Royal Purple
The flowers at my wedding were dusty lavender roses. I loved their deep, subtle understated color, almost looking slightly wilted, slightly wild, at the edges. They looked like they knew something old and important but didn’t feel pressured to tell the rest of the world. They looked like what it is to be something effortlessly breathtaking.
Like the Sufi teachers next to the waterfall in Maui who told me to stop focusing on what I was supposed to do, and instead focus on the “being” part of how I walk in this world. They looked like primordial wisdom.
When I walked down the aisle holding them in two sweaty palms, they felt like a grandmother holding my hand, who knew I needed them and needed her and would need her even more very soon. I loved those roses even as the next few years passed and the petals dried and dropped alongside the shaky foundation of my marriage.
“I have to tell you something that happened today.” My friend called me on her way home from an energy healing session. She told me how the healer had been working on her and told her she was seeing strong swirls of purple and had told her she thought it had something to do with a person who was a pillar in her life. “It was you. I knew right away it was you,” she said. This friend is my biggest fan.
In almost every conversation we have she, in some way, tells me I am the most connected, self-actualized person she knows. I smile each time and my heart opens wider at the same time that I am wondering if I have tricked her somehow. I don’t fully take it in. I tell her I am not doing enough in the world. She will tell me I am being the most important thing you can be. Like the Sufi teachers are standing behind her, whispering their message to me into her ear.
The man from the dating app that I am meeting for the first time in person comes walking around the corner of the café wearing a purple t-shirt. He is effortlessly breathtaking and I will forcefully remind myself over and over again that a purple t-shirt is not a “sign” of anything.
But he listens to me intently and with passionate curiosity. He looks at me like he is seeing royalty in person for the first time in his life. Later he will kiss me cautiously and tenderly on a sandy, slanted boulder we are having a hard time getting comfortable on. Sitting in front of the sea wall at the beach he apologizes for his coffee breath and then kisses me again. Even later that day he will sleep in his car in my driveway because he’s driven almost two hours to see me and wants to see me first thing in the morning. He doesn’t ask if he can do this. I just walk out of my house the next day and see him sitting on the hood of his car.
Years later, purple-shirt-man long gone, my friends and I will still argue about whether or not the driveway sleepover was romantic or frightening. I hold firm to John Cusack being the only man who could have made it romantic. But he has still imprinted on me what it feels like to have someone soak up every word I am saying like it is the most wonderful thing they have ever heard, and my tolerance for how long I will sit at a tiny café table and listen to a man talk only about himself has never been the same after him.
Last week I found a dusty lavender, linen skirt at the thrift store. It was $7.99 and fits like it was sewn right onto me. My daughter was with me when I found it and as soon as I held it up she said, “Mama, that skirt is yours!” It is effortless. Beautiful. Made in a way that flirts with all my curves and still lets me run across the burnt grass in the small soccer field behind our house. That still lets me kneel down to cut the purple-blue chicory flowers that grow abundantly on the sides of the blocked off road in the back of our city neighborhood. The short, crumbling blacktop strip that we call the super-secret-wildflower-path. The place where the plant's steady reclamation of the pavement reminds us what happens when we are allowed to just “be.”
In that dusty lavender skirt– with dirty feet, leftover tulsi flower buds scattered in my hair, wiping blueberry juice from sun kissed cheeks, I am royalty.
