26 Birthdays

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I hope it’s not a sign of marital neglect that I haven’t written on our marriage blog since May, when I posted,  “Happy Anniversary, I don’t promise you anything.”

Some found that sentiment sobering for a 20th anniversary celebration, but I thought it risque. That was quite a party.

Last year, I dedicated my anniversary to our vacuum cleaner, which by the way we replaced for our 20th; which may have been one of the best gifts we’ve ever given to each other.

But this post isn’t about anniversaries, it’s about a birthday, the 26th birthday that I’ve celebrated with this man I love. The first was his 21st, and that’s hard to believe from these middle age seats.

In gratitude for the many, many birthdays that we’ve shared and for the gift of his life in mine, I wanted to roast a turkey and host a feast of Thanksgiving. But our oven broke, and the roads are flooded, and big feasts aren’t Casey’s thing.

Cooking all day would have been therapeutic for me, however, as September 8th is not only my beloved’s birthday, but the anniversary of my mother’s passing, eleven years ago at the heart-break of this day.

Instead, Casey is picking up a pizza and dvd, which is his kind of fun, and that’s what this day should be all about, even if he is spending it with a hundred freshman and day 5 of rain and flooding.

But love transcends the weather, and so I’d like to offer memories for each year I’ve spent with this guy that I picked up at the Crab House, 26 birthdays ago:

  1. Thanks for letting my strength be a challenge (and an aphrodisiac.)
  2. Loved our early trips to the Berkshires.
  3. And to Colorado.
  4. And to Europe.
  5. Thanks for sharing Grandma Anna with me.
  6. and for sharing me with my entire family.
  7. Thanks for loving them as much as you love your own.
  8. I appreciated you as an uncle first, and then a brother in law, and then a father.
  9. Thanks for the two amazing guys, we call sons.
  10. Thanks for leaving the shore for the mountains.
  11. For building us a home.
  12. For steeping in community with me.
  13. For sharing new adventures–on the inside.
  14. Like yoga.
  15. Non-violent communication.
  16. Mating in Captivity.
  17. Thanks for making me go to YogaDance training.
  18. and for helping me find my way back to the world.
  19. I’m blown away at the longevity of your appreciation for my gifts.
  20. I’m amazed at depth of your perception where ever  you choose to place it.
  21. Thanks for sharing your 21st with me, and every one thereafter.
  22. I admire  your love for your family and students and friends.
  23. I miss your early relationship with the Earth.
  24. Your groundedness keeps me from floating away.
  25. You have such a BIG heart.
  26. Thanks for sharing it with me.

Happy 46th Birthday My Love,

Keep them coming!

Kelly

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Filed under Grow Old With Me

The Weight of Balance

In my mid-twenties, I began to crave balance in my life. I extracted myself from my family of origin; gave up my lifestyle of travel and partying; and settled down with a man, a job and a home.

Despite the absence of my long coveted freedom, I was surprisingly happy–er; so I went in search of MORE… balance… cleaning up my diet; incorporating regular aerobic activity; guarding my sleep; attending Al-Anon meetings; delving into spiritual texts, and even taking fiber.

While friends and family members suffered lives strewn with chaos, I strode steadily along my neat and narrow road. I was so carefully balanced, that by the time I had kids, I tipped right over.

It’s challenging to enjoy children when you are reliant on balance. Parenting by nature inhabits a world of extremes. The most vigilant of those among us, however, will keep at it. We’ll institute feeding schedules, bedtimes, chores and limits. We’ll carefully carve out our own time to force our lives back into balance; like shoving swollen feet back into a pair of pumps at the tail end of a wedding reception.

Yoga provides a quick fix. An hour on the mat, and even the most harried parent will find that sweet gift that the yogis call… “equanimity.” I love that word. It represents everything that is perfect about balance.

But don’t expect it to last. The moment you step back into the foray of family life, you’re knocked on your ass.

Until you stop trying.

In his book, The Three Marriages–Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship; author and poet David Whyte claims that “Poets have never used the word balance. It is too obvious and therefore untrustworthy… and seems to speak as much as to being stuck and immovable.”

Whyte suggests that balance is overrated and self-defeating, often leaving people feeling frustrated and exhausted.

This makes me think of the difference between my two favorite yoga teachers–the one who came before my children, and the one who came after.   My current teacher, Scott, doesn’t demonstrate the same kind of discipline or severity that my first yoga teacher imposed; but I’m forever grateful to Ann for forcing me out of my mind.

