Finding Purple

Colors change me. Mentally, emotionally, maybe spiritually. Especially blues, purples, greens, but really any color found and experienced fully. It's hard to explain, but it's unmistakable when felt.

After running the Seaside 10-Miler in Ocean City, Halloween Saturday morning turned into walking trails, dunes, and beach on Assateague. I had Alice Walker's words in my head seeing flashes of purple like soul breadcrumbs:

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

It was everywhere, scattered like puzzle pieces, wanting to form one larger purple spectrum, like there was some larger purple shell that had been shattered and wanted to be put back together again.

So I gathered a few, to have some puzzle pieces to remember, study, ponder. And I left some for the next folks who come along to find.

What I kept (and keep) thinking about is the purple that connects them all, not the separate shells. And that got me mulling Oscar Wilde:

Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.

When I first read that thought from Wilde, my mind went to the sky or the sea, where there are expanses and variations of unspoiled color, without form. All-encompassing. But the shells were carrying it also--through broken, partial forms, it was something about the color itself, what connected them.

I'm going to make a little leap here, if you'll permit me. Let's secretly replace color with Love (capital L Love), and swap out the shells for people. There are times when maybe we all feel like we have some part of that purple within us. Whether for kids, parents, partners, pets, I hope there are moments when everyone has felt something like that. Our own part of the purple.

But what about the larger purple that runs through everyone. If we all have that purple within us, and from time to time, we recognize that purple, that love, the commonality, in someone else. Or in everyone else.

There are times when I have felt that purple in a gathered group, that I can't explain any other way. When Bobby Banks sang a hymn at my great uncle's funeral, I swear I felt connected to everyone else there around me. It was a profound, sublime, visceral experience. When I crossed the finish line of the JFK 50-Miler after 11-plus hours of forward motion, I was so overwhelmed and felt so humbly and greatly connected to everyone around me. And it can come in silly, unexpected ways, seeing a video of people doing something for others, an unexpected act of kindness; a glimmer in someone's eyes; a smile about to become a laugh.

I can't explain it, but it was there. I think in the best and deepest moments I've contemplated life, religion, the Universe, sometimes, when I'm lucky, a feeling that goes further than where my thoughts can reach is there. Transcendent and underlying.

I won't swear to it, but that connecting thread, that piece that ties us altogether, it's not impossible that it's Love. Or purple :)

Making Waves

Virginia Woolf loaded the pockets of her overcoat with stones and walked into the river. That didn't go so well for her. Or maybe it did, since she did what she set out to do. I remember reading "To the Lighthouse" in college and being swept up in her language, her ideas, how it all hung together. And then was done with Virginia.

But a book kept coming up on my radar screen. It would surface, burn hot, have me curious and then subside as some other new shiny object grabbed my attention. But it would always come back. That book is Woolf's "The Waves." I'm a little more than halfway through it.

At base I am a word whore. I love language. Ideas. Stringing them together, they rush over me and take me with them; sometimes to where they intended to take me, sometimes to somewhere completely different, off the map. "The Waves" is a book for word whores. Ideas swim through it.

Now passions that lay in wait down there in the dark weeds which grow at the bottom rise and pound us with their waves. Pain and jealousy, envy and desire, and something deeper than they are, stronger than love and more subterranean. The voice of action speaks.

Let that rush over you. I'll give you a minute. Pain, jealousy, envy and desire, stronger than love. If you don't believe that, try it out, think back. Pain and jealousy, those subterranean, base feelings, will fu**ing override love every time. They will sweep you up and burn you. They can undo almost anything that love can do, in a fraction of the time. They sweep us up in a frenzy. Or they can.

And then there is love. In the background. It's maybe kicked back at a corner table, watching all the base feeling and emotions duke it out in a bar brawl. And once they have exhausted themselves, Love gets up, leaves the waitress a fat tip, and steps over jealousy, envy, pain, over the broken bottles and bloodied knuckles, and walks out. Let's hope Love is the last standing.

I wonder if our capacity for love is constant. If we are born with it, like energy in the Universe, that it just changes form, changes its object, grows and shifts and swirls, reveals itself more and more, if we're lucky, but it's always there in us. I wonder if we can see it reflected back at us in or by certain people. We recognize it. We just know. That someone else's energy or love feels like ours. And we know when we feel it. Maybe that is the big Love.

Or maybe love, like energy, like waves, sweeps us all up in it and throws us around, onto shore, back out to sea. We are at its mercy. Maybe it just throws us into people, randomly, by chance, and our best option is to figure out how to swim, how to surf, to try to go with the waves.

I don't have a clue. Woolf and her waves. That's one small stretch, less than a paragraph, that I read sitting on the back deck, in and out of cutting the grass, drinking a Stone Saison. And I have to stop. And let her words, her waves, rush over me.

Wherefore art thou, fairy tale?

I'm not sure how the fairy tale goes now. Or if there even is one. Maybe we've outgrown them.

