Mortgage and Marriage

I choose to sell my house because I don't want to be locked in anymore to the commitments, obligations, costs (literal and not so literal), work, and constant repair involved in a mortgage. As soon as I had a buyer, I started looking at where I would live next. Some days I thought, I really want a clean slate, empty rooms, not even paintings on the wall (painted by ex-lovers, streaming red with aching memory). I'll just rent a studio, make art, collect unemployment and detach from my entire past. Oh so tempting. Then I explored intentional community living...A community just starting, out on Sauvie Island. I could build a yurt, meet and eat in the big house, work the land, sustainable living, a fantasy since my Sandy days almost 25 years ago, a vision from six years ago that I called the Place of Grace. Or I could join the established Lighthouse Community, an urban, Buddhist community just off of Hawthorne. The house is enormously spacious with a poetry stage and movie seats in the basement, an open flex space with just an alter and some pillows, and a modest bedroom with sunlight, a fireplace, and hardwood floors. But wait, I already have a community. I am already committed to Bridgeport. Granted I don't live with these people, but I stood in front of them four years ago and promised to give and receive through thick and thin, for better or worse, like a marriage. I can't sign on to another community, that would be bigamy, wouldn't it? Yet why do I feel the need to flee?

Typical for me to squirm in tight spaces. As Denise Levertov says, "Don't lock me in wedlock, I want/marriage, an/encounter--" Most traditional committed arrangements are too tight and rule-filled for me. I need room to flex and flow with the changing tides. I need to be able to say, "Until life do us part." I know that nothing is forever and don't need to lock myself in with a myth of security. In younger days, as soon as things got too tight, I split open and flew on winged feet to start another honeymoon of lightness. Then, three years or so later, I would be disappointed with the superficiality, the unsatisfactory nature of the relationship (individual or organizational), and think it must be time to leave and seek again. My longing has changed from a desire for light flight to a yearning to go deep, with clay feet, through all the scrapes and mistakes, dents and scars of loving and living, to the other end of community, family, work, relationship.

Rilke writes, "Like so many other things, people have also misunderstood the position love has in life; they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure are more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, precisely because it is the supreme happiness, can be nothing other than work. It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation."

So first I say, "Okay, I am ready to step in deeper, no more toe dipping." Again, Denise Levertov in her poem "The Ache of Marriage...two by two in the ark of/the ache of it." Or three by three, or 50 by 50, whatever commitment to comm-unity calls for. Now, what about authentic self within? If I am to exchange winged NIKEs for clay heavy work boots, do I not need to be fully of this earth, true to who I am? This brings forward, for me, the question of secrets and integrity.

Another reason I have fled community in the past is that secrets became too heavy for me. I cannot hold in secrecy and feel internal integrity. We all have secrets. How do others maintain long term relationships with individuals and community while keeping secrets? Really, I want to know. That's a genuine question. Is it a matter of semantics, renaming secrets and calling them a right to privacy? Is about saying only what is necessary, true, and kind? I've always thought the path to greater intimacy is through open disclosure. My cousin once said that it is impossible to reach intimacy in a group. Maybe this is why. I am particularly challenged by committing to greater intimacy in a faith community. Am I not expected to walk in transparency, light, soul-filled truth? How do I do that in heavy, soil-filled boots?

Help me out here. Let's dialogue for future blogs.