on the up and up

November 08, 2011 candacemorris 8 Comments

Wherever it is that Joel finds this unending source of love, to which he bestows upon me in such attentiveness, I must find.  I must locate this resource in myself.

You've no doubt noticed me writing a lot about marital stretching, musing on the pains and pleasures of a maturing wife.  I've made some sense of it, with the help of mental pictures and a patient therapist.  Allow me to share. 

For the last four years, I've been in a deconstruction phase.  First, I found courage to take apart family and not be afraid of separating myself from what I found toxic.  Then my soul directed itself to question all things religion, church, god and the Christianity in which I was raised.  After god, it was taking apart myself in the form of my external beauties and internal artist.  As if that weren't confusing enough, I then had to start honestly examining my marriage.

I began this process standing on solid high-rise, a weapon of destruction handed to me by the very things I doubted. Despite my best efforts to ignore the need to deconstruct everything I loved, I still I distrusted the stability; I needed to destroy it in order to test its substance.  The fear of hurting others in this process with my flying debris, or that I wouldn't be able to put any of this chaos back together, paralyzed me for much of the process.  I pushed through, but as usual, my soul didn't give me a choice.  Its message has always been very clear: Engage or die.

There I am, standing on this structure, swinging a sledge-hammer, reluctantly.  Finally, it's all torn down, all in crumbles.  My face is streaked with dirt and tears, and I'm petrified, "What the hell have I done?"  Boulders of what used to be my beliefs, my identity, and my relationships lie cast about in wild and painful destruction.  I'm sitting on a boulder, observing all of this.  I am so tempted to gear up and hastily put it all back together.  But what if I didn't have to?  What if they weren't mine to put together in the first place?  What if I don't have anything to do with it, oh goodness.  That thought sends thrilling relief through the spine of my soul.  

Instead of the impulse to reconstruct something recognizable as Candace, I finger through the pebbles and dirt. What I am finding is gold nuggets of self and gems of goodness upon which this new me will no doubt be built.  Some are remnants from my previous self, some are forged as a result of destruction.  

I was drawing this visual of me sitting on a boulder in my journal last night.  Joel returned from the store, and asked me to explain (it was hardly recognizable as my drawing abilities are laughable at best).  In an effort to glean from his abilities, I asked him to please draw me sitting atop a boulder in a field of rocks and pebbles.  He did so, but then the most beautiful thing accidentally happened.  He continued with the drawing, sketching a tree, himself in it, overlooking the deconstruction of my soul, communicating with the cosmos in his cerebral way.  He's so patient with the stars, the vastness of the universe.  Of course he could be patient with the vastness of me.  It's nothing to him. The addition of himself to this picture made me shed a few unnoticeable tears.

I had no guarantee that I would find him here, and I am tremendously relieved that we've been given more time to be together.