 |
I sometimes upload pictures to Flickr. But I'm not shooting as much as I'd like to lately. |
|
...a soaring melody, an inscrutable, whimsical lyric, and so much musical imagination that it almost can't be contained inside the song. I adore this man.
— January 8, 2005 |
|
When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something has suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful.
— Barbara Bloom
You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself. — Alan Alda |
|
I can be reached at romanlily ~at~gmail.com. Or you can join the notify list here. |
|
 |
|
|
|
December 27, 2005
The judge's chambers
...I have made a life out of trying to please other people. I have believed and followed and subjected myself to endless guilt.
I have not exercised creativity in my definitions of myself.
I have chosen to make myself quiet and small and dependent.
...The thing is that the world is open to me now. The thing is that I can be any way I want to be. This is frightening, at least at first. I want to chain the furniture down, keep it from sliding off the edge of the world...
What I want is to be able to take care of myself. I would like to ask myself more questions. I would like to be more imaginative.
I would like to practice the thought of my own intuition being a sacred force. Maybe that's what's bubbling up here. My own intuition and self-knowledge, finally asking to be heard.
I would like to practice being myself.
— from my journal, December 2004
Pistol permits and marriage licenses are what's available in the basement of the Decatur city courthouse. My first trip to the courthouse was in 1999, to apply for a marriage license with Tom. My second trip was on Wednesday, to appear for my divorce hearing in the judge's chambers. Tom wasn't with me this time.
I walked outside after the hearing was over. The judge had signed the paper that I now carried with me down the sidewalk. The judge was terribly well-educated, with seals and diplomas and certificates on display in frames all over the chambers. I had watched his hand pick up the pen and sign his name.
He signed my divorce into law and then enclosed my cold hand in his warm hands and wished me good luck. It was a brief, respectful, quiet meeting.
Outside, I hugged my lawyer goodbye and walked back to my apartment. I hadn't been sure what to expect on this sunstruck walk back to the apartment. Freshly divorced.
As I walked, there was the sound of commerce. The jackhammers down the street working on new construction. Birds trading stories from their perches on their wires. There was cold sunlight over all of it.
I felt a lightness. Not because I was "rid" of Tom. There was no dark sense of relief relating to him. Instead, there was a very clear sense that this had been my choice. I had made this choice, and I was going to be okay.
(Even now, writing this journal entry, I hear myself trying to justify things for you, my readers.)
On the sidewalk, I thought again of the line from the Death Cab for Cutie song: This is fact not fiction / For the first time in years.
This thing that I dreaded happened. It happened, and I lived to tell about it. I became the thing that I once despised. But here, on the other side, I didn't hate what I had become.
Self-compassion is surprisingly hard to exercise in my own life. When I hear it spoken of by poets and spiritual folks, part of me still recoils. Self-flagellation is cooler (along with irony and sarcasm). Cruelty is flashier than gentleness; it has a marketable hardness. If it's aggressive, it's probably easy to understand and easy to enforce. But exercising self-compassion is a mighty work and a tremendous struggle.
It probably will be for me for a long time. I go through long periods where I'm pretty sure I don't deserve it, from myself or from anyone. (I once had a boss, a strict Calvinist, who drilled this thought into me as frequently as he could. Once, during a lighthearted conversation about some pleasurable weekend adventure, I told him that I felt guilty for how much I enjoyed myself. "Good," he said. "You should feel guilty. You are guilty." There he was, springboarding from my weekend adventure straight into the depravity of man. He was completely serious.)
Lalah and Beth came over in the evening after the hearing. We lit some candles and they listened to the reflections I had written. Lalah said she still heard a lack of forgiveness for myself in the words I said. (She said this very gently, in the most loving way.)
I won't say that I made a mistake. The marriage was not a mistake. Not at all. It was a very rich and beautiful passage, and worthy of all the grieving I have gone through. I loved this man, and will continue to.
I suppose the issue is that I didn't know how to live with the person I was becoming in the marriage. I had folded myself into as small and light a package as I could, and I could not fold any more. I was coming apart. I didn't know how to stay present in the marriage when the person I was was ripping at the seams.
When she came over, Lalah brought twenty-five yellow roses and a bar of chocolate. I cried for a long time, and then ate some chocolate.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