Scott’s looser approach is a better fit for my life now. He incorporates an eclectic soundtrack into his class, even playing Stevie Ray Vaughan.  He tells jokes. He encourages us to do a pose “our” way. He reminds us to go to the “steady edge” of our own stretch. He asks us to breathe “santosha” (contentment) into each pose as we express it, no matter how it looks.

I feel like I can bring my “whole” imperfect self to Scott’s class, and this resonates well with David Whyte’s advice about integrating work and family and self:  “Separating these aspects from each other in order to balance one against the other serves to destroy the fabric of happiness itself,” Whyte says.

Instead, he emphasizes the integral connection between the core commitments of our lives, telling readers to “stop trying to work harder in each of the marriages and start to concentrate on the conversation that holds them together.”

This reminds of the unique way my yoga teacher Scott leads the class through balancing poses. First of all, he has use the wall for support, and then he tells us to let the “falling” out of the pose be a part of its full expression.

Whyte claims that this sense of “unbalancing” must take place in life in order to push us into a new and larger sets of circumstances.

But is it me, or does this sounds scary–especially to someone who has held her life together with such a fierce commitment to balance?

“Get out of the dynamics of self-entrapment,” says Whyte, “and fall in love–with a person, a future, a work, or with a new sense of self.”

This is the fragile place of imbalance and expansion where I find myself now.

On a recent trip to Chile with my new job, I discover that I can survive without sleep, that I can navigate unknowns in a foreign country (five-thousand miles away from my family), and that I can drink wine with every meal and still be productive.

It was mostly likely this forced freedom from the entrapment of balance which enabled me to say yes to the idea of celebrating my  21st wedding anniversary with festivity.

When we discovered that the only date that was available for the facility we wanted to rent was only a month away, I said yes again, despite my tipping, delighted that this opening fell serendiptitously on the weekend of my anniversary.

When that same week was loaded up at work, I held onto my yes; and when I was completely tipped over by the news that my date didn’t fit  into the calenders of my out of town friends and family, I challenged myself to breathe santosha (contentment) into my choice no matter how it looked.

When dozens of local friends joined us for an evening of celebration, but none needed the space we rented for overnight guests, we decided we’d use the space ourselves.

“Why would you sleep on camp bunk beds when you could go home and be in your own bed right across the road?” my sister asked.

She had a point. Staying overnight at Camp Neringa would bring all kinds of increasing imbalance into our lives.

And as I lie there on that thin cot into the wee hours of the night with the rocking and squeaking of the metal frame, I was acutely aware at how I had chosen passion over balance again and again, even in this small way, and I was eager to see how this willingness to “fall” might expand the conversation of my life even further.

I thought back to the anniversary ceremony that my husband and I included in our celebration.  We risked disposing of the traditional “renewal of vows” in favor of an impromptu honoring of each other.

21 years earlier, we stood on a carpeted altar, face to face, holding hands, repeating words from a minister.  Now we stood apart, among friends, flanking a camp stage like opposite pillars of strength.

From that unplanned and slightly atypical distance apart, we spoke words of respect and appreciation and love–a conversation that wove our hearts and our witnesses together–despite the divide.

The next morning, after we finished cleaning up the camp, we danced to our wedding song that we had forgotten to play the night before.

I then walked home from Camp Neringa alone, while Casey drove the first of our cars across the road.

When he returned by foot to fetch the one remaining vehicle, we arrived at opposite sides of the pond at the same moment.

Immediately, I saw us in the roles of the story he had shared during his honoring of me. It was a lovers myth with the God Shiva and the Goddess Parvati. They too went off on their own to nurture their strengths and visions, and then joined together for a thousand years in “love play.”

As Casey stopped to visit with a neighbor who passed him on the road, I crouched down to dip my fingers into the cool spring waters of the pond and dab them on my third eye. As Casey finished his conversation, we each stepped up onto the dock that spanned the pond and walked toward the other.

Half-way across, we met at the damn, where the waters rushed into the stream, heavy from a week of constant rain.  We shared a final celebration embrace, and then continued on our separate ways.

There was a time when our fierce dependence on balance demanded that Casey and I choose the safety of of togetherness over the risk of differentiation; But we’ve discarded the weight of that balance in return for a thousand years in love play.

Kelly Salasin, May 22, 2011

The Three Marriages, David Whyte, Riverhead Books, 2009.

For more information about Scott Willis and Hit the Spot Yoga, click here.

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Filed under Anniveraries, Intimacy

The Taste of True Love

Anniversary celebrations, particularly at this stage of the game, traditionally include a “renewal of vows” –but if you’ve been following this blog, you already know that I don’t believe in them; which raises the question–What do I believe in?

