Ten Years

The past years that bring us to this point, the celebration of ten years of marriage, have been all at once heaven and hell . But the struggles are melting into victories. The broken hearts are mending and cleaving together. A friend recently told me through the words of CS Lewis that the deeper our capacity for feeling pain comes a greater capacity for feeling joy. I am living this.

I met David when I was just a girl. I've known him for half of my living years yet it seems I am just getting to know him. Back then, David played with the words hopeful wish. He had a hopeful wish that he and I would work out...but our relationship always teetered on a hope foolwish. We couldn't get it together. When we finally did marry we felt like we had realized a hope full wish. But marriage was just the beginning of the hopeful, hope fool and hope full wish stuff. When it comes down to it, love is difficult.

In the words of Rainer Maria Rilke:

[T]hat something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

[Love] is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), might young people use the love that is given them.


Coming out on the other side of this decade and entering into the next is a victory and I look forward with hopeful wish that we will yet become hope full wish.

David, I love you.

I chose you.

I still do.



Photography by Emilie Campbell