Life, Unfolding

Walker and I find ourselves in a poignant and rich time in our lives. Having been married for 26 years (as of Groundhog’s Day,) we clearly qualify as veterans. We have also, over those years, developed habitual ways of relating to each other. Our solid foundation of love is weakened by accommodations that have given us each much of what we want, while also sowing the seeds of resentment.

For example, I have gone away for business travel a lot over the past decades. While I do much less business travel now than previously, there’s a significant cost to Walker when I go away. And, I’ve been able to bring home sufficient resources to enable her to be very creative and generative in building many beautiful spaces and a thriving retreat center.

On the flip side, she is always building something! (I’m over it, having got it permanently out of my system fifteen years ago!) There is significant cost to me in stress, expenses, and chaos. Yet, those projects have clearly benefited me in the lovely place that we call home, the building of equity, and validating my identity as a bread-winner.

Both of us have gotten some of what we want from this tacit arrangement; our attachments are being taken care of. And, there are sacred cows on both sides of the marriage that have often seemed undiscussable. In the midst of our astoundingly generative lives, there has been a certain stagnation, an underlying structure of role configurations that sometimes feels restrictive and stifling to both of us.

In the middle of this, Walker’s bizarre symptomology got very intense. A cure has not yet been discovered, and we have found ourselves in a full-blown health and spiritual crisis. It became rapidly clear that we could not take anything for granted.

Stress exacerbates her symptoms, sometimes to nightmarish proportions, and she’s less able to manage all the minutiae of her business. I’ve cancelled or postponed a number of significant things that were important to me in order to be a solid landing place for her. Both of us are letting go of things that have been part and parcel of long held identities. She’s let me in more, and we have become closer than in years.

The circumstance has clarified what is important. In the context of crisis, we’ve become more honest with each other. Previously undiscussable topics are on the table. We are actively considering the possibility of a major lifestyle change, looking for a house in town, and talking with others about doing the day-to-day management of the retreat center while Walker still has overall responsibility. We’re taking an Artist’s Way class together, spending time in Walker’s art studio doing encaustic painting on tiles, hanging out with baby goats and our grandson, eating bison chili, and consciously creating fun with each other.

The very nature of our adversity, while clearly still very difficult, is also loosening the slow ossification of patterns in our marriage. It’s our sense that something new is emerging, a new chapter. We don’t know what it is yet, but we are listening, taking new actions, having fresh conversations, paying attention. We are grateful.

• What habits are you stuck in? What do you get out of the pattern? How does it limit you?
• What benefit to this pattern could you really let go of? What would emerge if you did?
• What is calling you now?