Storm

It rained on my wedding day.

A well-intentioned relative assumed I would be despairing at the idea of it, so she repeatedly sought to comfort me.  I didn't want to thwart her quest because she seemed so important about the whole thing, so I didn't tell her: I love the rain.  I'll take it any day, and the fact that it came on my wedding day was absolute perfection.
It tends to rain on our anniversary almost every year, and I love it.  I think of my wedding day when it gets cloudy outside. 
I curl up on my couch and thread yarn through my fingers... the thunder rumbles and I relax.  Granny square after granny square piles up, and I revel in the myriad of colors -the brightness of the yarn against the grey sky. 
I relax in the storm.

My life lately has been a storm all on it's own.  It's only fitting that the Arizona Monsoons should be in full swing. 
I'm on the brink -the cusp -of really, truly FEELING the truth of who I am. 

My self-worth has always been low, but it's steadily climbing.  I respect myself more than I did last year, ten times more than I did the year before that.  I'm starting to feel the truth.
I am a priceless daughter of an Almighty King.

He knows me.

Satan knows I'm on the brink, and he's been fighting.  He's been waging a war.  I feel as if there's a legion of angels packed tightly around me and a legion of demons packed tightly around THEM. 
This last week has been an absolute battle.

So much stress is on my family right now, so much stress on my husband, my father, my grandfather, my children, and my anxiety is in full swing.  satan has been running rampant, filling my head with lies, doubts, and pollution.
he wants me to believe I'm not worthy of temple attendance, of love, of acceptance.  I'm not strong or valiant or special.  he wants me to doubt my heritage.

he wants to steal my light.

Sometimes, I want to buckle.  Sometimes I just want to sigh and give up.  Just... stop.  But there's a will in me, and it says, "go on."
I bow my head, I brace against the rain, and through tears I push ahead.  I find myself bawling through temple sessions for no other reason than I'm finally SAFE.  satan can not reach me there.

As the storm raged outside my bedroom window yesterday, I pulled yarn through my fingers and I exhaled.
Stormy weather.

I know about stormy weather.  Just before crawling into bed, I pulled my Robert Frost book out and read one of my favorite poems.
My husband doesn't FEEL poetry quite like I feel it.  Words don't reach him like they do me, and I've yet to catch him reading an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel and stopping to gasp and inhale and read sentences out loud to me because they're written so bloody well that they make his heart skip a thumpety-beat.
(Yes, I do that.)
I feel this poem deeply, and I wish there was a "transport feelings button" on me because I want my husband to feel what I feel, to understand the breath and truth of what it means to me.

Frost wrote a poem about loving in the rain.  It seems so Notebooky. 
But "be my love in the rain" is more than a passionate make-out sessions under grey, thundery skies.

It's about devotion.
It's about braving the storm and finding love again and holding fast to it while the weather rages on.

This past week has been an awful, awful storm.  It's easing now, but I wanted to stop and say THANK YOU.  THANK YOU to every single one of you for your sweet, supportive comments on my blog.  Thank you for your emails, your texts, and your prayers.  Thank you.

Never in my life have I had such a strong, devoted support system.  I am blown away at the difference it makes.
And though I'm despairing NOT at the storm and rain but at the fact that there is no such thing as a "Transport Feelings Button"... I will share the poem I've come to cherish so well with you.

A Line-Storm Song

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift,
The road is forlorn all day,
Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,
And the hoof-prints vanish away.
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,
Expend their bloom in vain.
Come over the hills and far with me,
And be my love in the rain.

The birds have less to say for themselves
In the wood-world’s torn despair
Than now these numberless years the elves,
Although they are no less there:
All song of the woods is crushed like some
Wild, easily shattered rose.
Come, be my love in the wet woods; come,
Where the boughs rain when it blows.

There is the gale to urge behind
And bruit our singing down,
And the shallow waters aflutter with wind
From which to gather your gown.
What matter if we go clear to the west,
And come not through dry-shod?
For wilding brooch shall wet your breast
The rain-fresh goldenrod.

Oh, never this whelming east wind swells
But it seems like the sea’s return
To the ancient lands where it left the shells
Before the age of the fern;
And it seems like the time when after doubt
Our love came back amain.
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout
And be my love in the rain.

Robert Frost