This month Surya and I celebrate our 24th wedding anniversary. Like a yoga practice, a marriage is continuously expanding and contracting, lifting up and weighing down. Being married is something like riding a horse. Sometimes you trot forward and other times stall in place. Living together for many moons, the true colors of your partner get revealed. This necessitates that you whole-heartedly support one other to be just as you are. Each of us comes equipped with idiosyncrasies, little quirks and obsessions that, at the outset of a marriage, remain largely unseen. After thousands of meals, millions of words, and countless conversations, you have to hold space for each other, keeping in mind that no one is right, no one is perfect. I am reminded of the words of W. H.Auden, “Love your crooked neighbor, with all your crooked heart.” We must remember that each of us sees the world from a unique angle. When we expect that our loved one will process in the same way we do, we are bound to feel alone and unseen. And can we have the courage and strength to hold to our own uniqueness and not contort to someone else’s view that we be a certain way?
As with any living, breathing entity the most important thing is to lead a life of shared curiosity. Surya and I thrive, for we are both dedicated to the process of unfolding. We stretch our boundaries, wait, try to remain non-judgmental, and seek an always elusive center. Through the art of listening, we attend to our own blocks and barriers, humbled daily by the challenge to stay open. We are both on individual paths that guide us onward while at the same time, we share a common path of service. What holds us together is that after extending outward to touch the lives of others we always return to the hearth of love in the home of our being.
Marriage is a bit like theatre. Like players in a drama, it is essential to give and take stage, to wait while lines are delivered, and have good timing. Sometimes, helpless to release a tangled conflict or heal a wound, the most we can do is bear witness to each other’s pain. As practitioners on the path of transformation, we try to remind ourselves that neither of us is in command, that we live at the threshold of an unfathomable mystery and that all we do–watching Netflix, sharing tahini toast in the morning, raising our child–is part of the journey on the Way.
