I looked into the mirror and found that the dust of time has softened the edges of old pains and blended the colors of old joys; as though every footstep were muffled somehow, walking through snow toward night, walking in the dust of an extinct volcano toward a summit. Everything had become quieter, from the head to the body to the heart; love had grown quieter, insisting less, and accepting less insistence. What once felt like threat now felt like old thunder, a storm that had swept the plains clean and rolled itself, complaint and all, toward the east. Where once there was the need for a father's blessing, remained the embrace of a father's presence.
The dust had settled in the eyes; I wiped them with my hands to clear them.
When you divorce, if you have done all that you could to remain in communion, the flames have softened with the mirror's dust as well. If you sit in silence and watch the pageant of memories dance by, you are reminded by the faces of old friends, by the small attempts and small human failings, by places and touches and the birth of children, of the truth of it all.
Not the right or the wrong of it…
Why is it so many become fixed on the last moment of a story, as though that single paragraph summed up the value of an entire book? Was my marriage a failure because we no longer will share an intimate life? Was my childhood a failure if, on my thirteenth birthday, I was not smiling and bright? Was the Kripalu Center a failure because its original spiritual leader departed? Would you say a flower failed when its blossom bows to frost?
Those whose eyes are blurred by the dust… whose hearts can't contain the joy and pain of living, they look at one turn of the wheel and say "The wheel has not moved", because the same point is touching the earth. But of course something has happened. You are now one wheel's-wide from where you began, and its travel is part of your story.
Not only is it foolish to condemn the rotation of the Earth, it also mars your heart. My partner, with whom I grew. My partner, who bore our children. My partner, whose name is upon these central chapters of my story, linked to joys I could never have imagined, and sorrows as well.
I cup my hands and receive cool well-water. I look down into the pool I hold, and see the shifting colors or the present, my eyes, my hands, my mirror. I take the water up to my face, and clear away the dust.