Falling In Love

Love has been on my mind a lot lately as I begin this new adventure with BlueStar. For me love grows like a well nurtured Forget-me-not, but not always. Sometimes the mere suggestion of being loved sends me spiraling into furious passionate reciprocal feeling when they may not actually be real (hence Marco)...I have also been reading this month's Ensign and it couldn't have come at a more pivotal moment in my life. BlueStar and I have decided to stay together and soak up every moment of perfection we have together here in California for the next five months. When August comes around there might be some severe heartbreak, but I am feeling so calm and peaceful about it that I am not worried at all! We fit together, like pieces of a puzzle. We are very much alike: naturally happy, adventurous, creative, driven people who have come from somewhat similar backgrounds (very wealth-less childhoods, major conversions to our church, independent of our families, awful heartbreaks) and we have tons of simiar goals that we just simply discovered that we shared and didn't make together: adopting children, settling down in Southern California, never ever having divorce be an option, going on a mission together, making a huge difference in the world somehow...I fit with this man.

So the question now is what does falling in love mean? How does it happen? It suggests that it was accidental and against your will. Falling is a feeling of being out of control and not understanding what happened until the result: hitting the floor. This sentence doesn't exactly sound like the best thing to ever happen in one's life, let's see if we can find the real gem in this concept. There are extraordinarly wonderful moments to be out of control, such as the huge drop of a roller coaster, or sitting lazily in the sun in the passenger seat of a car, or feeling your ears pop as your airplane wins the gravity battle. There are also many terrifying ones (some of my wonderful ones may be your terrifying ones...that is what makes life so diverse and amazing) such as being pulled from the shoreline by the undeniable forces of the tide, or watching helplessly as the car behind you refuses to slow down at the red light, or trying as you might to convey your opinion to a best friend who is ruining their life...out of control, like anything, has it's light and dark. Not understanding what happened until the result is a funny one. I remember once leaving my Mom's house on a frozen night and losing my footing on the 3 front porch stairs what were slicked with a layer of ice. I fell square on my back and got a horizontal bruise from hip to hip. I found it very funny because I didn't even remember slipping, just sitting on the ground laughing. I have also had experiences like this where I find myself deep in a puddle of affection without having any recollection of ever getting there. What did I see in this person again? How did I get to this point? It happens, and sometimes it works out for the best. Not having been raised on instant anything (there will not be instant pudding in my home, cook and serve only!) I am not a believer of love at first sight. My love must be nourished and reassured constantly until it blossoms into an all encompassing tree with it's limbs and blossoms wrapping tightly around the other person. The last and most terrifying part is the hitting the floor. This part can destroy a person, can turn them into a hollow shell and leave them shattered laying in the bottom of a dry bathtub wondering how they are ever going to find the strength to climb out. I do not want to focus on this because I am sure that with that visual each of you paused for a moment and remembered being there, wherever there was for you, and felt enough pain to not want to read further.

I love that the phrase contains the word “in”! Falling IN love. I imagine myself thin and lovely in a flowing wispy dress standing on the edge of a slab of marble. Spread out below me is an expanse of rose colored water, only it's almost more like air than water. Water surely is one of the most powerful forces on the planet, but air is a necessity of a different sort. We can choose to drink water, to eat wet foods, to swim until we are soggy; but breathing is a different story. As Regina Spektor sang it best “everyone must breathe until their dying breath.” Air equals love in this analogy if you have not gathered that already. Ok back to me in my pretty dress. I imagine gracefully tumbling, willingly taking the plunge so-to-speak. I would break the surface and breathe in a new life, new love, a new person. His smell would be all around me and I could simply bask in the deliciousness of this new sensation. We would float blissfully, tumbling forever in this rose colored endlessness, completely saturated IN love.

Now we approach the last word of our darling phrase, this verbage so easily confused with lust, among other things. l.o.v.e.....

What more to say? It is the single most sought after thing in the whole world. It is the holy grail of emotions, the fallen star, the treasured prize at the end of the race. Those few successful ones run hand in hand into the sunset leaving the rest of us behind in a shadow of green envy, and self pity. Love comes in all shapes, motherly love is the shape of warm lips gently kissing her newborns brow, friendship smells like sugar and is the shape of us all laying together on the trampoline on warm summer nights, family love is the shape of shipping rope tied in endless knots never to be undone and sometimes there is romantic love that is the shape of sand caught up on a light ocean breeze, it blows away easily and picks up just as easily the next time. If you can be counted as one of the lucky ones who found Atlantis you can only do your best to make love stick around like the polished slab of marble my feet were warming in my pretty dress. You feed it with laughter, you water it with compassion and thoughtfulness, and you put it in the sunshine of compliments. Ok this is getting stupid...you know what I mean. Both of you adore each other enough to nurture it and treasure it more than yourselves. This is falling in love to me!