Today I wish to pay homage to my wife. No, not out of some silly guilt-ridden need for something, or some quest to have her "owe" me, or even some sly plan to have her "pay out" in her own special way for my thoughts. I just wish to offer some insight as to the lucky man I am, and the impact one human being can have on another.
First, let me say that words to fully describe my feelings are impossible. True enough, my Creator has blessed me with enough gab to fill a set of encyclopedias, but in that gift I understand just how poorly a job words are at describing true and raw emotion. Perhaps it is because words are mere things, and such emotion goes so far beyond any thing in this universe as to make words so completely useless in their existence. Perhaps it is why we can best communicate such emotion without words, without a need for such things.
Also, I don't post this publicly for any "reward", except in the desire that my wife never forgets who she is in my life, and in hoping that others read this and perhaps hold their partners a bit tighter, and never take them for granted. Sometimes life gets in our way, and it never hurts to remember the power of love and what that power is capable of.
And sometimes we as humans being in this world just need to know the impact we have on others.
I view myself as one of the luckiest people alive. I have lived through hell, the kind created both by others and by my own ignorance. I have been at the bottom and seen the top. But most of all, what I value most about this experience we call "life" has been the love that has driven me beyond what I believed were my own limitations. It is such passion, such emotions, that drives the me that is in form beyond what the me that is not believes it can go. It is, frankly, not just love that makes the world go round, but is what makes the world.
I recently had the distinct pleasure to sit next to an elderly lady on a plane ride to Pittsburgh. She was old in body, but her mind and mannerisms were of youth. She was a football fan, a Steelers fan, and we went back and forth about the Steelers and the Eagles, the Steagles, and I informed her how lucky she was that it was not my team who faced hers at the Super Bowl. She informed me with similar passion that she had just been to a parade that was, of course, not in my town. It was very fun, and made the trip very quick. She told me she was widowed several years ago, and that her husband got her into football and she fell in love with it decades ago. It really made me pause to reflect.
I looked into her eyes as she spoke of going to games with her husband and saw her memory fade back to those years. I could feel the love in her description of those times, and understood that it wasn't so much the passion for the Steelers that she enjoyed, but the memory of the passion she shared with her husband that drove her. I wondered without asking if she thought about her husband while at the parade, if she thought about him during the game, and of course I knew the answer. It was simple because I could relate.
While I looked into her eyes as she spoke, I saw my wife's own eyes looking back at me. I wondered if my wife shared a similar passion of me. As I looked at this woman's hands, knarled by time and condition, I wondered what time had in store for my wife and me. Would my wife's hands reach for me through time and space? Would her eyes search for me through the distance that time would create? Would I still hold a place in her heart after years had gone by, after time had taken its toll?
I realized I simply could not answer those questions. Yet, while catching a shuttle from the airport to the hotel, I took a glimpse into my own heart to seek things as they are to me. Regardless of what the erosion of time would do to that which is my life, our life, I could certainly understand in my own being what my wife, my partner in life, meant to me.
And in those 25 minutes and in the day since I unlocked my soul and just allowed words to form. This is as mighty of a description as my limited abilities will allow, and is a simple gift I offer - a part of me to a part of you.
She is simply the hand I reach for in the night. She is simply the name I call when all words fail me. She is simply the dreams that wake me in the night. When all else becomes dust I know that I can turn and she will be there, smiling and arms outstretched. When I am bloodied and battered she will tend to my wounds. When I am vicious and mean she will be the music that comforts me. When I am loving and kind she will be the mirror that reflects all that I do. Her skin will soften my own, her words will make mine understandable, her dreams will inspire me to greatness. She is my essence, my soul, the light which protects and guides me when the darkness threatens.
These are but words, they don't scratch the surface of what this mere man feels when I am with her. My skin tenses to her touch, my eyes glisten with her art, my soul expands in her very presence. In my very human way, I am ignorant of these things in the noise of life. As all things shutter around me I forget the tear that forms when she exposes her soul to me. When the noise is loud I can no longer hear the music in her voice, I can no longer feel the tenderness of her touch, I can't see the light of her way. I become more human without her, more insatiable to the ways of life then satiated in the ways of love. I become a nothing, a thing of skin and bones and tissue and flesh, all of that that makes me more human than being.
It is then that I realize that God did not make woman for man, but rather God made man of woman. God did not make woman for the companionship of man, God made woman to complete man, to become his essence, to guide him in the darkness, to inspire him to become more. Woman, in her beautiful essence could survive easily without man, but man would be doomed without woman in his soul.
In this there are no words, nor deeds, nor gifts, nor discipline of action that could give my wife what she gives to me. This day I let her know that she is in every thought I have, she is the essence of every still moment in my life. She is the wind that powers me, and the only hand I seek to have in mine. She is the only thing I will search for even as time and condition have taken their toll on this flesh and bone and tissue and skin. My being will always search for her in the good night, my soul will always cry out for her in the noise of life, and it is those things of being that will cause those little bumps on my skin at her touch, will cause that tear to form at the view of her soul, and will cause the hairs on my neck to stand at the thought of her kiss.
I love you my wife, I love you with all of my heart and being. Neither time nor space nor circumstance of form can change these things. They are, as intended, pure and selfless. When such conditions of existence cloud our eyes and deafen our minds let's not forget the essence of what we are, of what destiny seeks to prove in our togetherness, of what love seeks to prove in the experience we share. We have what is priceless, we are wealthy beyond all comprehension not just in the love we have but in the awareness of it. In that manner I offer you my life and all that I am in simple understanding of what it all means beyond the flesh.
Finally, isn't it wonderful what one seemingly meaningless and anonymous moment in time can create? I often wonder how many of those meaningless and anonymous but priceless moments of time we squander in the noise of existence. I often ask myself, how simple would life be if we only had 4 seconds to live? How would we treat those 4 seconds? That, however, is another story...
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