Letter to My Spouse

I wish that it was such between us that I could say these things to you face to face, that you were in a place within your Self that you could listen and hear what I have been trying to communicate for so long. Alas, I am relegated to a space in a place outside Us to say what I must. For I must let go of the things you wish me to forget. The letting go is not so I can pretend they never happened (as you are trying to do), but to get on with my Life.

I will listen to your Message, perhaps at the cost of Us, but not at the expense of Me. For too long, I have loved you unconditionally, despite the unbalanced love, imagined slights, hurtfulness, lies and betrayal. For too long, I thought that you were so wounded Inside that you needed a stronger Love to surpass your own Inner Pain. I believed that you needed a patient understanding from someone who truly cared about you so you could get beyond the things that held you back from Being who you are.

All the while, you withdrew more and more, and accused me of leaving you alone, saying this is why you went to others. You rejected the myriad suggestions for us to be together, and stood by passively saying we did nothing. You provided no alternatives, and said I was the cause of your boredom. You entered into an intimate relationship with another woman (was she the only one?), making plans for your Future together, and you did things that you would never accept from me. You perceive attacks in reconstructive comments, and I am supposedly the one with a guilty conscience. When there was nothing worse you could cite, you fabricated an evil, malicious version of me to blame for what you were doing. Somehow I became the default reason while all your deceptions were justified, and why there is no need for you to apologize for the betrayal and violation of our Relationship.

Despite all this, what you have done in the last year is not good enough reason for me to be mistrustful and cautious and confused about you and us. I could forgive you for the deception and even the intimacies with her, but I am tired of apologizing for trite things you will never forgive, that you have inflated to huge proportions to balance your indiscretions. I am tired of persisting in a relationship without a sincere Love or tenderness. I must cease the futile attempts (and yes, I see now just how futile they have been) to prove something that you will never believe no matter what is presented before you or demonstrated.

The unbalance of our Relationship has tipped until the weight of it is too much to bear. Now I must balance who I am to love more: you or me. Haven't we learned that making false assumptions will destroy our relationship? Yet you hold on to and manipulate your false assumptions to justify your actions. You say things are different now, but you will not let go. You will not go to counseling, despite your suggesting it, because "we will speak of the Past." You say you do not want to be with her, but not why you want to be with me, so you feel that saying nothing should be interpreted as everything being fine. There is a simple answer, but you cannot speak it, because you do not feel it, and this I must learn to accept. I do love you still, but will not try to make you love me when you don't. We can try to look to the future, but only the Future will tell.

In My Beginning is My End

I said to my Soul, be still, and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
Wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing.
There is yet faith, but the faith and the love
And the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought;

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness, the dancing...

Trying to use words and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words;
For the thing one no longer has to say,
Or the way in which one is no longer disposed to say it…

Home is where one starts from.
As we grow older the world becomes stranger,
the pattern more complicated of dead and living.
Not the intense moment isolated,
With no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment;
And not the lifetime of one man only,

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

Love is most nearly itself when
Here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers--

Here or there does not matter;

We must be still and still moving into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise.

In my end is my beginning.

T. S. Eliot

The Darkness Around Us is Deep

A thick fog is enveloping us, choking the thin atmosphere that exists around us. No clarifying ray of Hope can be seen on the Horizon. There will be no more discussion of why or how we got Here. But the winding, deceiving ways to the place that is Now cannot leave my head. All I hear are the intimate conversations, pet names, and whispered affections that took place while I was sitting in the room. The secret codes, Twitterings, webcam visits, text messages, phone calls, and long conversations into the wee hours of the morning long after I had gone to sleep. "You have nothing to be concerned about. I'm just talking to my buddy."

Some of those conversations were about the uncaring bitch he lived with. I was just the person living in the same house who felt nothing and meant nothing, so could easily be discarded and disrespected. Divorce and their Future together was discussed before he spent His Time with her. All of this while I helped him get ready for "his vacation" and prepared to drive him to and from the airport. How sad that it was all turned back on me. He saw nothing Good in what I did. Ever? He saw nothing wrong in treating me as if I was the perpetrator of the Crimes to our relationship. "She means nothing to me. She is just a friend."

When he was with her, I did not exist. No calls, no birthday wishes, no emails...a curt assurance that he was safe such a long way from Home came only after several tries. Then, he could not say what was the Truth. Even now he cannot say the Truth, that he loved her, made her promises about their future, bought her things, cried with her in his arms. She thought she was pregnant at one point. There were shared experiences and deep intimacies that go beyond sex, that go beyond me. "But I never said I loved her."

He is with me now, but for what? I truly do not know. He does not touch me with tenderness, or look at me with a look of Love in his eyes. He does not see the Beauty in me, in the Us that was for a brief instant. How does respect simply appear from the place within where there was none to begin?

My husband, how would you feel if I did the same things to you? "Go for it." The Darkness around us is deep...

Staying Awake

If you don't know the kind of person I am,

And I don't know the kind of person you are,

A pattern that others made may prevail in the world,

And following the wrong god home, we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the Mind,

A shrug that lets the fragile sequence break;

Sending with shouts, the horrible errors of childhood,

Storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,

But if one wanders, the circus won't find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of cruelty

To know what occurs, but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

A remote important region in all who talk;

Though we could fool each other, we should consider

Lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the Dark.

For it is important that awake people be Awake,

Or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep.

The signals we give - yes or no, or maybe -should be clear;

The Darkness around us is deep.

