How To Live A Good Life (or try our best to)
Reflections on waiting for life to happen, mothering the world, marriage and divorce.
Dear reader,
For the past three months, I find myself repeatedly thinking about what it means to live a good life. On my walk to the subway station in the morning, I see dad’s carrying their sleepy kids’ knapsacks. I hear little birds singing their morning song. A man with small round glasses sits in the window of the cafe on my block, reading his book, drinking his coffee. The flowers are blooming everywhere, and if I was not rushing to go-be-therapist somewhere, I would stop and inspect each petal for its miraculousness. I glance behind the reflection of a car window and see a woman with blonde curls that fill the driver’s seat, dressed business casual, staring at the stoplight with purpose.
I wonder if others are curious about what it means to live a good life. What does it mean to follow your own wishes—to even understand, for certain, what they are? I wonder if others, like myself, have found that growing up is also a process of discerning what our true wishes are; discerning what dreams belong to us and what dreams are inherited. In my early 20s, I believed the desires that I had were self-made — that they sprung organically from my own interests. Between that time and now, adulthood happened. More complicated decisions were made. Missteps usually feel like a good idea, or at least “think” like a good idea, at the time.
Between 20 and 28, I have learned how to care for myself consistently in ways that feel radical. I believe this is a form of inner mothering and it is an important part of my good life. An infusion of a favourite iced herbal tea in the fridge to sip before bed. Sweating daily because I know it is essential for my psychological wellbeing and mental clarity. Learning how to have conversations that terrify me; learning how to open even when everything in me wants to close. Continuing to develop my own capacity to say “no”, to believe in my knowing surrounding what does not feel right for me. I generally feel good about who I am in the world. More importantly, I feel blessed to be a daughter of the divine forces that instruct, direct and influence the unfolding of all things. I feel lucky to experience my existence as a human person and I am objectively lucky, beyond measure. In Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, Amy Krouse Rosenthal writes:
When I am feeling dreary, annoyed and generally unimpressed by life, I imagine what it would be like to come back to this world for just a day after having been dead. I imagine how sentimental I would feel about the very things I once found stupid, hateful or mundane. Oh there’s a light switch! Oh! Oh! And look—the stairs up to our front porch are still completely cracked! Hello, cracks! Let me get a good look at you. And there’s my neighbor, standing there, fantastically alive, just the same, still punctuating her sentences with ‘you know what I’m saying?’ Why did that used to bother me? It’s so…endearing.
I think a lot about this notion of inner mothering, and I also think about the idea of mothering the world. Mothering plants, animals, objects; moving through our environments with grace and empathy; engaging in a degree of conversation with all that is. I live as the version of myself I want to be when I feel wonder or awe, and like Rosenthal, I feel wonder and awe when I allow myself to notice, to truly notice the chance happening of it all.
Sitting at dinner last night with my cousin, we are eating pistachio ravioli and vegan meatballs. I ask her how she is doing. “I am so good,” she says, smiling. I am not sure if she is being truly, deeply sincere in this moment, or sarcastic. The last time we saw eachother our conversation revolved around the relationship between stress, disassociation, depersonalization, and how we are both hate weed. “Oh, really? You’re good? Or are you being sarcastic”, I ask looking back at her, unsure. “No, I am actually really good. I feel so good. I’m so relaxed…four out of five days of the work week I see friends. Even if it’s just for a thirty minute walk. I love my job, I have nothing hanging over my head right now. And I realized that I’ve spent my whole life waiting. Waiting to move to Montreal, waiting to go to Thailand, waiting for law school, waiting for life to start. I am not doing it anymore. I am not waiting. I am so grateful I am healthy, I have time and I want to use everyday”.
Over the past ten years especially, I too have had many moments of waiting for my life to start. I now know—though I frequently forget—that life is happening right now, and it has always been happening. Waiting to move out, waiting to be an adult, waiting to graduate, waiting to get the right job, waiting to be with R. Before my separation, there was a waiting of a different kind. Waiting to be loved, waiting to be enough, waiting to understand what was wrong with me, waiting to figure out what changed and how I could fix it, waiting to go back to the before. Indeed, there is no going back, there is never any going back.
I sit quietly with myself and take stock of my ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows. It’s like opening a cupboard of memories. Some of the things I believed would make me happy did. In other instances, I fought with vigor for an outcome that never came. In relationships, I believed that the harder I worked at them, the more I thought about them, the more I understood the other and myself, the more they would evolve. Like any and perhaps all strongly held beliefs, there are seeds of truth in that. But what I have found is that some of my most difficult work in this world has been instead to walk away, to let go, to surrender. To join hands with the humble: those older and wiser who have already discovered, sometimes it just doesn’t work out.
