create. resist. arise. love.

I have these three prints on my wall. Along with an illustration of an animal they say: Create. (Peacock.) Resist. (Porcupine.) Arise. (Owl with outspread wings.)

I think about these three verbs, these three commands or invitations or actions, often, and often I think of them as a cycle. Create. Resist. Arise.

Today I’m thinking of them in terms of love. Which is not, as some magazines would have us believe, a singular act. To love someone is a process. It is a process which, like most processes do, involves cycles. Create. Resist. Arise.

We create love, mostly unconsciously. Certainly we choose it, choose to act on the feeling and create relationship, which is a way of saying we create the conditions for the process of love to occur.

And we resist. Oh, we resist. Love is scary. Love holds a mirror up to us and we see ourselves. Love makes us risk and reveal, and most often we don’t like it one bit. So we resist. We push back, we retreat, we run, we do anything we can to save ourselves from this thing that we created.

But then, if we stick with it, if we move into and through that resistance, we arise. We rise in love. We become brighter, stronger, more honest, more daring, more grounded, more capable of and in the process of love.

Which creates again in us what we call love. And so the cycle begins again -- and not in a terrible, frustrating way, though often it can feel terrible and frustrating to be in resistance again, but we know at the end of it is rising. And creation.

As a people outside of relationships, as friends of people in love, we tend to witness a lot of resistance. Which makes sense; the creation is private. The arising is intimate. The struggle is real, and often requires wine or crying or both.

So often the arising disappears so quickly into the creation, we can barely catch sight of it, let alone share it with others. It’s often momentary, bright, a lifting and flare that catalyzes the everyday acts of creation that make up living in love. And that’s not generally what we call home about, or bring to our friends to drink over and through.

And this is why I think we have weddings. Weddings are the chance for those who love these people who love each other so much, to be part of the creation of something new. A public, sanctified union. And at the same time, to witness an arising.

What a blessed ritual it can be, if we let it. If we don’t get caught up in the distraction of the flowers not being the right level of blooming or the caterer serving the wrong temperature steak, our uncomfortable shoes or the cantankerous uncle complaining about the heat.

Being together. Witnessing creation, witnessing arising. Witnessing love as a process with no edges, no beginning, no ending, only expansiveness and all the now that now can hold.

Create. Resist. Arise. Amen. Blessed be.