William Stafford

He Loves Me; He Loves Me Not

Listening to Indigo Daisies…it was my fate.
He loves me, he loves me not…
Did he ever love me? He forgot.
(Is it too late?)
Lyrics echo my thoughts, mirror my pain.
I want to run away from the unexplained.
Running never solves anything;
Running changes nothing.
Should I stay if he is still charmed by others’ arms?
I dream of laying in a field of peaceful tranquility,
In your arms, with no worries.
Don’t want to live without your touch.
But I can’t make you love me if you don’t.
You can't make your heart feel something it won’t.

Where is my baby? ‘Cause I miss him so much.

When Truth was Deception

What do you do when you come to know you have lived a Lie?
When the certainty of Truth WAS the lie?
Feelings of doubt, betrayal, uncertainty prevail.

How does one get beyond that terrible truth?
Can any good created by the past return?
Does anything of the past actually exist?
Thoughts of confusion, mistrust, betrayal prevail.

Would it have been better to live the Lie?
Blind to the truth of what actually was?
Any future built on the tenuous foundation
Of a blind acceptance for the sake of a false peace
Can only be a Grand Deception.

The Lies bind you in a ghost mansion of
Shadows and false Emotions.
The Truth shall set you free.
But the Truth is sometimes painful
And difficult to accept with Grace.

This is Life. Evolution.
All happens for a Purpose
Which we can only come to understand
With Clarity and Inner Peace.

But what of Love?

Paying Attention

A changed thought system can reverse
cause-and-effect as we have known it.
For most of us, this is a very difficult concept to accept,
because of our resistance to relinquishing the predictability
of our past belief system, and to assuming responsibility
for our thoughts, feelings and reactions.
Since we always look within before looking out,
we can perceive attack outside us only when
we have first accepted attack as real within.

Gerald Jampolsky

I believe in a Grand Plan directed by the Source of All, but believe this is also guided by Free Will. So I guide my Life by looking for the signs, patterns and synchronicities, reflecting on how these might fit into the Grand Plan, and what my part in it all is. Don't get me wrong...there is no long analytical process involved in each living Moment, but when times get confusing or I am involved with confusing people, I go to greater lengths to reflect on what is the correct thing to do. What would the Universe want me to do?

For the first 7 years of be-ing with my husband, I trusted him without doubt. Truly. He is a sensitive, friendly and outgoing person, and likes to share his insights, and there were many women about, but I trusted that he, at the very minimum, respected me and our relationship enough to draw the line and maintain appropriate boundaries.

In the last year, this has changed. But even when I had my gut feelings and saw signs to the contrary in the past year, I depended on the trust built up over those years, and kept telling myself to have faith. At that time, I had so much faith that even though I thought he was being unfaithful and deceptive, I was willing to accept that if he would be happier with her, then I would let him go. I know this sounds foolish, but I believed that this was my Soulmate, and I have a deep Love for him. How could I hold him back if he was not happy with me? I think I was a bit more secure back then as well. If he needed to explore being with her to realize what he had with me, then so be it.

This past weekend was one of those defining Moments in a Life. I have been trying to get past negative feelings involved in remembering what my husband did. I have been trying to grow into a new future with us being together because this is something that he says he wants. He cannot define what he wants or articulate why he wants it, but thinks that our "getting on" with each other can be nothing but a good thing. I know he has been confused, so I am glad that he is here with me and healthy, and there was the glimpse of a future that was imagined before.

This past weekend, he shared insights that showed his true feelings. He had suggested couple counseling, and since we seem to have trouble communicating about feelings and the substance of our relationship, I embraced it. He was not agreeable to psychological counseling, but I discovered couples mediation, which helps to foster effective communication to get past the conflicts and develop the skills for the future. At first, he said he was agreeable. I made the contact, I spoke with the mediator, and the next step was for him to contact the mediator to ask about the process and answer any questions, so he would feel comfortable.

After weeks of him not calling the mediator, I finally asked and he said he does not want to go to mediation because we will "have to talk about the past." There was no other discussion about it. That was it. That was it in another way. I finally realized something that I have been avoiding in myself for some time now: He does not love me. I thought about the last two years and realized that if he had loved me, he could not have done the things he did. He would not have been so deceptive or been involved with other women. If he had cared for me a little, even if he did not love me, he could not have spoken so badly about me to the other woman. She had such clear details and things only he and I spoke of, so I know she is being truthful about the things he said about me to her. He would not have spoken so readily of divorce to her and not mentioned it to me, even with the opportunities to share the information. There are so many things that he would not have done. And even more telling is that if I had done even a small portion of what he did, he would be gone already...would have left if I had spent weeks with my soon-to-be partner, talking of divorce and returning soon to spend our lives together.

So what is there to do now? I must prepare my Self for the inevitable. I have not been paying attention to the signs, to the changes in him that spoke so loudly of his lack of caring, love and respect for me. I will not beg. I will not try to convince him of my worthiness. Nothing I do seems to be enough anyway. Nothing that I don't do (given the past circumstances) seems to give me enough credit. I must love my Self first, even he does not.

Our response to change is voluntary, and perhaps it is this free-will nature of the Universe that makes it so difficult to make choices within the circumstances and difficult situations we find ourselves. Today, I will consciously begin to go with my gut again. I certainly do not know how my changed thought system will manifest. I have tried to have faith and believe that a new reality is on the horizon, but there appears to be no substance to this assumption. What reality can there be in a marriage without mutual love? All I know at this point is that I cannot go on as I have. I need to start paying more attention to the signs right in front of my face.