…To prevent the anger from consuming me, to endure the nightmares that would follow her departure for another kind of love and life, I needed a new and very effective belief system, a new and powerful way to see the universe.
It was then I would look to the east, something I had always leaned toward. It was then that my readings in physics and the philosophy of science, my studies in anthropology and psychology, would take shape in a belief system where I could find peace.
Once the flame of anger and hatred takes hold of us, we burn and burn and burn. Perhaps that’s why Jesus described hell as a place where the “fire is never quenched.”
Call it desperation, call it praxis, call it hope, call it whatever works, but I dragged what was left of my heart and mind to Tibet first, and then to Thailand, into the belief systems of those who understood suffering but didn’t nurture anger as a response. To those who continued to love, even though the world said they should hate. To those who understood love does not own, but love just loves. To those who didn’t measure their lives in terms of how much, or how many, they could control, but in how much they could accept, and how much they could expand themselves to embrace what appears in the small view, as contradiction and failure.
The learning in my loss was profound and I am grateful, as grateful as I am for the new person the loss would create in me. Change is a part of life, and loss is a part of change. I no longer assume anything is forever, but just the opposite, that everything is a gift for as long as it appears.
In accepting change I see the possibility for greater peace, greater love, and greater compassion. Just because my ex-wife and I are no longer together, and I no longer own the rights to unlimited access, or the entitlement of her company (service), does not mean I have stopped loving.
On the contrary, even though we are on other sides of the world, and I may never see her again, my love for her perseveres, and I imagine always will, as I continue to develop in myself a love that transcends documentation, expectation and conventional forms.
“My heart is open to all forms,” ibn Arabi wrote, and mine is open for all time.
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