A fire within
As the evening light wanes and indigo fills the heavens outside the glass, I watch the black silhouettes of doves flying to roost in the pines along our drive. I spent part of the day pushing furniture around in my studio, and the space feels freer. With my desk in a new corner, I can see both windows and the door, and feel snug with my chin resting on my knee as I type, trying like I always do to stretch the minutes out between interruptions to be long enough for me to get to the core of something that matters, and to put it on the page.
The past few days have been filled with the kind of conversations that make my heart quaver. Hard conversations, because we’re at the very brink of things, teetering and uncertain of us, of our direction, of anything. The wide expanse of possibility stretches out before us like a vast canyon and we’re on uneven footing right at the edge.
Here at the brink, I am still fiercely holding on to the hand of the man I love. Yet I am also threatening to leap, because I cannot settle for just enough, and this is what our life has become. The pressure of living here with what we have, and what we are, has crept up like kudzu, and filled the wildness of our days with mediocrity. I’m not content with just surviving, with making ends meet, with each day starting where the last left off, simply subsisting, and the fact that many of our days have become this is why we find ourselves here at the edge of our love, our hearts thudding in our throats.
There is something wild, and fragile, and breathtaking in me, like a field of irises; something unstoppable, like the innate sense that leads the salmon upstream through rapids and turbines to the sweetwater scent of its origins. Something that tells me that life is meant to be lived voraciously, not spent. It is a restless yearning to grow, a longing so intense it wrecks havoc when things become static in my life.
I keep trying to imagine us together in a different way than we are now. A way that is more awake, more whole, more passionate. I imagine a life with more intention and clarity, because right now I see how our existence has dulled and also, I see how the fire in his eyes has dwindled as the pressures of finances and differed dreams have risen up. There is a promethean part in me that will run the risk of being burned in order to return it to his eyes. Even if this means loosing him in the end.
So over the past few days, interwoven with moments of sheer delight—sledding pell-mell downhill with Bean in our backyard after snow fell all day, sipping cider with it’s heady scent filling a warm house, or pressing our lips together tenderly in the dark—we’ve been having hard conversations. Conversations that make us weep and beg and sometimes, gratefully, laugh. Conversations that tear through our souls like a wildfire, and leave us exposed to the quick.
I keep thinking about how the greenest grass always springs up after the forest is charred and I want to believe that this is what will happen as we talk. Yet coming back to this stuff day after day feels awful and pathetic and humbling. And also, it is a bit like digging up the awesome skeleton of a tyrannosaurs-rex with a teaspoon, such fragile work, so much to be found and had, yet so much to loose without careful, diligent, stubborn effort.
“I want to make you happy,” he says, with a tight expression spreading out about his lips that makes him look, almost, as though he is wearing a smiling mask over an expression of absolute grief. He’s said this many times before.
I turn away, my chest tightening. Then I try to explain something I know to be true: something that is indelible like a birthmark on my soul—how one cannot make another person happy, and also, that if one is barren and desolate inside, one cannot give any joy away.
“Don’t,” I beg. “Make yourself happy instead.”
He looks put off.
I try to explain how I am: how the superficial masks people usually put on for each other each day are mostly transparent to me, and how I’ve always been that girl who can walk into a room of almost strangers, and pick up within seconds the deeper vibration of their hearts, despite what they might be saying to each other. I try to make him understand how this sensitivity I have like the sixth sense of a water dowser, makes it impossible for me to go along with his motions of happiness, his tight smiles, his constant banter, the jokes, the stupid songs, because below this I feel the desolation of his creative self—something I can tell he is hardly aware of, yet is reacting to, like an animal, always on the defensive, and ready to attack.
“I want you to understand that putting me first, putting your family first, your son first, your work first, you are routinely robbing yourself of something vital to you, and to us.” I say pleading, my voice soft and low.
“It’s like this,” I say. “Picture a tin cup. If it has a leak in it, even if it is being filled, it will never be full enough to overflow.” I pause and watch his face, turned towards mine, brows furrowed, still angry, still confused.
“Even though the cup may hold some water,” I start in again, “Enough to drink from and to survive, it cannot hold enough to give any away. But if the cup is whole and being regularly filled it overflows with abundance.”
I can tell by his expression that on some level this makes sense to him, but that he has no idea how to translate this into anything meaningful for his life, and this is where I come up short. I don’t know how to beg him to be selfish, to pursue the bugle calling of his soul, to plan for and to fight for the wildest and most impossible things that he can dream. I don’t know how to make him understand that when we’re both growing, no matter how hard our daily life gets, deep happiness will burble up like an unexpected spring, and that I’ll go with him anywhere if he’s striving for something that truly matters to his soul.
Often, I’ve been accused of being selfish. I am someone who needs vast amounts of time spent alone and creatively in order to be whole. I am also intensely driven and I grew up in a family of seekers. Both my parents asked difficult questions of themselves, and grappled with their ever-changing understanding of the role of human incarnation across the arc of life. Both parents strove to grow spiritually, and to be whole, and my mother continues on this quest, doggedly and with mindfulness, now that my father is dead.
So this in some way is my model: that as human beings, we are called to grow, and that we must, lest the landscape of our soul becomes vacant and sterile. My model couldn’t be more opposite from his.
A family of traditional Italians, they eat and laugh, and when they fight it is behind closed doors and no one is allowed to ever speak of it again. They are a family without a lexicon to make meaning from loss or grief. Anger takes the place subtler emotions, and the palette used to describe life-altering events is starkly black and white. Things are either good or bad, and happiness has somehow become synonymous with many external things: good food and company, and also pretty clothes, new cars, career success. Hence, in some incomplete way his model has been this: that as human beings, we should strive for success by making money and enjoying a good life marked by the acquisition of external things.
In our conversations we’re meeting on this slender ledge, and trying to turn the language that we know into a tightrope so that we can cross into the territory of our souls that has no capacity to be named. We’re trying to take the blueprints that defined our childhood longing, and re-designate their boundaries from this different vantage point of love. We’re trying to dream together, something new and different. But this is difficult and painful because always, there is the chance that we’ll end up falling, and without the right words or the right maps, we might fail to reach out fast enough to break the other’s fall.
The way I operate, Thoughts & observations | Comments (20)