Looking into Marriage

When I close my eyes: the outline of steeples, radiant neon against the black night of outer space. Opening, his eyes, steeples tucked deep in mossy green landscape. I look, finally, completely, because I have been invited. Together we lay, we look, we want to see, we choose ourselves, and for the first time, we choose each other. Our child sleeps fifty feet away.

In the beginning, we meet but we do not meet. We look but we do not look. We just want what we want and so. We make vows. We conceive. We birth and dwell and tend. We do not look.

This weekend a voice says, “Now turn to your partner and maintain eye contact. We will set the timer for five minutes. This will be terrifying for some of you.” I think to myself, Uh oh, breaking the rules. I turn my head and allow lashes to lift the curtain. True, it’s hard to look. There he is: new dawn, new day, new universe, this man I call my husband.

Over the hills of all the not-seeing, we look. And that’s enough.

Waves from that fire spread through the belly. Waves wash over quivering limbs, move through fields of nerve fiber, carried by rivers of blood. From the heart, a burning light, and we laugh; we can’t hold back the force of all the withholding, and we laugh. Laughter spills to tears.

The voice says, “Ok, if you have it in you, keep looking. This is a face that one day you will never see again.”

The waves pull back to sea, am I am pulled. I am leaving, returning to the night, and he recedes from view. Suddenly, I see owl, hawk, and wolf, looking out at me from his eyes. I see his people: Portugese, Spanish, Mexican elders. They bid me farewell and I turn quickly to avert death.

In an instant, through layers and years of anger, I encounter a grief so deep that it takes me back to the beginning. In the beginning, a spark of hope. I remember an impulse to love.

He looks at me still. Shades of light move in his eyes, passing clouds. A smile forms across his face, slow to find, full of heartache. Willing.

I do not know where I am in relationship. I do not know where I am. And by this truth, I begin to feel myself, in the wind, connected by blood and bone, solid yet hidden. So many years running on a beach, building bon fires, tracing SOS in the sand till my fingers were raw. Here I am. Find me. Save me. But now, I sit down. Right where I am. I forget about the elaborate stories, everything I have told myself about myself and about this man, and I sit quietly.

The voice says, “This is not about feeling better. That’s not love. Intimacy takes you to your knees. And your partner lets you stay there. That’s love.”

He continues, “My parents have been married for sixty-three years. I have taught about marriage for thirty. But it’s all I can do to sit across from them on the couch. They hold hands and discuss their burial wishes. I’m finally able to sit with them without having to say something……What are they going to do? What am I going to do without them?”

Walking back and forth, fifty married couples in silence, “That’s the thing. Marriage is devastating. It’s fierce. If you let it, if you allow yourself to desire, to want at all, it will kill you. And it’s supposed to. The real question: will you let it?”

My meditation teacher once said that the greatest act of love is when the ego allows itself to be transformed. Sounds romantic, doesn't it?

So I walk the streets today, unstable, coordinates all up in the air, nothing clear. But true. Uncomfortable. True. Willing to look.