When I tell people I was married at twenty-four, they assume I am religious (I am not, or at least not like that). The truth is that I would do most anything for the people I love and in my early 20s, I found myself in a relationship where our togetherness was contingent on marriage. Marriage was not necessarily in my vision of a good life. However, the “yes” of it all was easy for me, the “yes” to our story, the “yes” to our good life as one in relationship with each other.
We were two people who fell in love abroad. I met R in South America. We were both called there to work with ayahuasca and other Indigenous plant medicines. Our connection was instant, undeniable and sustained itself with a degree of intensity I previously thought fictional, for years after we met. Upon our first meeting, we spent three months together working in the Andes. As staff at a retreat center, our role was to support visitors through their ceremonies and to periodically engage in ceremony ourselves. Separately, but in our recent pasts, we had both attended the center as guests; myself as a 19-year-old working through dad stuff, and R processing the loss of his father to cancer. Now we were back, both of us, a few years later, to give service. Our relationship began in a place that bridges the spirit world with the material world—a highly charged energetic environment, one that is somehow nothing like the “real world” and more reflective of “the real world” than anything I have ever experienced.
During my first ceremony of the stay, I came to believe that R and I were married in a past life, and he had left me. This happening was based on a vision I had while drinking ayahuasca and occurred prior to the verbal declaration of our feelings for one another. I pulled aside a worker and requested someone go get him, wake him if need be (it was the middle of the night) — I need him, I said. Thirty minutes later R and I sat together on a cedar bench under the stars. We were strangers to each other, only having met one week ago, but I was beyond taken with him. I had come to South America to be of service, and to also be in my own experience; falling in love was not in my cards and I was scared—scared that an unrequited love would hijack my experience. I shared my feelings with him brashly, earnestly, boldly, with certainty, and in a way that I have often been laughed at for. But I thought, as I often think, what is there to be but honest, when such matters are so undeniable. As far as I was concerned, my feelings for him were factual and vivid. In telling him my feelings, I held no expectation that he would reciprocate. Actually, I thought it unlikely. I simply felt it was important for him to know how I felt. It was important because no matter what, I knew it would be a loud force that followed us for the remainder of our three-month contract with the retreat. When R said he felt the same way, I could hardly believe it. Our friend, a fellow worker from Tennessee, walked past the bench and I said to her in shock, “did you know he likes me”? She stared directly at R, eyes sparkling, smiling. In her Southern drawl she asked, “You like her?”, curiously. “I’m kind of crazy about her”, he said. We burst out laughing, surrounded by the woods, under the moon, all of which seemed to laugh too, as they watched our story begin.
As staff at the retreat center, R and I walked alongside blue collar conservative Christian men having crises of meaning, young bohemian couples from Brooklyn, New York, engineers from Stanford, mothers who did not want to be mothers, fathers who did not know how to be fathers, lovers struggling to love, individuals suffering from cancer, skin issues, gut problems, drug addicts, alcoholics, the guy who designed a very famous animated gecko, young people seeking direction, brothers from Texas, a couple in their 80s from Cuba who made the walk every other day up and down the mountain to drink medicine together—among other eclectic people from around the world. At times with uncertainty, we supported individuals who had made terrible, sick, traumatic mistakes. I will never forget a shaman saying to someone in ceremony, what you did will affect seven generations, and the chills, the silence, that reverberated around the maloka. When someone chimed up “he should be in prison”, the shaman responded with no pause, “he is already in prison, can’t you see?”
