“You can’t touch love, but you can feel the sweetness that it pours into everything” -Annie Sullivan

For a long time I believed love happened in the giving and receiving of affection, attentive listening, and showing up. It was in the exchanges where I knew that love was circulating in my life. I never knew that the love that came in was actually sitting in me steeping and changing me just because it was in me.

Maybe for a long time, I was not a worthy container of love. As soon as it came in, the cracks in my self esteem and the doubts that trailed the love would let it leak away. It took me a long time to realize that love given or received is a substance that actually stays in you and sticks to you in drops with each kindness and loving touch.

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“Marriage: that I call the will of two to create the one who is more than those who created it.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

I love weddings. What is more reassuring than attending a ritual whose goal is to promise to love. Regardless of our knowledge or experience with it’s failure, we all want to believe in love and support the couples who are bold enough to take the leap. Wedding rituals are so universal that there is an element of cliché. Yet, even within the anticipated rituals of cake and first dances, they are also a completely unique experience for the couple that takes the leap to define their life together publicly.

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“Marriage is not a noun; it’s a verb. It isn’t something you get. It’s something you do. It’s the way you love your partner every day.” Barbara De Angelis

I have told more people than I can count the one irreplaceable piece of advice that has kept my marriage going for decades. Sometimes, like today, I have to go inside myself with a pick axe and dig it out for me. The advice came from Bob, the best marriage counselor in Seattle, when we were just into our 7^th or 8^th year together. He said, “Mature love, the kind that outlasts the wide and frequent swing of feelings and even the painful ups and downs of cohabitation is the ability to hold what you love about someone side by side with what is most annoying about them.”

This is not that hard to do when you are feeling the love for them. It is really hard to do when all you can see is what is annoying about them. Our grievances about our partners have some weird balloon effect inside of us. As soon as we hone in on what is missing, defective, overwhelming or otherwise provokes you to want to leave the room screaming, it is hard to wrap your hands around the part of them that you love. For me sometimes, the distance is so large that for moments I wonder if the love that I hang onto is just an illusion.

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“When something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren’t grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude” -Cynthia Ozick

I was searching for the feeling of gratitude for much of the day. I let it be a slow day, not jumping out of bed early to exercise, letting myself have quiet writing time at home, taking the dogs and kids on a walk through my favorite nature park. I accomplished the necessary and left early for a late afternoon swim at the lake. When the kids all took the floatie out, I lay gazing up at the blue sky and heard the warm summer breeze on the banks while the dogs resting on either side of me.

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“Sometimes you put walls up not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.” -Unknown

Today I received a card that said “It’s not you, it’s me.” This is the perfect break-up line, assuring that even if you are walking away from something that is worth fighting for and about, you can go guilt free. After all you took responsibility and legitimately tried to make the person you are leaving behind feel somehow better about being left, because at least it is not about them.

Sadly of course it is about them, because it is always about both people. Relationships and both their positive and negative outcomes are always a product of two people’s capacity, intention and willingness to do the work of loving. I have been struggling for the last month trying to find a breakthrough with one of my closest confidantes.

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“My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.” -Henry Ford

We are not given many best friends in a life. Even if you don’t ascribe to the belief in reincarnation, there is something unique and extraordinary about how a best friend hears exactly what you mean when you speak. They laugh at all the right moments and can crack your heart open just by the tilt of their head in the middle of a story. I had a Sunday holiday today with my best friend, Sarah. I met her when I was 20 and she handed me her kid and her car keys and we embarked on a sisterhood through life.

Sarah and I have not lived near each other for many years and sometimes there are years that go by before we are able to see into each other’s eyes again. Yet, even after years, it seems like yesterday since I have been with her. Our truest friendships are like that, they are like the stars, ever present, even without proximity. Often our best friendships change and shift with the phases of our life. My first experience of what unconditional love meant happened when I was still a girl and have learned what love means through her presence for 25 years.

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“Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.” -Ryunosuke Satoro

For me there is probably not a more intense interaction that I can have with humanity than when I become an air traveler. While I am intellectually conscious of the enormity of the world’s population, it is when I move through airports that I experience the vastness of humanity trying to move through space. It is in the midst of the crowds of people, all on their way to somewhere, that the complexity of life on earth becomes transparent.

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Wendy and editor Zanne Miller explore how our loving relationships can be the most gentle and effective education we engage in to become the person we want to be. Rather than focusing on finding the right partner, commitment works best when we approach it as a method of personal growth. Commitment comes from developing the ability to remember that you really love someone, even if you aren’t feeling it. An enlightening conversation that, like the book, will provide fresh eyes to perceive the love and wonder in your own relationship.

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“We are what we repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act, but a habit.” -Aristotle

This wisdom has been spoken since the beginnings of recorded human history. The lesson that has been known and passed down by every great leader in history is that it is through the disciplined devotion, work and practice of mastering oneself that we meet our greatest achievements. It is an evolutionary track that takes decades to fully appreciate the power that comes from disciplined spiritual practice of becoming oneself.

It is the ego driven self that seeks mastery over others. Even the highest levels of victory in war or scaling the heights of financial achievement do not feed and nourish one’s sense of self like listening to the small quiet voice within that urges you to always do the thing you are afraid of. So many of us believe that overcoming our fears is something that we demonstrate out in the world. We work to bend reality to our aspirations even as we refuse to look inside and see what is keeping us from it.

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“Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive — the risk to be alive and express what we really are.” -Don Miguel Ruiz

The global tour of the Banff film festival is in Eugene this weekend. The short videos selected among hundreds of entries from extreme sports enthusiasts are mind boggling. From the free form skiing off of tops of mountains, to bicycle riding from Alaska to the tip of Argentina, to solo climbing up the biggest rock faces in the world, alone and without a rope, the feats that humans put themselves through and accomplish seems like attempting the impossible.

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