A couple of weeks ago Orionne and I celebrated our one year anniversary! What a meaningful threshold for us to cross. And what a profound year of leaning in it has been. We met (re-met) one year ago in July and immediately bowed in to a most extraordinary love. We bought and renovated a home, moved in together, and bravely surrendered to the bittersweet complexity of blending our families.

What a mystery this leaning in business is?! How much I’ve learned and gathered and received by listening to the commands of my innermost knowing.

How could I have known, a little over 16 months ago, that listening to that inner command of moving our family to Ashland would so radically change my life, blossom my heart, forever altering my experience of home and family?! I couldn’t have. I’m just thankful that somehow I knew enough to listen, deeper than my fear and resistance and attachments and preferences, to what I knew was a trustworthy compass, guiding my life into its next perfect season.

In this year of leaning in, I’ve seen that listening and courageously responding to the tides of change—dutifully following what guides us, making of ourselves an irresistible target for Grace—does not mean life suddenly gets easy or manageable or uncomplicated!

Saying yes to more love and more life usually means also saying yes to more mess and more tests of faith and patience; it usually means more ways Life gets to stretch our hearts wider open, simply for Love to have its way with us.

For many months we have been navigating a harrowing personal situation tenderly impacting the heart of our home and union. We have all been fiercely worked at the very edge of our soul growth, challenged to rapidly and continuously evolve, to keep opening to love in the face of these painfully tricky tests and trials Life has asked us to meet.

Crisis has such a way of showing us what we are made of, right? Through leaning in again and again, (as opposed to running as fast as we could for the nearest exit!) we have both been invited into newfound reservoirs of honesty, clarity and compassion for us all.

I’m being poetic, and intentionally vague for the sake of privacy, but my point is~ true relationship is incredibly hard work, on purpose! If we let it, it can’t help but fiercely awaken and humble us in just the ways our souls most desire.

In rising to the occasion of what our union has invited us to embrace, we are rewarded by a love that is as strong, committed, resilient and resourceful as it is breathtakingly true to the truth.

Every opportunity to deepen in self-awareness, to be kinder to ourselves and one another, and true to Love~ is nothing less than a precious gift. And what an astounding beauty to find myself with a partner who not only knows this, but beckons and models this with inspiring consistency.

The older and wiser and more humbled I have become, I’ve come to recognize that my greatest challenge and steepest assignment in this lifetime is leaning all the way in to Love.

Surrendering to this Love that I am—it’s truly all I want, what I love most of all, what I live for. And yet to really, completely lean in to this ruthless inclusivity of love and life, to say YES to it all, just as it is? This is utterly annihilating.

I don’t mean just this romantic, relational love; though, yes, love in all its true forms is annihilating. But what I mean is that this deep, vast, impersonal, essentially un-nameable truth of our beings, to which I’m fondly referring here as Love, wants to claim us and our entire lives so profoundly, leaving nothing but LOVE in its wake! In my perception, the greatest task of union is to provide us with an exquisitely annihilating, everyday opportunity to lean in to this Love we are.

Beloved, thank you. Thank you for leaning into love with me, and for letting our union be devoted to this Great Love to which it all surrenders, returns and belongs.

Thank you for meeting me in the immediacy and depth of our original YES, and for the courage of your continuous yes to me, to us, to our family and all our life together entails`~ from the most gorgeously delicious to the most tedious, trying and at times terrible!

Thank you for stretching wider open to this love with yourself; for the wisdom of self-compassion and self-responsibility you align with again and again. It’s super HOT! 😉 Thank you for your exceptional patience with me, your startling goodness, your extraordinary innocence, your quiet brilliance, your stunning devotion. Gosh.

You inspire me, delight me, crack me up and turn me on in so many ways. Thank you for pushing me up against the wall and for lifting me up in your strong arms to find the dark chocolate you’ve hidden in the highest cupboards! Oh, my.

Thank you for the way you challenge me to trust love more, to love life more, to continuously open to the lotus blooming majestically from muddy waters.

This incomparable way you have my back so I can bring my truest medicine to the world arrives like a long-awaited wind beneath my wings. You make me want to blossom eternally, to give everything to Love’s grace, because I want you to have the very best woman Love could bring you.

I treasure our magnificent life, our precious family, our holy union. I’m so blessed by your love. And I surrender. <3