Lost ring.

So, I lost my wedding ring a week ago. I slid it off while having my nails done - at the suggestion of the young woman who was massaging lavender scented cream into my hands.It took at least two days to notice it was gone - and even then, once I figured out where it was, instead of running back to the nail salon to retrieve it, I'd ... forget.I'd be dozing off with a book in my hands when OMG! I'd remember, my wedding ring. I'd reach for a scrap of paper and scribble a reminder. I'd leave it where I'd absolutely see it in the morning but then, somehow, I didn't see it.If you were to visit my home, YOU'D have seen it - you couldn't miss it. There were GET WEDDING RING notes in the bathroom, on the bedside table and the kitchen counter. There was one in my purse, one on the dashboard of my car and one, on a sticky note, affixed to the inside of my laptop so that when I opened it, I'd be reminded.And even if you and I BOTH missed all of those clues, the NINE books that I'm reading - every one of them - just happened to mention the words "wedding ring" at least once this week.I do not think it coincidental that all of this is transpiring during a period which my astrologer friends tell me is 'a huge wake-up call for relationships."Nor do not think it coincidental that last night, my beloved and I had one of those 'difficult' conversations in which I 'said things' and he 'said things.'What I think is: it's magnificent. I think it's divine.The 'things we said' were not new things but I am new - and so is he - and so, even though we said all the same things, new things HAD TO happen. Because, as we went through the motions - as I watched myself shift from engaged, relatedness to self-centered jerk, seesawing between the extremes of my own particular personality - I saw new things - and I learned new things.Then, wait, I realized: none of the 'things' we are saying are real. None of them matter. Not really.Sure, I would like a new house. Sure, I would like to go out more as a couple. Sure, he junks up the yard with the things he drags home from construction sites.But this is the same conversation we've been having for years. What I saw last night was that beneath these 'issues' there is love - profound cherishing.Our marriage has been a long and bumpy road and for most of it, I have been secretly (and sometimes, openly) planning to leave this man. He and I talk about this now - this thing that I do - loving, running away. Leaving, coming home.Last night, I witnessed (in the light of this moon of bright truth) that I've been using that leaving/staying question as a smoke screen. If I obsess about that, I won't have to face the real emptiness, the real questions in my life.If I keep packing and unpacking my suitcase, I won't have to unpack the trauma and uncertainty I grew up with, the loneliness and anxiety I still feel when I'm overtired or overwhelmed with work. The voice of wisdom that calls to me in the middle of the night - and my resistance to wake up and fully answer it.The truth is, I'm staying. my heart married my husband the moment we met. I was 18. He, born six months ahead of me, was 19. We made it official eight years later, at 26. It's been thirty years now.And so, this morning, I picked up my wedding ring.This 'huge wake-up call' for relationships feels dicey and uncomfortably real. On one had, it's as if things left simmering too long on the stove have begun blackening the bottom of the cooking pot. This is the stage where damage happens - when all humidity boiled away, the pan itself can crack.At the same time, we cooks are suddenly called to completely reconfigure ourselves: maybe we don't like 'cooking' anymore. Maybe it's time to... I don't know, take up scuba diving... in Japan.For me, how this feels is - I can only express it as, the sudden urgency to completely 'reorganize' my relationships to everything - including myself.There is this sense of a 'limited time offer' here, as well. As if we are invited to access a new and deep thread of wisdom - a sense of certainty about how it all fits together - while the door to the temple is swinging shut. It's all, "Jump now or forever hold your peace!"And I imagine that, as I access that thread, and leap for that door, the people who love me are feeling challenged by that. In the past, this would have concerned me - now, not so much. The thread is what matters and holding on to it - and somehow, to myself.When I make contact with this thread (which feels fresh and living and radical - it feels red and precious and pulsing - I don't want to let go. It feels worth protecting.Luckily, when I DO manage to hold onto it - it reconfigures me - reminding me of the other things worth protecting: this 30-year marriage and this precious man who shows up every day at the dinner table to wrestle with my shifting tides.Rather like the moon.The young woman who'd done my nails had been a good guardian.She seems to have polished my ring (somehow) and wrapped in a tender cocoon of tissue paper. Then, she hid it away at the bottom of the cotton ball jar, which she'd stowed inside another container and hid under her table.So that last week, while I floated in dreamy forgetfulness, my ring, bless that manicurist, had been secured in the Fort Knox of the nail salon.Rather the way that my husband rests at the foundation of my own heart - beneath the 'cotton balls' that insulate us from the day-in and day-out of it all, as we, in turn, insulate one another from the sharp edges of ourselves and of the world.What I hadn't known a week ago, when she'd taken my hands in her own, was that this sweet manicurist was named, you may want to sit down for this, Sophia - the name given to the divine wisdom I've been chasing with all my reading and recalibrating.Rather like moonlight, this wisdom which weaves through the world, ebbing, flowing, mysteriously moving into everything.