VOWS (Unwedding) 2010

I was going through some old writings on my computer and stumbled across my initial vows to my beloved.  I wrote these for our unwedding over three years ago.  I did not read these exact words; I wrote some other ones influenced by the draft here.  But, I thought I would share these now, cause I like them.

Family picture from late 2012!

Vows from February 2010

I do not want to keep you standing in the cold for too long, but I have a story to tell.  It is a story of a love deeper than those dark mountains lurking far from human eyes at the bottom of the ocean.

It is not a mushy, syrupy love (okay maybe sometimes).

It is a love that is hard and sinewy; sometimes it is dirty.  Sometimes it sparkles.  Mostly it is bound in a friendship that will move from this cold night and the cold evenings of our past forward in years, minutes, seconds for as long as Kristen and my lungs pull air. 

I could tell you the story of how we met over ten years ago in a Women in Film class at the state school up the road—where we both received excellent educations.  And the story of how a few short months after that meeting in class, February 11, 2000 became our anniversary. 

But mostly I want to tell you about what we have built together since that night ten years ago when we saw Angela Davis at Wayne State and then spent that night and the night after and the night after and the night after curled in one another’s arms talking and whispering and barely sleeping.  

We have grown a radical love that is fertile and dedicated to bringing more and more life around us.  When I was younger, I never really new or understood that your lifemate, your lover, your partner, could also be your best friend—the person you desire to spend your fun times with, your deep and joyous times with, your down times with, the moments when you feel embarrassed or ashamed or panicked or itchy with.

But that is what my kk is to me.  

I guess I have to go back to that night when I ended up in kristen’s arms for the first time, This physical placement—the fact that we ended up entwined around one another—matters to us and it matters to other queer people making their lives together in the midst of laws that favor some groups of people over others because of who these groups of people choose to have sex with (or a romantic relationship).  

Oh, but that is not what this is about—wait, yes it is kind of.

Anyhow, why that night—February 11, 2000—why did we choose that one night as our anniversary (which it will remain after today)?  That night long ago, we did go hear Angela Davis passionately and persuasively talk about dismantling the prison industrial complex in the USA and the discriminatory practices that lead to the over-incarceration of poor people and people of color in this country, and then we ate dinner with some of you who are here and some of you who are not, and then we were smitten and intrigued and tangled up in all that newness that falling in love brings with it.  That staring for long minutes into the eyes of an almost stranger who you are now discovering intimacy with for the first time. 

From that night on, Kristen’s body and mind became a map to me—a map larger than the great and colorful and over-bearing North American world map hanging on the wall of my 2^nd grade classroom.  The stories bottled up in her mind and heart became landscapes and topographies for me to piece together through the deep voiced tellings of her orange headed self.  Her skin became territory for me to explore through smell, taste, touch; my skin the same to her.

That night 10 years ago, I embarked on a new journey with the most unique and beautiful person —a voyage of devotion and discovery.

For nearly seven years (now it is 10 years), I have devoted my working life to trying to reform the prison system in Michigan and Kristen, for the last 3.5 (now it is 6.5 years) years, has worked to end housing discrimination in the Michigan.  We are committed to working for social justice and to striving toward the greatest good for all people and the earth.  

But, more importantly, we are committed to community—to building and growing a loving and beloved community that includes humans, soil, non-human animals, trees, rivers, fungi, rocks, bees, lakes, skies.  We have put down roots in Ypsilanti that are long and thick and sink into the wet slope of the valley toward this river next to us; this river that we love—the Huron.

As Angela Davis stated, “Radical simply means  ‘grasping things at the root.’”  And Kristen and I have worked on both a theoretical level and literal level to do just this.

I have witnessed my love—this beautiful bird before you all—become, day after day, more loving, more poignantly powerful, more dedicated to growing our own food, more self-sustaining, more community sustaining, more committed to all of this living we are doing together.  

I have seen her grow into her own body and discover her resilience and athleticism.  Before K and I were together, she walked around—hiking here and there, but exercise and sports were not her cup of tea.  And then she began to share in the joy of the invention that is more amazing than the automobile—the bicycle—the two wheel kind.

She is so strong on her bicycle; she has amazing endurance.  In the last one and a half years she has put more than three thousand miles on her Surly long haul trucker and many of those miles we have pedaled side by side.  

This mutual love of community and bicycling lead us to founding with a handful of good people who are here today, Bike Ypsi—a community bicycling and bicycle transportation advocacy group.  

We love this town; we love all of you who are here today.

At this juncture, I want to let you know that it is a cold night in January when I am writing these words—and I have had a couple of beers.  We have just survived a week of being without heat at South Normal; k has been through the 8 year anniversary of her mother’s death; together we went through the first anniversary of me having a miscarriage after very suddenly and unexpectedly becoming pregnant.  So, this writing is impaired—heated with melancholy, sentimentality, and a new boiler.

