A Man in Need

There is a whole catalog of emotion that opens to me as my marriage is slowly ending, now that I have given myself permission to seek joy.  For someone who has learned to compartmentalize as a means of living with the many things that rattle about in my heart and head, this is a particularly unsettling time. 

Add to this the full weight of that great harvest moon, here at the tipping point from light to dark and whatever lies beyond, and the fact that today is (still) my 15th wedding anniversary and we still live under the same roof, and I find myself especially pensive and disquieted.

I tell myself with my rational mind that this is not the time to go howling with the Wild Hunt, to lose myself in the primal and ferocious. This is not the time for a man in need to play ninepins in the mountains.

"We must not look at goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits:

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry thirsty roots?"

Neither can I teeter overlong on the fulcrum of the year, balanced between my old life and the new.  My feet spin in empty space.  I feel the bones of the Earth and resist the instinct to hole up in my den.  You can't resist the season's change, though, and you can't be a floating island untethered to the bed of the sea.

I want to turn my prow into the current, dip my blade into the bright water and shoot through the flume and around the bend.  I want to learn to savor these last, lingering months and moments when I have a foot in both worlds.  To get where everything leads means letting go of one life and reaching towards another.  Some of what is precious to me will remain, but not as it was, not unchanged.  Some that I yearn for waits for me there, in that place of silver linings and the stuff of dreams made real by faith and love. 

And for all that is beyond the scope of my power to alter or command, I am not without the means to steer nor the vision to realize what must be, in time, the result of all this transition.  My marriage will end.  My dreams will take new form, in grief and hope and joy.  I will watch the splendid procession of colors at the dying of the year, feel the glowing heart of winter as the stars erupt in frost and fire.  I will inhale air so cold it freezes in my nostrils and coats my beard with ice. 

And Spring will come, as it always does, and with it renewal, and new life.  And I will dance in the center of the wheel as it carries me forward.

Comments

[Bill West]

Damn it,Tim! I so want to write like you when I grow up.

[Matt McKeon]

Er...you are going to start dating again?

[Marcia Dresner]

Beautiful statement that resonated with me and should resonate with anyone that is facing life during and after life-altering change. Thank you for sharing!