Our days were spent baking loaves of sweet potato bread, shredding beets for large salads, picking rosemary from the garden to fry with potatoes, rising early to make giant vats of scrambled eggs with peppers, preparing gluten free rice noodle dishes, occasionally layering pasta for a lasagna, or cooking special meats and corn if there was a sweat lodge. We snuck ripe mangoes from the enormous pantry, spooned avocados onto toast and ate bananas smeared in natural peanut butter from a bucket that was well over 50 pounds. We prepared the ceremony space with flowers, candles, fresh pillows and blankets, fire wood and jugs of water. We swept up the ash from the night before. The lack of screen time meant we all slept well at night. I would close my eyes and simply open them, 8 hours later, refreshed. There was always a lot to do, and specifically a lot to clean. We washed all the guests’ clothes, swept, mopped, changed linens. We drank tea with honey all day and smoked hand rolled cigarettes. We got in trouble for taking too many smoke breaks. At one point, we got in trouble for being too in love. Although we did not so much as touch around guests, our managers pulled us into their office one day to say, there’s clearly something going on between you two, you need to cool it. I was intensely embarrassed by this and—given our avoidance towards physical contact when around others—surprised that our relationship was so obvious. From that day on we were prohibited from doing tasks together and forced to convene privately at a secret hammock in the forest that overlooked the mountain. Outside of our hammock meetings, we scrubbed toilets, daily, and hosed down buckets that had been used for vomit, first dumping the remnants into a giant hole. I became highly accustomed to seeing/hearing/smelling/experiencing every possible bodily function during these months. I did my best to envision the cleansing of the environment as a form of meditation. The purge of ayahuasca is both physical and spiritual. Gratitude, I thought, for the ways we can become clean, learn how to let go, release what is no longer serving us. After one particularly challenging ceremony, I wrapped an older woman in a large wool blanket. Would you like a tea? Maybe chamomile? She nodded. “Con miel"? I asked. She nodded again. I left to prepare her tea in the kitchen, and when I returned sat down next to her. For hours during the sweat lodge, she had held onto me, sobbing, screaming in Spanish about her son. I witnessed her, I stroked her hair, and I imagined myself as a rock. For hours like this she screamed, cried, and I held. It felt like we were in an ocean of our own together. The day changed to night. The ceremony finished, and soothed. We sat quietly on the damp grass, in the energy of the after. We sat in a certain kind of intimacy that is rare, precious, soft. I rubbed her back. She drank the tea. We did not have much shared language but it didn’t matter as we continued to speak in our own way, through the silence. After a while she looked directly at me and said, “are you a mother"? “No”, I paused, “not yet.” I was twenty-three years old.
My first night with R was in an attic that we lovingly called “the nook”. It was a ten minute walk up the mountain, to the top of the property where the hot tubs were. In the bathroom, if you looked up, there was an area of the ceiling that was not like the rest. By climbing up on the sink and pushing open on this area of the ceiling, you would find the nook. Some other workers, likely quite some time ago, had hauled foam mattresses and blankets up there. There were glass bottles filled with drippy white candles, one giant South American spider who became our roommate, and a container filled with an unknown solid that had been labelled in handwritten cursive as massage oil. To move around the nook you had to crouch, or crawl. When people came into use the bathroom or soak in the hot tubs, we overheard their conversations not because we wanted to, but because the walls and ceiling were extraordinarily thin and we might as well have been sitting next to them. In this little alcove above the bathroom, we exchanged gifts, celebrated R’s birthday, had our first sleepovers, and subtly escaped in the morning taking weird separate routes back down to the breakfast area so as to not be obvious about it all. One night in the nook I gave R a letter I had written him. He asked that I read it to him, and so I did. Speaking the letter aloud into our little nook universe felt like a spell. His eyes filled with tears. When I was done, he said with the utmost sincerity “that is literally, the best thing I have ever heard”.
I came to see my relationship with R as a ceremony itself. Time marched on and we transitioned back to our Western lives, him from Michigan, me from Ontario. We found creative ways to spend longer stretches of time together. I worked remote jobs as much as possible. My life was punctuated by flights, bus tickets, Facetime calls, and weekend trips. In the morning, I would wake up, look in the bathroom mirror, and thank God for the blessing of our relationship. Our bond was a sacred stone I carried in my pocket always, at times terrified to drop, to misplace or somehow damage. When I had nightmares or sleeplessness during this time, it was nearly always about R dying or getting sick. It was scary to love like that, to love in a way that you are scared to lose, and I treasured it. I was treasured too. One night I texted him at my sweaty Toronto studio apartment, “I miss you”. He responded, “I’ll be there in 5 hours”. And so he drove in his olive green Subaru, that Wednesday night, from Michigan to Toronto. At the time, I was a waitress at a popular brunch diner in Cabbagetown called Morning Glory Cafe. R would take the subway down (a surprisingly novel experience for a well-travelled yet small-town-granola-y American guy) to see me. During my shift he would sit at a table on the patio outside, eating breakfast while I worked. I loved making sure his coffee was full. I loved touching his back in the sunlight. I loved bringing him a drippy egg sandwich with avocado, bacon and potatoes. I loved when he would get up to pay and I would of course refuse to allow him. I was aware of how he was seen by others too — as a handsome, gentle, clear-eyed being. R had an ethereal quality to him. In moments, I felt there was something Christ-like about him. “You are so pure together”, my mom would say. I loved how he would pick up litter wherever we walked. One time at a bus stop in Buffalo, New York, a drunk homeless man approached us. I withdrew, avoided eye contact and could not make out what he was saying. The man put his arm around R, and without flinching R pulled him in for a hug.
