Partnership

This is an excerpt from the weekly News-Loveletter. If you would like it sent to your inbox directly (with all the other juicy bits, including a mini joy practice), you can add yourself to my mailing list here.

Seda and I have been breaking bread together for nearly 32 years. It’s not our anniversary this week, and we haven’t celebrated that since we let go of our romantic bonds over a decade ago. But our longevity as partners occurred to me a couple weekends ago (see this week’s YouTube), and I felt moved to take a step back and celebrate.

It’s not the marriage I’d expected. I’ll say that. When I said “I do,” at 18 to what appeared to be a Wyoming Cowboy, I put a down payment on the white picket fence. We still have it out back. That fence has been re-purposed as a live, improvisational, and inter-active piece of performance art. The fence that originally sought to keep things tidy has evolved into a structure that challenges us and many others to rethink borders of all kinds.

And the center of our creative endeavor together continues to be this: the mundane and deeply spiritual breaking of bread. We are nourished together. Seda and I plan our future together, we make soup together, we break bread. Not everyday, but as a capstone to our week, and we meander back and forth to one another’s living quarters with appetizers, side dishes, and desserts, real and metaphorical, all week long.

Seda and I surprise and delight each other, we make space for one another’s growth. We celebrate each other and our unconventional relationship, most especially when we are enjoying our “normal” life — walking the dog, cleaning house, gardening, remodeling. This is our daily sacred. These are the candles we light together and carry out into the world.

Where do you find sweet partnership? What does it call forth from you and what do you receive in it? Do you celebrate big milestones, the everyday, or both?