Alex and I had a marriage that others admired; not just from the outside.

College students who lived with us over the years would invariably comment that they hoped to create a marriage like ours. A week before we announced our imminent separation to our eldest daughter, she and her friends had been talking about parents. She told them, "My parents have the perfect marriage," and her friends agreed that, of all their parents, Alex and I would be the last to divorce. When Alex told colleague friends of our separation, in every instance they expressed profound astonishment and dismay. What they saw was real. What they couldn't see because I had to hide it mostly from myself, was that I moved through my days with the sense that I was living someone else's life. It was a good life, but inexplicably not my own.

There is a painting that hangs in the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. It is large, maybe four by five feet, and it depicts a 19th century Eastern European scene. Village women are gathered around a maiden who sits in the center of a room. They are dressing her for her wedding. With the exception of some young girls playing happily near a sunlit window in the background, each of the women, including the bride, appears to be alone in her thoughts, yet they all wear identical somber expressions. They know, and we know looking at this scene, that they are dressing her for her death.

What is it that dies in a woman at marriage, that at midlife rises to demand resurrection or else a final death?

No one who survives to speak new language has avoided this...

I dreamed we lived in a castle that had been converted by Alex, with my tacit assent, to a home for the dying. It was cool and dark, as though the central fire had been left unattended. I wandered the upper level, slowly circling the fireless, great hall below. Fear mounted in me silently, as I felt myself slipping into some formless, dark abyss.

Do we dream for the world?  I don't think this is just about a woman sliding into depression because the passion in her marriage has gone out. I think this is about the soul of the world. Do you understand? I mean, when the fiery intensity for deep, creative relatedness, for authentic living, is dampened - through neglect or any of the other thousand ways we collude to put out that fire - the soul of the world, too, falls into the abyss.

When I was twenty-three, unmarried and in graduate school, I spent a summer working as a research assistant for one of my professors. The job required little of me other than a lot of waiting, and I mostly spent my days at the lab ensconced in the diaries of Anais Nin. One day, something extraordinary happened.

I was walking home from work with nothing special on my mind. Then, literally between one step and the next, the world completely changed. The Denver neighborhood did not suddenly became some unrecognizable other world. Not that. Houses were still houses and trees trees. The sidewalk was still there beneath my feet - although barely. My movement through space had acquired a transcendant fluidity that made the walking of a moment before, by comparison, seem like trudging through tar. But now everything - houses, trees, sidewalk, grass, air, birds, everything including myself - was charged with light, a silver radiance that overflowed with indescribable bliss. How can I say this? In the loudest Silence I have ever heard, every particle in the manifest world was singing welcome and delight. To this day, no experience has been more real. There was an unshakeable certainty that this is what we humans were born to experience, and that our regular consciousness is a state of sleep from which we might, in any moment, awaken.

It is spread out before you and you do not see it.

Remember the first time you fell in love? How everything else in your life ground on without you, and infinite space and infinite possibility opened between you and your beloved - even if he or she didn't know it? How you fell headlong into an image of completeness that had never occurred to you before? This is how this was, a hundred-fold, only the object of my naked, mute adoration was the One Consciousness that infused every atom of creation, that wore this or that particularity as its cloak. It was an inebriation that was, at the same time, the most exquisitely lucid sobriety I have ever known.

I no longer have words to say how it is.
Half-truths try to escape, but instead
pile up behind my teeth.
Now even when my words tread lightly,
they bind, they bare holes,
I do You wrong.

I want to speak!

I want to tell how face by face
I come to know You,
and face by face stare drunk into Your no-face.
How you fill me up until it seems I would burst,
and bursting break only into
the widened circle of Your embrace.

This is the passion that was reduced to cold embers in marriage; this experience of being in living conversation with the cosmos as beloved. An inner depth and spaciousness - Buddhists call it emptiness, but we Westerners shrink from the word - is necessary for such a conversation to be maintained. Yet the business end of marriage seemed to conspire to fill up that space with drivel. Conversation with Alex all too often meant talk about soon-to-be-acquired upgrades in our personal computer system, or about the status of our pension plan, or about how incredibly busy he was - a daily topic that required that we both pretend not to know that he set his own schedule. It wasn't that he didn't want to listen. He loved me fiercely, and I knew that. I simply could not figure out how to bridge the gap between the secret of secrets that lived inside of me (as the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, named it), and the concrete world of things and doing that he so ably occupied. And even while I knew that this was precisely the dilemma that not only I but our whole culture needed to face - how to give voice to soul before soul itself became extinct - in the end it seemed as though the only hope for this lay in shattering the numbing security of marriage and daring to live in a state of free-fall, of radical insecurity.

No one who survives to peak new language has avoided this:
the cutting away of an old force that kept her
rooted to an old ground.

Was it fair to our daughters? The question plagues me at times, but I think it's the wrong one. We might as well ask whether or not it's fair to foster in them the illusion that security exists in a culture hurtling toward chaotic dissolution. The white picket fence we have, until now, thrown up around their childhood may ill-serve them in navigating the turbulent, uncertain future that is upon us all. It is collective delusion that has us fiddling with our pension plans while Rome burns. But throughout this separation, Alex and I have worked carefully to preserve and even enlarge family love, while the container for our relating changes shape. The girls know beyond any doubting that our love for them is primary, and it is that experience of unequivocal belonging that I believe will hold them and prepare them for their own work in the world in years to come.

It makes no sense to a mind formed by the values of the modern era: I left my marriage in order to become a more intentional witness to the marriage of heaven and earth. Earth withers where we have wrenched heaven from her embrace. Regulations, legislation, all our environmental do-gooding will be spitting in the wind if we fail to understand this. It seems to me that, in truth, the restoration of the world depends on one thing only: that we meet it with the devoted attention of a faithful lover.

I don't know how, but maybe in this free-fall I am finding my way back to a fidelity to passion, to love, to Soul, that feeds a hunger greater than mine alone. Maybe, mysteriously, that fidelity is a womb for some new language struggling to be born. Time will tell.

Time will tell.

•

©Sophie Madlin, 1995, 2006. This essay first appeared in Northern Lights Magazine, vol.10, no. 3, Winter 1995. It is slightly revised here.

Back to Part I, Part II, or to Articles Page