This morning I saw my husband off at the train station, wishing him well on his travels to a conference halfway across the country.  I’ll miss him a lot while he’s gone.

Last week we enjoyed an evening meal to the sounds of Van Morrison’s Philosopher’s Stone, an album, among many of his, that holds sacred space for us.  Through one of the most difficult seasons of our lives and marriage, Van Morrison was our companion, calming and soothing us by putting the sadness and confusion and frustration and disillusionment we were feeling into poignant, gently hopeful verse and song.

“Wonderful Remark” came on while we were eating last week, and we reminisced about dancing to it, years ago.  It was a night like many others that year, maybe right at the apex of the challenges we were facing.  Tectonic plates were shifting everywhere – in our individual identities, in the power balance of our marriage, in the foundations of our religious worldviews and vocational pursuits.  It was a painful and disorienting season, filled with so much difficult conversation that we found ourselves speechless, sometimes, clear at the end of any sense for what to say.

That’s where we were that years-ago night:  speechless, eating in heavy silence.  And “Wonderful Remark” came on.

To this day, I’m not sure what the song exactly means.  And I guess I don’t care.  All I know is it lifted us from our seats, and drew us into the living room where we began one of the most beautiful expressions of the tenacity and survival of the human spirit I’ve known.  With all that awfulness swirling around us, all that pain that made words turn meaningless and us hardly know how to laugh or cry, we danced.  We danced and danced and danced, our spirits, almost in spite of ourselves, refusing to be snuffed out. If there had been bad guys celebrating victory over us before that point, our dance would have shooshed them dejectedly away.  “We will live,” our dancing said.  “We will love.  We will dance on despair until hope can revive.”

I can’t help but believe that was a turning point for both us, one of those cosmic events that plays quietly out in the everyday.  One of those moments that cleanses and heals and changes everything, despite issues remaining, and pieces of us needing still to be put back together.

We survived, my love.  And well.  There’s no one else I’d rather do life with than you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 20th, 2005 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Books and Art, Healing, Mindfulness, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.