“This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we’re most sure that love can’t conquer all, it seems to anyway.  It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts….The truth is that your spirits don’t rise until you get way down.  Maybe it’s because this–the mud, the bottom–is where it all rises from.”

(Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies)

I finally hit bottom. It occurred to me the other day that though I am a big complainer–always have been, recently became aware of how big a complainer I am, and even with this awareness still do it way too much–it occurred to me that lately I’ve been outdoing even myself in this department.  I’ve been complaining about a wedding, for the love of all things holy, and I’ve been complaining about this in the midst of the best year of my life: an engagement to my best friend, a move to a new city with family, a niece on the way, new jobs that the BF and I actually like (considering it’s still work), a wedding on the beaches that I grew up loving, and a honeymoon with drink flags. I mean, hello! There are people with actual problems, problems that start with C, problems of soul-shattering loss and apparent hopelessness.  And here I am, writing about crumbs and vendors.  What a luxury.

Now, before I sound too sane, let me point out that we are in the home stretch.  I just created a wedding program I love, and almost everything is checked off the Master To-Do List.  There is room to move around and air to breathe and this allows me to relax and unclench multiple body parts.  In addition, I have bleached my teeth, worked on my tan, toned my arms, and am feeling an overall sense of well-being that is the bastard child of overpreparation and a forced surrender to things I realize I cannot control.  But still, I got here.  And I’d like to stay.

This morning, the morning of my thirty-third birthday, I thought about the botanical gardens in Birmingham where I spent so many afternoons pining over my singleness (or really, an absence of a match for the love in my heart) and praying for things to be different.  I realize now, of course, that had my prayers been answered according to the vision I had, I would never have ventured beyond the borders of that town, would never have wandered other gardens, like those in Central Park. I would never have been uncomfortable enough with my square footage of planet to increase it exponentially, would never have known the joy and emotional divisibility that comes with having more than one home.  I would not be getting married, at least not to this man, and any other man simply would not do.

So my outsides are polished up a bit and the insides are coming along, slowly as they always do, and I can see the light.  I’m walking towards it.  (And running–that helps with the toning.)  And there’s fun along the way.  Last night the BF and I scored tickets from his company to see Tom Petty at Philips Arena.  I’m not too big on concerts–I generally don’t like to be around other people–but there’s no substitute for the feeling you get when the first few live notes hit your ear and you immediately know the rest of the tune, recognize the song, speak the words from memory.  There is a deeper place that records these melodies in our lives, and there is a moment when they go from being outside of us to being a part of who we are, like the phoenix song heard by Harry Potter.  They echo through the chambers of our hearts and remind us we have a story that can be complained or proclaimed but either way, it will be told.  Grace is what turns my complaints into proclamations, and I feel the language of grace being absorbed by my heart every time I move from resentment to love, from bitterness to gratitude, in the midst of struggle or celebration, of just life–grace is the song I’m committing to memory.

A lot of the recent yuck comes from that ever-present concern of what others are thinking and how I appear.  But the people I hold closest have seen me with unbleached teeth, pale skin, and cheese-dip arms.  I don’t have to save face.  I can wander gardens without fear of the future now because I know the author of my story; I know the thirty-three year old who spent his last night in a garden for me.