“Be wet / with a decent happiness”

Tonight, as I write this, I am thinking about The Lovers. 

I’m thinking about its beautiful invitation to shine as our own beacon, to be our own lighthouse when we feel otherwise spiritually dim. The Lovers is a card of self-sight that asks us to look upon ourselves as a beloved would, seeing not flaws, or imperfections, or endless failings but rather, seeing all that there is to love: our resiliencies and strengths, the beauty that is the fullness of our particularity. The Lovers calls us to adopt an external perspective in order to appreciate the gorgeousness of self that we often miss when we are stuck in the eddies of our own internal narratives. It asks us to trade in our judgement for compassion. The Lovers invites us to grant ourselves the grace of love that we so often reserve exclusively for others. 

Tonight, as I write this, I’m thinking too about “The Rain.” 

I’m thinking about this poem by Robert Creeley, finding myself feeling that I’ve misread it all this time. It begins with a familiar scene of lying awake in quiet, persistent thought—the keeping awake of a silent hounding, restless in the unease of remembering ourselves. The memory of chagrin, the judgement that we should be otherwise. And in this waking darkness, there comes a call to love: “Love, if you love me, / lie next to me. / Be for me, like rain, / the getting out […]” This is a call out to ourselves—to rescue ourselves from ourselves. It’s a reaching out to the part of us that knows an inborn love, the loving part to which we are too often unavailable. It is a call out to the grace of satiating our yearnings with a decent happiness. More so, it’s the prayer for a clearing flood and the allowance to be wet with it.   

Tonight, write yourself a love letter. Tell yourself how very much you love you—articulate all that you find to love. Be for yourself like rain.