love and marriage goes together like a horse and carraige

Tomorrow, March 9th, it will be four years since I married Bob. We got married on Jones Bay Wharf on a Sunny (not so much today) Sydney Sunday evening. It was lovely.
Geez, I love this guy.
Bob, you are the sweetest, most kind-hearted soul I know. You have a big heart and a genius mind and I want to be like you when I grow up.

Here is a poem I wrote him a couple years ago. Our friend (Nate) printed it for us in his ridiculously beautiful penmanship, and it hangs on our bedroom wall. Nate's wife (Jaynie) says that the most important thing about love is staying in love. And I quite agree. I think love matters and means the most when it's boring and mundane but remains.

Enjoy.

***

something for love

and every day I am happy to be with you, my dear
sitting opposite each other sipping coffee
waking up to you
saying goodnight to you
dreaming as I lay next to you
driving in the car with you
solving our problems
one ride at a time

and you, my dear,
will never go away
and I will never go away
and we will be the same two lovers
song-birds even
singing our songs of hope

it will never end
and we will go on singing
until we finally arrive where we are heading…
home.


© 2011 Lauren Stamper

cosmos in chaos

My silence is no reflection of some still calm ordered existence right now. I'm quite the mess, and honestly, my head and heart haven't been this full of emotion-I-could-burst for quite some time. All around me is the juxtaposition of cosmos and chaos. Order and Insanity. Beginnings and Endings. Love and loss. I know I say this often, but it's more true to me everyday: life is everything all at once. And I am full.

It seems the people I love most (those special special ones who make up my insides) seem to be either fighting grown up battles no grown up should have to fight, or living the best years of their lives...(giving birth to perfect little babies planning weddings and other sweet excetera's ...) And some are doing it all at once. It's a constant roller coaster - the highs and lows of the human heart and existence. Sometimes, just sometimes, life will throw a bone and hand you one 'thing' at time, but right now it's all of it and it's all happening now. And my heart is full for the ones I love.

The longer I live the more I believe that nothing is more important than the people you love. Nothing has more access to the heart and soul than another human heart, and, over the course of your life, if you are brave enough to let even just one person in, you'll have to grow a big heart and wide arms... because life is messy and grey. You must be able to take deep breaths, call on divine strength and realize that there is nothing more rewarding and fulfilling than keeping a tight grip on someone's hand and pulling them through the fire.

It's amazing what kicks in when the chips are down and you have to survive. Even if we're all just hanging on by a thread.

to the sea (part one)

A few days ago my husband released a single on iTunes. It's a song called "To The Sea." And, just like it's author, it's beautiful.

He wrote it about us. About a boy and a girl who meet, fall in love, follow each other to different parts of the world and find themselves mostly nesting beside the sea. The two of us have actually followed each other to lots of different places. The glamourous and the not so glamourous. We met in a small country town, moved and married amongst the beaches of Sydney, hopped on a plane a few months after we said "I do" to LA, jumped on a tour bus, slept from hotel to hotel, moved to the stunning ocean hills of Malibu California (with our besties), ended up in an apartment in Santa Monica, lugged our stuff back to the city of Indianapolis, and now here we are: back to Sydney living in a borrowed house driving a borrowed car. Oh dear. Try to explain and define love? I don't think so.

I think maybe love is a bit like the sea... the constant ebb and flow, the calm, the chaos, the divine, the earth. It's everything and one thing all at once.
I don't know much about love, but I know this... no one wants to be alone. Love is about not feeling alone.

One of my all time favourite songs is by one of our fave bands called Dawes. It's called, 'A Little Bit of Everything,' and one line sums it all up magnificently. "I think that love is so much easier than you realize. If you can give yourself to someone then you should."

And while I'm on my song kick, also download "I'll follow You" by Jon McLaughlin. Talk about a love song. I probably didn't even need to write this blog. I could have just put a link to that song - it says it all.

Good night x

the world

I was thinking of this beautiful Blacklist Studio print (www.blackliststudio.com, by the way) this week and started pondering the big wide world we live in. The world is so full. It's one big beautiful mess of people, places, lunches, dinners, boyfriends, girlfriends, heartache, happiness, hope and a lot of hopelessness.

It's everything all at once.

Life is a bit like that sometimes - the world seems to be on your side one day, and the next day you pick up the phone and all of a sudden you're in a situation you wish you would wake up from ... the next moment your best friend makes you laugh through your broken-hearted tears.

It's everything all at once.

And sometimes amidst it all, pieces of yourself get lost along the way - the world can drain the life out of you and you have to remember who you are. Don't lose what's real about you. Hold onto the stuff that brings you joy, be able to take walks alone, find a best friend who is a better person than you, and if you can find someone to give yourself to then you should (I took that last line from one of my favourite songs- more about that later).

That's the kind of stuff that life can try to take from you if you let her. So while the world is a big and deep place (but getting smaller and more shallow) hold on to the real you.

Don't let the wrong things and people about the world define you.

love and misses

some love and some loss

In 2003 I moved to the USA. To cut a long story short I ended up studying Literature in college over there (in one of those classrooms where I would one day sit down next to the guy I would end up marrying). During this time I learned how to write. I fell in love with it. I realized how much I had to say and how I could create whatever I wanted to with words. Words are the most wonderfully powerful and magical little creations we have. The stuff we say and the stuff we write can (for better or worse) change lives, and change the world.

The poem below is about love and loss. Everyone in the world has lost something.

No matter what the journey has been like for you, me, the person next to you, or the person sitting across from you - we all know loss. It's a part of life that puts us all on the same page. We all understand what it's like to miss someone or something, and how sometimes when you lose that irreplaceable person, place or thing, you lose a little piece of yourself in the meanwhile. This poem talks about that.

A lament (part one)

When you went away
a piece of me died too.
And I miss you:

Not like a favourite TV show that went off the air in the nineties,
or an old song I used to listen to on cassette in high school and can't find anywhere.
Not like cheap petrol prices
or when everyone was fine with tap water.

But more like a piece of the land (Home) burned away by the Fire,
or like grandmother's mother's jewels taken one night by thieves dressed in black.
Perhaps like a rib
(my insides).

You, the sweetest one -
Irreplaceable,
Irresistible (to everyone, my dear).

And I'm glad we're all allowed some broken parts,
we all leave here a little messy in the end.
Our pages yellow and rolled up - corners folded in
by everyone.


So now I'm old, grey and soft around the edges.
Too grey for this colourful world.
Too soft for this firm and hard humanity.

And I still miss you so much.