Earlier this week, I sat in session with a profoundly wise teacher, Diana Zaheer. (Shout out to

Over Zoom I quickly blurted out all of the “problems” my mind had cataloged, most of them to do with overwhelm and an amorphous fear or sadness that hung out in my peripherals, never letting me look at it square. Was it that my family lives far away, and I miss them? Political anxieties? Work stress? The pressures of planning a wedding, of inevitably disappointing people as we try to stick to our vision?

Diana waited for a pause in my fretful laundry list, and then said: “It sounds like the heart wants your attention.” I initially balked at this. My heart? The problem here is my head, dude! We gotta give my mind some solutions, please. But with her guidance, I was slowly able to sink deeper in myself until I felt my heart. There it was—that low, earthy, sonorous hum. You know what I’m talking about? That deep blue cave of both safety and melt. From this place, we ventured into what it means to be a bride.

With all the wedding industry nonsense stripped away, what are the true energetics of the Bride? Mary Oliver (forever on point) says, “When it's over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement./ I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”

I think amazement is innate to the Bride. Equally innate is being taken in arms, and the awe at feeling oneself surrender joyfully to such a taking, without reservations or exit strategies.

The bridal energy is hopeful, innocent, renewing, light. Aesthetically it knocks you out with its beauty—just like springtime. This prose piece flowed from what I felt in that session: that my path towards marriage is being breathed oh so organically by the season. That in choosing marriage we are choosing to be a part of a larger cycle. That this is the precious season of life in which I have the opportunity to embody the Bride, and my heart wants to be wide awake for it.

Thanks for reading,

Em

The Heart Wants Your Attention

Out in the wet May weather an elm tree stands, leaves elegantly receiving the rain, the whole crown dancing with this dialogue between ground and sky. It was born for this, of course. Trees are intermediaries: catching directives from above, collecting water, making green things, weaving new breath.

A riverine column of starlings bends through the silvered clouds—how joyful it is to move as one with your brothers! They seem to proclaim.

But beyond all personification, the trees and birds simply are.

Perhaps I don’t need to make them into intermediaries, messengers of renewal.

They are renewal, plainly. As is the sweet, hard musk of cold rain turning winter’s dead leaves to black muck.

The tree looks back at me. The gentle turning of each leaf in the rain says, you are this, too. You are renewal.

To be a bride in springtime is to be a struck bell on Easter Sunday. A bear rooting in the osha groves. A nodding cone of lilacs drunk on its own brief perfume. Persephone rousing the dreaming fields. To be a bride in springtime is the most natural thing.

I feel myself dissolving into this, my nature. Our nature. It is true that bride’s have much to do, but it is also not true—the season does it all through me. Makes lists, chooses dresses, gathers flowers. The season wants this. I am part of the cycle—both expanding and melting.

How funny I once feared marriage meant shrinking. Like the snowmelt creek losing its banks, I grow fuller and fuller, rise to kiss the feet of my beloved, dredge up for him the mineral medicine of my rocky depths.

The truth is, I can’t make myself ready. I cannot shine the sun on myself. But I don’t need to.

Something is ripening me. And for this ripening, the heart stands at breathless attention.

Jorie Graham’s workshop on revisions in