The Two of Us, Maastricht, the Netherlands, 2004
I’m on a major Ferris wheel these days as what would have been my and Martijn’s 15th wedding anniversary on Valentine’s Day, February 14th approaches. I am feeling isolated and very under utilized. I often feel lost and what I imagine is depressed, needing to pull myself into any meaningful activity.
The missing of Martijn’s human presence is visceral, cutting deep into my stomach where it feels as though there is a gapping hungry hole never never to be filled again. I miss the balance, love and perspective he gave me, the unconditional love that I’d searched a lifetime for, found and lost. It is never enough for me to acknowledge that ‘at least I had such a love’ when ‘so many others never experience it’ – the mantra of good friends with good intentions.
Yet, I know that is all I can do, accept where I am now, and try to make sense of what I have and what I’ve lost, and move forward in this life with dignity.
I do need to find a place for me to contribute to the ‘greater good’. That desire burns too brightly and consistently for me to ignore. And so I’m thrashing about trying to do so, trying to not let the sadness and hurt get the better of me, and to practice the Zen art of stepping back from the torrent of thoughts produced by my restless mind until I can see the joke of this deluge, see it for all its ‘tricksiness’ as Gollum in Lord of the Rings would say, and to instead find my inner peace. For without that peace I will not be good to anyone else, let alone myself.
If there is way/place/act that I’m meant to fulfill to help make this planet a better place for the seven generations out, as the Native Americans and other indigenous peoples realize is our task as stewards of the earth, I hope it finds me or I find it. I honestly invite my destiny and hopefully assume that when the student is ready the teacher will indeed come. He did before and his name was Martijn.