I felt the way R treated not only me, but the planet, strangers, and my friends, set a new invisible standard in all of my relationships. It set a new standard for myself. I had always cared about being a good person, but this was different—there was a practice to the way he lived. He shifted the ecology of my life. The energetics of his care and love helped me to feel confident, self-assured, and safe. When I spoke about my desire to be a writer, to have a podcast, he said simply: when you speak, people listen. I have no doubt it will happen. I did not relate to the relationship problems my friends were faced with and at times, I became somewhat egoic — correlating the goodness of “us” to being more deserving than others. I felt we must have had a benevolent mission, something deeply important we were to accomplish together. Why else would God have brought me this man, who was just perfect for me, and seemed to arrive out of thin air?
R and I spoke about the possibility of starting an artist residency, or some form of a retreat center ourselves, but in Canada. I wanted to create a beautiful environment where people could come to unravel, to be alone, to feel held in nature. I imagined a small cabin stocked with essentials: fruit and vegetables that we would grow, maple syrup, coffee, sourdough, butter, eggs. I imagined bookshelves filled with the texts from writers that had led me back to myself. I imagined a desk by a large window with water colour paints, thick paper, pens, pencils. We agreed that it needed to be near some form of water, whether a river, lake or the ocean. R was interested in natural building and natural technologies—grey water filtration systems, composting toilets, solar. As a teenager he had worked framing houses and in construction. Over the course of our relationship, we continued to dream this dream, travelling only to places we could see ourselves buying property and building a healing space together. We stayed in Earthships, tiny houses, and I especially fell in love with the freedom, artistry and sculpture of cob.
One morning shortly after we got married, in the small green house we rented on Vancouver Island, R woke me up. Ever so gently he placed his hand on my head, kneeling at the side of the bed so our faces were just across from each other. I opened my eyes and could feel from the tip of each of his fingers an energetic buzz, like five rays of white light were entering the top of my head. I looked at him, wide eyed at the sensation coming out of and through his hand. When I sleepily found my words to describe what was happening, he smiled simply and said I just finished meditating. These sorts of normal/abnormal everyday magical happenings were not uncommon for us. At the small green house, we consummated our marriage in the ways that people who don’t care about waiting to have sex might consummate a marriage. I cooked for us all the time. We loved eating chocolate oatmeal breakfast cookies on the porch and doing yoga, going on hikes, watching the ducks in the park. On my 25th birthday, R took me to an Airbnb in Port Alberni, right on the ocean. The Airbnb had a big bathtub — something missing from the little green house. He brought bath bombs and fresh face masks for me. We laughed when we arrived and realized the bathtub was in the middle of the bedroom, with no privacy at all, somewhat defeating the purpose of having “me time” on my birthday. Strategically, the pictures on the Airbnb ad had not given away this part of the bathtub situation. I bathed anyways, in the bedroom. R went out and purchased raspberry beers from a local brewery. After my bath, we walked out on the dock in our pajamas. My whole body was relaxed from soaking in tub. The ocean there was still, like glass, reflecting the creamsicle sky. I had posted some pictures from our little getaway on my Instagram close friends story. A younger cousin of mine responded “this is such a nice vibe for 25”. And, it was. I was almost suspicious of how good life felt, how much my life had improved since meeting him. It was hard to make sense of. At times I thought of the words of my uncle Alex, if things feel too good to be true, they usually are. At the same time, I wondered how much of my fears were related to a lifelong feeling of undeservingness that I carried with me. I reminded myself: it is okay to accept love, good things can happen to you, you don’t need to be scared to lose this.
After our marriage, I felt blessed and honoured to know R unequivocally chose me, and I him. There was something kind of funny to me about being married so young, it felt counter cultural on some level. I was the only person I personally knew of my age who was married. Having attended an alternative arts-based high school, the circle I moved in was a mix of filmmakers, musicians, theatre kids, visual artists, writers, photographers, and unemployed twenty-somethings who either rented cheap rooms in the city or lived in their parents’ basements indefinitely. When I told people I was married, I couldn’t help but laugh at times. Who did I think I was calling this man my “husband” and being a “wife”? I had just finished undergrad. At the same time, our relationship had never felt casual or even ambiguous. From that first night on the cedar bench, we had chosen each other and never faltered in that choice. Well, maybe this is our second lifetime together, I thought. And in this one, he will stay.
