In the cards

About ten years ago, when our daughter Courtney was attending the Aspen Music Festival, I flew out to see her perform.  I met Jordan Allen, a cellist Courtney had met in college. 

I am generally shy, it takes time for me to engage on deep personal levels with people I don't know well. But Jordan liked that I was a writer. His enthusiasm to get acquainted and trade artist stories was uncontainable. It took fewer than five minutes to hear about things which might have taken someone else years and possibly as many drinks to disclose. I loved this open, guileless young man immediately.

After Aspen ended, Jordan, who called me Movie Mommy, shared regular updates over the phone - the men in his life he hoped would make him happy, and the ones who would not.

Once, during a bleak stretch, Jordan asked me how anyone could ever know if real love, marriage and children were even in the cards for them. That conversation, more than any other, stayed with me. The only answer I could offer, as unhelpful as it was true, was time. 

Jordan joined the Madison Symphony Orchestra and got his life gig underway. His updates, less frequent but longer, kept me up to speed for a while.

A year passed, and then two, when I saw on Facebook that Jordan had become engaged.

I had no words that could convey my joy for him. And yet, later that week, didn't Jordan email me and ask me to write the reading for his wedding? Yes, he did.

And, so, with Jordan's permission, I'm posting my little contribution to the celebration of hard-earned love, which, yes, it turns out, is in those cards. 

For Jordan and Kyle

Married 10/24/2015

When real love speaks 

Inside our open hearts is a resting place, for what may be love.

Indeed, it travels in, what may be love.

It lingers there, haunting hopes, occupying dreams, igniting imagination.

Open hearts welcome what may be love.

It's always wanted,

There's always a place for it.

But when it leaves, what may be love leaves the heart as it was found

A work of art begging for detail.

A circle longing to close.

As empty as it is full.

And so, the open heart waits

and says...

When?

Until eventually, real love watches

and says...

Now

It doesn't look like anything else, real love.

It doesn't drift into that open heart and out again.

It doesn't thrive beyond your grasp.

It can only live in your open heart.

You aren't afraid of it.

You can't be.

Real love only answers the ready voices which beckon it.

It rewards those who coax it into the light.

It moves into the hearts which connect two people

and says...

I'm here.

Real love is one end and the other both, which close the circle

It makes you unable to recall the feeling before you were found

It defies your ability to describe it.

It is all you feel, now.

It is all you need to feel to do everything.

Occasionally, you will remember

when what wasn't love

 left you.

You may pray.

And real love will watch

and surround you

and say...

I'm staying