You are neither here nor there
A hurry through which strange and known things pass
-Seamus Heaney
Perhaps the most difficult marriage of all—the third marriage beneath the two visible, all-too-public marriages of work and relationship—is the internal and often secret marriage to that tricky movable frontier called ourselves: the marriage to the one who keeps changing at the center of all the outer relationships while making promises it hopes to God it can keep. What is heartbreaking and difficult about this inner self that flirted, enticed, spent time with and eventually committed to a person or a career is that it is not a stationary entity; an immovable foundation; it moves and changes and surprises us as much as anything in the outer world to which it wants to commit.
Love in the words of Shakespeare may be an ever fixed mark, but the person, the self who loves, is not. Nor is the person who works a work, navigates a career. They are both a long, turning wave form moving through experience with a kind of changing, revelatory seasonality, carrying all before them like a tide, surprising everyone with their twists and turns and contradictory flows. We are each a river with a particular abiding character, but we show radically different aspects of our self according to the territory through which we travel. As Seamus Heaney said in one poem, You are neither here not there / A hurry through which strange and known things pass. Now a swift-moving stream, now a slow traverse, at midlife perhaps nothing but a dried-up stretch of seemingly lifeless gravel, becoming a lake again, then by a strange summary on the hospital bed, an estuary, a giving out, a transition into the next existence.
In the midst of a seemingly endless life, however, we can spend so much time attempting to put bread on the table or holding a relationship together that we often neglect the necessary internal skills which help us pursue, come to know, and then sustain a marriage with the person we find on the inside. Neglecting this internal marriage, we can easily make ourselves a hostage to the externals of work and the demands of relationship. We find ourselves unable to move in these outer marriages because we have no inner foundation from which to step out with a firm persuasion. It is as if, absent a loving relationship with this inner representation of our self, we fling ourselves in all directions in our outer lives, looking for love in all the wrong places. The other timeless metaphor for this internal configuration has been a source or a well, a place to drink from, as if somewhere, there is a constant invisible outflow, a flow from which we might be refusing to drink.
I wish I understood the beauty in leaves falling. To whom are we beautiful as we go? - David Ignatow excerpt from The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship
Lovely! Thank you. I am absolutely certain that we give ourselves fully to work and to outer marriages as a distraction to avoid looking at ourselves completely and learning to love ourselves first. Which is silly. Because once we do love ourselves wholly, then love finds us.
Ok, there goes this month's budget. I have not yet purchased the book this is from but I am so drawn to this essay's wisdom. With 70 only a few breaths away in the speeding timeline of life, I am still working on this inner marriage and only now beginning to get the commitment right...renewing that intention day by day.