Steadfast Love

My husband, Rob, and I recently visited Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks for our wedding anniversary. How does one condense such a diverse experience into a single blog? I guess it’s a lot like trying to fit twenty-three years’ worth of marriage sentiments into a single card.

Or trying to live inside a single log.

Marriage is an eye-opening experience.

It requires two sets of very different eyes.

And seeds of love:

One plucked from each heart.

The seeds grow,

mature

and make more seeds

so that even if an interloper tries to steal the seeds—

tries to consume the love—it doesn’t work.

Because love hangs on.

Love knows how to go through dry periods.

How to cling to its foundation through all sorts of weather.

Until it is full and lush again

undeterred by any scars. That’s just the way steadfast love is.

Photos © Sondra Sula.

If you like these blogs, you’ll most likely enjoy my daily devotional book, Meditations on Mendocino by Sondra Sula. Available on Amazon in paperback or Kindle versions.

A Walk in the Park

My husband and I decided to take a walk in the park for our twentieth anniversary—Yosemite National Park.

I felt so small next to trees soaring hundreds of feet into the air, and exploring the knots and holes of gargantuan fallen trunks, worn smooth with years of exposure to the elements.

Even places intended specifically for stopping and resting seemed massive. We took a break from hiking and viewed a dry riverbed from a stone couch that could comfortably seat ten adults. I felt a bit like the bonsai-style tree I saw growing from a crack in a wide expanse of rock: tiny and old.

And yet when I came to a river or lake, I felt renewed, supple again. Every giant rocky dome, boulder and pebble was succumbing to, and being shaped by, seemingly innocuous water. Could my earnest prayers slowly wear down the solid bulk of hatred gaining momentum in our society? Could the spirit within me continue to blow so steadily as to reshape attitudes, much like the Sierra Nevada winds were reshaping trees?

Perhaps I am only a minuscule part of the whole, but I can do my work: creating a fertile place where trees can grow on bare rock, allowing them to rise toward the heavens.

All photos © Sondra Sula.