Over Thanksgiving, Robin and I stayed up watching Pretty Woman. Julia Roberts wanted the fairy tale. In that case, it was: hooker meets emotionally damaged billionaire, buys clothes, makes him emotionally whole, he punches Jason Alexander, and they ride off in a limo together. We're not sure about the happily ever after part; there hasn't been a sequel.

This story ran in The New York Times wedding section this past Sunday. It's caused a ruckus of sorts. Typical story: boy meets girl, they get married and have kids, hang with a couple like them with kids, boy and girl from the disparate marriages dig each other, fall in love, tell their spouses, move out, get divorced, get re-married to each other. Much bigger family. Brady style.

They did it for love. There has to be something for following your heart, right? You only live once and the kids will get over it. Half of their friends will have something like that happen, so they'll fit in anyway.

Maybe one marriage and/or kids isn't what people want, or should expect out of life, out of a relationship anymore. We trade cars in, we move from house to house, town to city, job to job. Change and transition is the new foundation.

For the past several years we've watched a number of friends, with or without kids, split up. It's rough. People whose weddings you attended, that you remember, that you thought were rock solid.

I'm not judging, just riffing. We live our lives trying to make what we think are the best decisions. The ones that will bring us the most happiness. Life isn't simple, or even linear. If you are "meant" to be with someone, maybe it's not the person you married and had kids with. It happens. Repeatedly. People change. Or they don't.

Maybe marriage as a bond, as a vow, isn't relevant. But it makes you worried to be married.

I write this having been married 11+ years and having been with my wife for 15+ years, each of which include my best and happiest days and experiences. Not all of these experiences--say finishing my first marathon as a touchstone--have happened with Robin, but all have happened because of, or in connection with, or with us being together as the foundation, condition, backdrop to whatever experience.

What we have together, including our girls, makes us happier than not being together. There are rough days or stretches, which we have worked through. Our intentions are to be happy, stay together, raise the girls, surprise each other, deepen our relationship and our friendships, find new ways to make ourselves and each other happy. Love, explore, live, together.

We want that to work. I hope it will. I like to think we both have a say in that being the case.

Funny, looking at different things that happened to bring us together: me failing out of college, Robin looking for a teaching job and having a friend from Penn State who was teaching in Tilghman Island, our circles of friends connecting via Tom and Nan and that we live in a small town, the fact that I had seen Blue Miracle in Raleigh and dug them and that all involved decided to go see them at the Avalon, meeting each other, being intrigued by Robin, different dates, staying up all night talking, moving beyond talking (but still talking).

We were Christmas shopping this past Saturday, without the kids. It was December 18 and it was a chaotic vortex of holiday shopping in Annapolis. Amidst the chaos and Christmas spirit, Robin remembered one of the first nights we spent together, as a new couple, looking for any and all time we could spend together, be together, get together (cue 70s-80s porn soundtrack music ;), then she asked, "Did you ever think it would lead to this?"

We laughed. I thought back to that time, those early days, the thoughts I had in my head about us, about myself, about being together. Did you ever think it would lead to this? "This" being us making each other laugh, together but better than then, still wanting her and looking forward to our time spent, our girls and watching them do their things--sports, playing with dolls, building forts, spilling drinks, asking questions, giving hugs--Did you ever think it would lead to this?

"Yeah," I said. "Actually, I kind of did. Or at least I hoped."

[I was going to end there (you can stop reading if you prefer that as a stopping point). But I realize that our case is just our case. It's probably not the norm. It's not everyone's story. It's just ours. It's a work in progress. But it's my frame of reference. And that's what you get on a blog that I write :). Add your thoughts to the mix if you are of the mind.]

Come in, we're open

Life is suffering. That's the basecamp of Buddhism and really any world religion or life response for recognizing shit we've all got to wrestle with.

We lose loved ones. We get sick or watch family and friends get sick. Our heart breaks when we hold our daughter or son as they cry from a fall or hurt feelings or being scared. We get divorced or have a falling out. We get worked over physically or emotionally. And if you are like me sometimes you just can't help asking, "What the fu**??"

We create or adapt our armor to protect us from or help us deal with suffering. A helmet like, 'everything happens for a reason.' A shield like, 'if it doesn't kill us it makes us stronger.' Chain mail like, 'this too shall pass.' And I think all these things are true.

But none of them explain suffering. None of them get at they why? or name it understandable. At base, it's just there, whether we build our lives to try to hide that fact or are able to have it out in the open.

Suffering sucks. And yet it's our response to suffering that defines who we are, how we live and how we love. It's likely that if we suppress or deny suffering that we do the same for our capacity to love.

I am not a sage. I hold no answers and make no claims to. But being open seems a better way to live than being closed. What sign we hang on our door determines who or what will come into our lives.

When I am open, grief can flow out when overfilled and love can enter to fill the room. The opposite is also true, but if I don't cling too tightly to grief it can leave again, making room for love.