Marriage: Confronting the Dragons
My husband and I are approaching year 27 of our marriage. "How do you do it?" people ask. I've pondered that myself, and it seems that we erect the structure of our marriage on a foundation of what we confront when we deal with each other.
That may not sound very romantic, but it is a grand adventure and some really good work, when we do it well. We face tumult and challenge head-on, and, eventually, we make it through all that mess to the other side wiser and more resilient, knowing more about ourselves.
I can see why people don't want to go there; why they opt out of relationship after relationship. In having a disagreement, we forge bravely (and often with frustration!) into unmapped territory. We are explorers, and “there be dragons!” I find out what Adam is like, and I also find out more about what I'm like: often, I discover things I didn't know about myself. On occasion, many occasions, it turns out, I discover that I'm not as perfect or well-intentioned as I thought I was.
But through learning those hard lessons, through facing the nitty-gritty accumulating in the corners or hidden under the rug, we can wield our scrub-brush and soap and start cleaning up our act, both individually and together. Often, we don't even know what the problem is until tempers have already flared. Through our negotiations back and forth, we formulate the obstacle so that we can understand it. What's going on here? What’s the size and shape of it? We find a way to express it more clearly, so that we can both see it. Sometimes just knowing something more articulate about the problem, seeing its shape, edges, color and size, is enough.
So, we fight it through; we fight it through again a few months later. Eventually, as we continue our excavations, we can uncover a solution that can bring a new level of peace between us. The strange and miraculous thing is, somehow there is always a solution when we really show up. Sometimes it takes us years to get there. At the end of all that, we've changed. The house that we've built together, that we're always building, is cleaner, more open, more free with all that trash taken out and burned.
Thank you, Adam, for going there with me for 27 years! You have helped me make myself into someone better, stronger, more patient and more aware in the process.
Initiated as a tradition-holder in the Nahua/Mexican weather worker lineage in May 2003 by don Lucio Campos de Elizalde of Nepopualco, Morelos, Mexico, Erin Everett is a weather worker, ceremonial leader, and traditional healer. She is known in Nahuatl as a quiatlzques and in Spanish as a tiempera. As are many in this tradition, she was struck by lightning in her youth, which is a known calling to this path. A native of western North Carolina, she and her colleagues work with weather in the Asheville, NC geographical region. More information about their work, tradition, and teachers can be found at seedsoftradition.org.