You live, you learn. You go through relationship after relationship, or you burn through a few. Now you're 44. You're committed. To self. To her. To them. You're blending. You're working. Mind, body, breath, and self-reflection. But still you can get so tired. Where is the Eden? Where is the reprise?
My partner and I--we'll call her Liv--are two middle-aged adults on a conscious path. We read about the path, we go to the workshops, to therapy. We practice yoga. We get it. Life=path. See God in every mundane act. The dishes, the laundry, the endless stream of tasks and duties. The complications. The conflict. Mindfulness. Yep. Sure. We get it.
But God-Be-Damned it can be so hard. After all this growth and growing. The tension. The subtle nuances of tone of voice and not-so-hidden agendas. The needs. The unmet needs.
And the children, their doing their own growing. Sprouting through the undergrowth despite our fears and our attempts to hold on. She's got two, I've got one. We're blending. It's a blender. It's a casserole. It's one of the hardest things I've ever done.
Neither Liv or I went into this with our eyes closed. We knew it would be hard. We both had been through the relationship wringer enough to know what it was. Relationships are hard. You hear it all the time. And by the time you get to this point in the road--three kids on the verge of adolescence with three distinct personalities--you're in it all the way up to your armpits.
So here I am. Here we are. I'm not going to say that neither one of us don't think about what it would be like to be single again. But that grass-is-greener mentality is a habit we've largely done away with. The grass needs mowing on our side of the fence, and we're going to mow it! It might have been four weeks and look like a wild prairie, but we'll get to it. That's how we roll. That's the commitment we've made. Clutter, projects, creativity. Love. There's something in us that wouldn't have it any other way.
And what is that thing inside of us that would choose all this? Tonight at dinner, the younger of her two--Jason, an energy ball of eight year old precocity--shouted the old Jewish toast "L'chaim!" at dinner. To Life! (he is one-half Jewish). It really made me think. Wow, it's been here all along. In every culture, at every time. In the light of such suffering, we praise Life. We all do it. We all want it: Life. We all wouldn't have it any other way. There is something in all of us, in all of life. It's the original impulse; To live and to experience life. No matter what the circumstances, we keep going, seeking out one another. Waking up to the wholeness that is Life. Nothing can be left out of Life. Life is everything in it. It is the energy that lives in us and it is the wakeful heart that seeks it out in fullness. Yes, suffering. But still the impulse is there.
Today is my first blog entry. It is this impulse to life that I want to explore and celebrate in this blog. I want to explore the depths, and cross the divide. We are filled with so much self-doubt. Life is full of suffering and challenges so profound they would steal the life from us, could they. And we live in a world that codifies, institutionalizes, and pathologizes our suffering and life-challenges with 'mental illness' on one side and dismisses them with a 'don't worry, be happy' approach on the other. In the middle is the impulse to life in the face of what is. The simple, natural impulse to live and explore life; to live on it's juices, sweet and bitter. I want to leave you with a passage from Tony Kushner's 'Angels in America' that epitomizes this sentiment to life in the face of death and certain suffering. We live past hope indeed...
"I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life."
Me too............
+The Lock