Dissing vows or admitting that I don’t put much stock in: “till death do us part,” probably doesn’t give a full enough picture of how important this relationship is to me–nor  does it reveal how hard I work to protect it. As a lifelong educator, the least I could do is share whatever wisdom I’ve gleaned from a relationship that’s been allowed to thrive for 25 years.

I touched on this with a fellow American as we walked through the streets of Santiago last month. Noah talked about open relationships and swapping, and I talked about fidelity.

It’s not that I think there is something inherently wrong with the way you see it, I say.  In fact, I appreciate the transparency of Noah’s generation. Back in my day we just cheated on each other while pretending we were ready for commitment.

When you have kids, the cost is greater, I explain, referencing friends whose marriages fell apart after swapping or whose relationship survived, but suffered, root-deep damage. A sobering silence follows. Noah and I both share the history of a “broken” family.

We pause at a playground on the hillside of Saint Lucia. I explain to Noah that Casey and I don’t stay together for the kids, but we are extra careful because of them. He climbs a top a intricate metal structure, as I talk about the preciousness and weight of parental responsibility–while thinking that this playground would be an insurance nightmare in the States.

Noah motions to me to join him on a long, wooden seesaw.  That doesn’t mean our world revolves around the kids or that we don’t take risks, I tell him, as he raises me precariously into the air. Casey and I are committed to having lives that are “alive,”  I continue, he took off for a month last summer to study yoga, and that I did something similar a few years before that.

It was after the birth of our second son that Casey and I realized that we were both holding back in some subconscious attempt to maintain the stability of “equal deprivation.”  We decided then and there that we wouldn’t survive this way–so we gave each other permission to act on behalf of our selves–even if left the “other” behind for a bit. There was a great deal of vulnerability in that decision, but ultimately it brought new life to the relationship.

When you spend an entire day with a man you hardly know, these are the kind of conversations you  have as you walk along the river in a foreign city past lovers lying in the grass.  The topic returns to sex.

One surprise is that it keeps getting better, I say. The same is true for another friend of mine from school who has been married longer than me, and who was just as much a “player” as I was back in the day.

There’s a gift that comes from commitment, from fidelity, that draws lovemaking from an even deeper source, I tell Noah.  It’s not something than can be artificially stimulated by the titillating experience of swapping–or by pornography. I launch into my organic sex soapbox; and Noah politely listens.  College students “living life” suffer enough lectures from middle-aged professors “about” life, without having to endure another from a friend of their mother’s; but I’m on a roll.

It’s really hard to capture how loosely and how carefully Casey and I hold this gift of our relationship. We certainly don’t pretend we aren’t attracted to others. We’ve always known that each of us is susceptible to falling in love–or lust–with someone else. We’re pretty honest about the close calls. We’re in this together, and we remind each other of that.

After 25 years, I think Casey would be really happy with a long-legged brunette with silky hair who rides horses and has a barn and who challenges him–on the outside.

Instead, he’s got this curvy, curly-haired petite woman who regularly has him traversing the inner landscape of just about everything, whether he wants to or not.

Today, it’s Noah who’s traversing, and he redirects the strength of current with a “Terre Mote,” a famous Chilean drink, appropriately named, “Earthquake.”  A third of the way down, Noah’s voice gets louder, and mine softens into the sweet memory of the youthful abandon I see everywhere around me.  By the time night falls in Santiago, and Noah and I return to Nunoa to eat Egyptian food with our hands, I am too tired to talk, and my thoughts turn inward.

The love my husband and I share is so strong that it increasingly has us placing each other’s happiness above our own comfort–even 5,000 miles away, when I’m sleeping in another man’s apartment–a Chilean colleague who I described via email to my husband as “gorgeous.” Granted “Pablo” is away for the weekend, which is why he lent me his place, but that doesn’t stop Casey from slipping into a well of self-doubt on the opposite continent.

He didn’t include me in his angst, however, because Casey appreciated how VITAL  it was for me to find myself “free” in the world again. When I return home to the States two weeks later, I laugh when he shares what he put himself through, and then I exhale, as he wraps his arms around me and reclaims me as his own.

There was a time when I would have loved to have “collected” another experience–a swarthy Chilean man, for example; but that fleeting pleasure has become “too” sweet for my taste, which has grown much finer.

Kelly Salasin, May 19, 2011

On my 21st Wedding Anniversary

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Filed under A Month Apart, Anniveraries, Intimacy, Organic Love, Sexuality