I started writing this newsletter over a year ago to process the total disintegration of my life.
Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest and spiritual teacher who is near and dear to my heart, describes life as two halves.
In the first half, we build a strong container for our identity.
We are handed templates for roles to play, and we play them well.
For me, that was the career in tech, a wife, dogs, mortgage, church, and the promise of being a father.
Hell, I even threw in a brand new Honda for good measure.
In the second half of life, Rohr says, our carefully constructed ego container must crack open gradually.
In doing so, we learn to live from our True Self as soulful people dancing with life instead of asserting our will upon it.
He was right, of course.
He just missed the mark on the gradually part.
My container did not crack.
It erupted.
In a single moment that will be burned in my memory forever,
I was set on the path to losing everything.
It started when my wife told me a simple, deep truth about her that made our love inhospitable for her whole self.
The marriage was over.
I tried to go to church shortly thereafter, but I couldn’t force myself through the doors anymore.
A spiritual community that had meant so much to me all of a sudden meant nothing at all. The symbols were hollow, the words were hollow. God was not here.
A life built together is like a rope, bound together thread by thread.
Each shared act, a new thread that joins the others to make the rope stronger and stronger.
As the life together is dismantled, threads start to pull apart.
Shared possessions were next.
Then the dogs. That’s a loss I still can’t describe.
Want to know unconditional love? Get a dog.
I was laid off from my job shortly after I left Dallas.
I saw that one coming from a mile away.
Shit leadership in a field that was dying anyways.
Eventually the mortgage was gone.
Can’t say I was actually sad about that.
Homes can so often own us when we’re not careful.
All of those things you lose?
They’re external manifestations of an energy.
That energy is a bond forged over time, one act at a time.
As much as the loss of those things can devastate,
the much more devastating loss is the moment you realize the energetic bond is gone.
It comes unexpectedly, in the middle of the night.
Its loss wracks your body with sobs because a part of you hoped there was a chance it could be saved.
You remember the moment it dies, but the shockwave doesn’t hit until days later.
It starts as an unexplainable anger that arises for no reason at all,
a wave that crests in an uncontrollable explosion.
And now there’s nothing left of the first half of life.
I did not come to Mexico to see the sights.
I did not come to Mexico to live the glamorous life on the beach.
I came to Mexico to live in an apartment made of thick concrete walls so I could howl unabashedly and not feel the stares of my neighbors the next day.
So I could lose myself in the anonymity of a culture I could only half understand.
So I could be with friends who know the me that is emerging in this second half of life, someone who could only be born from the death of something true.
Here we are.
It’s the second half.
What is being built through me, I can only vaguely feel the shape of.
There’s something else at the driver’s seat,
and it’s not any Me I’m familiar with.
Where the first half was dominated by a thinking, calculating, planning self hoping to arrange the pieces perfectly,
the second half seems to be guided by a still, small voice within that can be felt but not heard.
The voice whispers and whispers, only in half-understood poems and cryptic hints at a right next step.
Each step is more of a stumble,
an aching forward as the light blinds reborn eyes.
I find only one prayer is ever worthwhile to utter these days:
Amen. [So be it.]
This is the only response to a life totally out of our control.
It is in the embodiment of Amen,
that I think I’m learning how to live again.
A blessing:
May you love well enough to cry endlessly when the ones you love are lost.
May you have the courage to love again anyways,
knowing that this is an invitation to your next great grief.
What a share. I love the metaphor. I also love the adventure arising in you. What a time.
One day, maybe soon, you will look back at this time with fondness to how open the future felt for you right now. That’s the flip side of breaking everything. That’s our reward for all the pain and fear.
If the this-ness of what we are, in wildly simplified terms, is just stories? Then you’re writing one most people will never have the chutzpah to duplicate. Bravo, sir.
You did pack a helmet, right? (Meh, fuggit.)