Engagement News, Volume 1

So, the big news: We're getting married! I asked my sweetie two weeks ago, and she said yes. (I asked her here. At night. Tres romantic.) We've tentatively settled on a big celebration next summer involving lots of good music, liquor, and dancing. The ceremony's still up in the air, since we don't know if we'll be able to get married in New York State, or will need to travel to Maine or Canada or one of those more forward-looking places. (I suggested a destination wedding in Iowa, but that was nixed immediately.)

Most wedding planning seems to be taking place while jogging. This means that either a) we will be in incredible shape come next summer or b) we will be in horrible shape and nothing will get planned.

Yesterday we picked out rings. That was way fun, possibly because the ladies at the jewelry store held a wine-tasting event that afternoon. Regardless, we picked out lovely palladium bands (had you ever heard of that stuff?), and mine will be set with a beautiful diamond C.'s aunt gave her years ago. I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. 

Stay tuned for further important wedding decisions, such as: can Susan pull off strapless? Will we be overcome by a sudden desire to recreate Ellen & Portia's million dollar intimate celebrity wedding, plunging ourselves into debt from which we will never recover? And how much does an open bar cost, anyways?

Share the Love

Many of you have probably already seen this. I'm not a fan of Keith Olbermann, but this brought tears to my eyes. And not just because my thoughts, these past few months, have turned to marriage and weddings and growing old with the woman I love. Okay, maybe a lot because of that, but also because I've always been a sucker for weddings and true love and beating the odds. Until recently, I believed that progressive folk should pursue a more radical agenda: getting the state out of the marriage business altogether. But I have been persuaded by the energy and joy of lgbt couples who have worked to secure and celebrate this right.

And yes, of course, because I want that, too. 

Rope Burn

"Each relationship and every single encounter can be a vehicle for meaningful spiritual connection, through the transformative magic of Bodhicitta. Buddha taught that this Bodhicitta or spiritual love has four active arms, known as the Four Boundless Heartitudes, and four expressive faces known as the Four Forms of Compassion in action. This is how we love, Buddha-style: impartial to all, free from excessive attachment or false hope and expectation; accepting, tolerant, and forgiving. Buddhist nonattachment doesn't imply complacence or indifference, or not having committed relationships or being passionately engaged with society, but rather has to do with our effort to defy change and resist the fact of impermanence and our mortality. By holding on to that which in any case is forever slipping through our fingers, we just get rope burn.

"Buddhist love is based on recognizing our fundamental interconnectedness and knowing that all beings are like ourselves in wanting and needing happiness, safety, fulfillment, and not wanting suffering and misery. The Dalai Lama says, "If you want to be wisely selfish, care for others." All the happiness and virtue in this world comes from selflessness and generosity, all the sorrow from egotism, selfishness, and greed."

Lama Surya Das, "A Buddhist Valentine"

Three Things I Love

This is a good meme to be tagged with just now. So, because Dr. Write says I should, here are three things I love (other than family, friends, and beverages):

1. Water. It just feels like home. My only time snorkeling, I felt like I could stay there all day. My earliest memory is of the gray foam at Kalaloch, on the Washington coast. When I saw Lake Ontario last fall, I felt that same sense of peace that the oceans give me. I even love staying in the shower far too long in the morning. The theme for my 45th birthday (mark your calendars people: March 1, 3pm, my house) is going to be Under the Sea. Or Tropical Paradise. Or something.

2. Reading. I come from a family of readers--"no reading at the table" was an actual rule for dinner, and of course we read everything in sight, from milk cartons to cereal boxes. I got lost in the Oz books, in trashy bodice rippers, in muckraking books about the counterculture. Now, I want to read magazines and blogs and websites, and chick lit and speculative fiction and Serious Literature. And the comics. And the back of the milk carton.

3. Animals. This is a family thing, too. Animals remind me to stay in the moment. I don't mean to romanticize the lives of these creatures, but I am amazed at how much they are both like and not like us, how the behaviors can be so similar, yet totally un-self-conscious. I want to get to know every cat in the neighborhood on a first-name basis, like Belle who lives around the corner, who comes running to greet me on warm evenings, rolling on the sidewalk and looking for scritchers. And the birds--twitching their heads this way and that, wiping their beaks on branches. I'm endlessly fascinated.