But it is also fueled by clarity and distinguished by the weathering we have been through together over the last many years.  There are days when I wake up to the soft body next to me totally mesmerized and terrified.  Terrified because I do not know what I would do without this love in my life—both in the physical sense and the emotional sense.  Mesmerized by the sweet skin and courageous soul nestled next to my chest, legs, belly.   

“Some day, some day men and women will rise, they will reach the mountain peak, they will meet big and strong and free, ready to receive, to partake, and to bask in the golden rays of love. What fancy, what imagination, what poetic genius can foresee even approximately the potentialities of such a force in the life of men and women. If the world is ever to give birth to true companionship and oneness, not marriage, but love will be the parent.”

Emma Goldman

it will be okay and maybe even better

I have things to do. Work—lots of it. This work includes my paid work and my house work, but then it also includes the work of my own head and heart.

I need to work through some themes that keep surfacing. Since k had all the bleeding spells, she has not been riding to work with me (though she did ride both ways yesterday for the first time in three weeks). It leaves a void, but also this time to contemplate the things of the world.

Spring is such an active time. Everything is bustling with energy and newness. It makes total sense that my mind is doing the same thing. It is shrill with desire. The desire to know; the desire to understand; the desire to love; the desire to make love; the desire for something bigger than human to help.

Help with what?

To make sense out of human motivations, love, desires, actions, hatred. I do not need definitions or total explanations. I need a bigger peace.

I need to know that when I witness the heinous actions of humans against humans that amidst the knowledge of those actions I can survive and so can those that I know and love and do not know and love. And the survival I am writing of is not just getting by, getting through it; rather, it is knowing that the little efforts toward something better do indeed matter and that these little efforts translate and carry over to generations to come.

And when I speak of generations to come, I do not simply mean human generations, but I mean the vitality and security and well-being of all living things and the rocks, soil, water, and air with which they all exist.

All of this gets me waxing spiritual. Whitman comes to mind a gruff booming in my ear. The rhythm of his voice a fixture in my head though I have never really heard him (except on the gravely, “36-second wax cylinder recording of what is thought to be Whitman's voice reading four lines from the poem ‘America.’”) But rather the rhythm bounces over my memories because I have been reading him religiously since 11th grade American literature when I fell in love with his words and the rapture they induced in my belly.

And, so when I ride my bike down by the river and I think about this woman I met last weekend—the daughter of a man who probably sexually abused hundreds of young woman—I move to Whitman and the words that he wrote; the words that invoke the turn toward something akin to perceptiveness and peace.

I think of our fallibility and our ability to harm. I think of our holiness and our ability to heal. I think of how this woman who expressed that she had done all that she could to keep her father from acting out again and again should never have had to endure that endeavor alone. I think about the messed up world we live in that isolates and abandons people leaving them to their own devices rather than welcoming, developing community, and holding one another accountable over and over again for all of our actions and in-actions.

I think how I want it to be different. I pray that it will. I hum praises to the birds that bring me peace and spin smiles and gestures to the water lapping over rocks and ridges of river.

I listen to this old man, long dead; the cadence of his writing like a comfrey balm. It seeps liquidy over the bristled edges of my heart into those cut places where pus and angst rise up and where I yearn for something more to cradle my face and whisper in any form that comes--it will be okay and maybe even better.

From Walt Whitman's Song of Myself
The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and
vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the pass-
ing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and
dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch'd words of my voice loos'd to the eddies
of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs
wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields
and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from
bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd
the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin
of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in
books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

more on rivers

I’ve got veins all over me and through me. I see river veins running near to me and their sometimes murky, sometimes glass-like surfaces pierce through my heart like a million sharp stone arrows leaving me breathless, leaving me satisfied with a painful depth of joy that raises tender scar bumps on my skin.

Yesterday, riding fast along the river that I love, the fog of a chilly but warming morning hung in misty ribbons over the trembling water. The birds went about their business building nests and tending to their little ones and beckoning the coming of rain with their varied voices—calling tangy toned notes, shrill and lovely.

I spotted the first orioles I have seen this spring—startled and gladdened by their bright orange under bellies, I stopped to pay closer attention to their proud black heads—slick and serious in the gray morning light.

I pedaled on and watched all the living things moving in some kind of perfect unison around me and wanted just to be there for always and not to emerge up the cemented hill from the river valley through the neighborhood where wealthy people live in too big of houses.

Everyday it is like this. I am tempted by a river to stay low and fast to its banks—to hover lightly on the edges of that in between place. That place where I do not have to think about suffering and violence and the ever-growing emergence of more and more injustice.

On some days, I wish I had become an ornithologist or a botanist or something not so connected to the intricacies of the human ability to think (or not think) and hurt (or not hurt) and love (or not love) or spread meanness (or not spread meanness). I wish for the lazy river to cover me constantly and make it all better. It does—in those hazy morning moments when I am captured in the river valley apart from the mayhem on the hill.