having to go through all the store’s silverware and each pick out our two favorite sets and then compare. I think that the set we picked appeared on both our lists. I wanted ones with rounded wide handles that fit in my hand; Annie wanted ones that were smooth and looked quirky and interesting. (I was all for quirky too.) The funny thing, as she pointed out, is that whatever we pick – that’s what our kids will think forks and spoons look like. That will be their mental image of the Platonic fork.

Isn’t that crazy?

There are a few exciting things on there (a thing that whips your cream for you so you put in cream and it shoots out already whipped!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and a bunch of things that will be Useful, which is what I think a wedding registry is supposed to be?

And then we created a second registry at thethingsIwant.com because it lets you put things on the list from all over the place – not just one store. That one has the Greatest Ergonomic Watered-Steel Etc. Knives Ever, because we need more knives, and a bunch of pots and pans, and the THERMOMIX. Which is the world’s most awemazing appliance. If you are trying to decide what knives or pots or appliances to get for your kitchen, you should just go look at our registry, because everything on that second list was RESEARCHED FOR HOURS AND HOURS. Because why be like “please may we have this pot” if the handles are going to fall off in five years?

TheThingsIWant.com is a pain to navigate, in my opinion – you can’t just click on the image of an item, you have to pick one of the tiny buttons underneath it that says “view” or whatever. But you CAN rank items in order of how great they are, which Crate and Barrel doesn’t allow.

So the bottom line is:
http://www.thethingsiwant.com/our_registry
and, I guess,
http://www.crateandbarrel.com/Gift-Registry/Guest/ViewRegistry.aspx?grid=4287570 (or go to crateandbarrel.com and type either of our names in).

We should pick a place where people can donate money, too. Equality CA?

We walked up the Cascades and stood around the fountain and planned out where things are going to be. We can make everyone stand in a circle! Just like we wanted! In front of the waterfall! And there is an outlet right there so it will be really easy to mic it for sound or whatever! And then everyone can walk down to the reflecting pool and get cute food! We can provide picnic blankets and people can eat on the grass, or we can have a few tables set up for people who want to eat at tables. And then the rest of the oval around the pool can be for dancing!

And then while people eat, we can show the Married episode of Hulk on a screen there near the tables! And get Rock Band set up where the ceremony was, and face painting and a photo booth! You will put on false moustaches and get your pictures taken!

And we can walk down the dramatical stairs on either side of the waterfall to the ceremony and make big entrances! And now Annie wants to wear shoes for the ceremony because there is all kinds of twigs and rocks and broken glass! (Hopefully Oakland will clean it up a little better before hand. And MOW THE GRASS. Seriously, it looked like… a… something funny with tall grass… there!) So I guess I am going to get a classier-looking pair of almost-barefoot toe shoes. Like these!

I would think they’d make white ones, but noooo. My choices seem to be these ones which are nature-like and would at least go with orange and be relatively subtle, OR several shades of blue which mostly all have different-colored toe tips or grey straps across the foot, which is kind of garish and distracting, OR there’s a burnt orange one that is the right color for our wedding but most of the shoe is black. For pete’s sake.

Or I could go barefoot. And just have somebody sweep the area before we use it.

The end!

The Berkeley one has all kinds of hilarious information. First of all it’s only like $500 a pop. And you can pick ones that are okay with having their identity disclosed if the kid grows up and wants to know where else they came from.

But here is the best part: You can look at the catalog online, which includes their impression of each donor. And those notes are HILARIOUS.

There’s one that is from before they did interviews, where they try to make up for that by including their impression of the person. They go on about how this one person looks like Lyle Lovett, and then they actually link to a picture. Of Lyle Lovett. That you can view for comparison’s sake.

And then one was all, “I would describe [this one] as a dorky-cute artist.” But my favorite was the first one we clicked on, which seriously began with the statement, “I have to admit that I expected Donor 4132 to be in the mold of a stereotypical math dork.”

I strongly recommend their website for just the entertainment value. Right here. Click on anyone!

“Remember, when the gay community is granted personal freedoms, ours get taken away! How? ….Shhh. Did you see all that lightning?” A masterful summary of the “gay marriage is a threat to traditional marriage” argument.