We are defined as much by what we refuse to destroy as by what we create.

I was telling a life-story to a friend the other day.  It was a story about part of the process of my separation from my now ex-husband.   We’d been together for 13 years at that point.  We’d built a beautiful adobe bed and breakfast as well as our own home on part of the same land in western Colorado.  We’d raised a teenager, my niece, and cared for and buried his mother who lived with us.  My soul was saying that the work we’d come together to do was done: some hard words to say or to hear.  What I knew was that I was being tugged away by unyielding forces, from this very good life that we’d built together. 

On the surface, leaving looked like an asinine thing to do.  I had a beautiful home with lots of land around me, a great job, good friends and a man who adored me, or at least what he knew of me.  But therein lied my angst—there wasn’t enough juice left in the relationship to sustain either of us.  And there wasn’t a community that I felt tied enough to to keep me grounded as the storm surged inside of me that said, ‘Mend your life, Beth. Tend your life. No one else can.’  That kind of claptrap.

So one weekend in September, after I’d answered the call to move to Oregon for a job, and he’d said that he wasn’t going to follow me - at least not yet - my husband and I took the decrepit camper down to a narrow little camping spot on the North Fork of the Gunnison River where we often went with the dogs to let them romp.  We took a goodly supply of red wine.  We hiked for a bit, made a lovely dinner, and then sat down by the fire to talk until we were done.

From that altered space, he told me that he saw my soul slowly dying, and that I needed to move on with my life. He also said that he loved me desperately, and that he would do everything in his power to keep me with him.  And that I was not to give in.  And that he would deny that he’d ever said any of this.  I cried my way through this conversation, but I knew he meant it: he loved me, wanted me by his side, and he was telling me to go so that I could live and love. We asked each other if we had what it takes to do the work of making the relationship we had 'work'.  We both agreed that we didn’t.  We no longer valued the form of the relationship more than we valued the content of it. 

From the get-go, we’d built our relationship on the premise that we were committed to the process and unfolding of the relationship, rather than to ‘each other’.  This nuance has been one of the most profound of my middle years.  It has allowed us to stay committed to the relationship, even though we are no longer in it.  It has allowed us to stay committed to each other’s spiritual growth and development—because that was our highest value.

Now, six+ years later, we are both on separate but never-separate life journeys.  He has had a major love, who just died in May of this year.  We are true, dear and special friends.  And we always will be, because we have refused to destroy something that is so life-giving to each of us, even if it no longer nurtures us to live as husband and wife.   

Not sure why I’m telling you all this story, but there it is. It's one of the stories that are forming the spine of a book that is being born from the Hafiz poem "One regret, dear world, that I am determined not to have when I'm lying on my deathbed is that I did not kiss you enough."

   
Autumn 2003 in the Chinook-Camper named Bertha, with  Ling (the forever puppy) on my lap, Jaz (alpha female) at my side, and Josh (sweet boy that moved with me to Oregon) at my feet.  Now all dead, they live forever in my heart. However, I still have that shirt, now with wonderful holes and used as an undershirt, and that plaid blanket that now lives in Estralita the Eurovan...and they both still warm me on chilly evenings around a fire, somewhere, anywhere under God's starry sky.