During the pandemic, R and I became profoundly confined by the arbitrary logistics of modern human life: borders, citizenship, residency, and so on. Marriage was a solution we thought our way to, perhaps as much as it was a commitment. Although R had previously applied for an express entry program to gain residency into Canada, his application was immediately frozen at the beginning of the pandemic. Little did we know at the time, it would remain frozen for years. When the borders between Canada and the US closed, marriage became the only path that legitimized our bond in the eyes of our governments. And so it was, one day, in a tiny courthouse, that we were married. Throughout the pandemic, I felt grateful for the heart-led decision we had made. The whole situation was unconventional as hell, and that kind of suited both of us. We got married during lockdown, alone, in the reddest area of rural Michigan. Trump signs were pinned into lawns all around the cottages of the town. It was not until months later, on a Vancouver Island hike that R got down on one knee and gave me an incredible moonstone ring with little diamonds around the band. I exploded into tears immediately, and then began laughing—for a moment I had forgotten that indeed, we were already married. On the day of the marriage, our “wedding photographer” was a homely soft-spoken receptionist who happened to be working in the grey windowless office at the town hall. She happily snapped shots from the disposable camera we gave her. I couldn’t even get a dress because all the malls were closed due to the pandemic. I wore my red hair tied up in a ponytail. I had mixed feelings about the by-neccessity-casual vibe of our day. I worried that it would somehow brand our marriage with a lack of sacredness. However, I reminded myself that we had agreed to have a bigger celebration with family and friends, once the pandemic was over. The purpose of this day was basically to sign papers; papers that would allow us to cross borders to see each other with ease, and ultimately to live together. Truthfully, when a town hall worker printed off vows from the office computer for us to read, I was surprised. And yet, when speaking the vows out loud, tears streamed down my face. I choked to get my words out. I understood in a way I had not before, what the promise of marriage was. To stand by someone forever, in sickness and in health, whether rich or poor, whether it was difficult or easy—a commitment, to a commitment. I was not frightened of it. I was moved by it, in every cell of my body, the promise and the knowing that we would be there for eachother forever, until death. I believed in it—in our ability to make this promise—and I thought as I often did: one lifetime is not nearly enough with him.
Shortly after we moved into the little green house, we found out that the couple who owned the house was getting a divorce. They had built the little green house at the back of their property as an investment for their young family, a way of securing a stream of passive income. During the day, we would sit on the porch and watch as their two young sons ran around the house, tiny faces flashing by the upstairs and downstairs windows. While our story was expanding, theirs—or at least one part of theirs—was ending. We found out about the divorce because the husband told R that he was moving to Victoria to live with his parents, so it would be either his wife or someone else coming by to do any repairs. After the husband left, R continuously offered to help the wife cut the grass and to move bags of yard waste to the front of the house for garbage pick up. She rarely spoke to us, but we smiled at her intentionally and when we moved out of the little green house, I left three ceramic cups I had made filled with dandelions — one for each son, and one for her.
At times the energy felt dense around their home across the lawn from us. The boys wore Santa pajamas and elf hats when Christmas came. I felt the sadness of the wife. I was protected from fully understanding her pain because of my naivety. There was no way I could ever conceptualize the ripping, the gutting, the destruction, the emotional, spiritual and psychological death that divorce is. I saw no shame in divorce and if anything, I believed it was likely a good thing for all parties involved. Growing up as a child in a house with conflict and mental illness, I was envious of peers who went bowling every other weekend with their dads. I thought it was cool the way they carried an extra bag to school and had two sets of presents on holidays. I thought it was cool that they didn’t have to hear their parents fighting. I imagined there was less anger in their homes than in mine. In my late teens and early 20s, the stories I engaged with around divorce were mostly of women liberated and reporting from the gorgeous “beyond”. And so, when we lived in the little green house, where our story was rapidly unfolding just behind another couple who was closing theirs—I felt no fear of divorce, though I got married young and spontaneously. By my naivety I was bubble wrapped, but also by the deep embodied sense that I knew and could trust R. Although we had known each other for just under two years at this point, our relationship had been so strong, so consistent, and our visions for the future were so compatible. I thought of the ways many of my friendships had similar trajectories — an instant, undeniable connection, and then I thought about the ways these friendships continued on that way for 10+ years. The people in my life currently had been the people in my life for a long time now. I felt I could trust not only him, but in my own ability to pick the right person for myself. Also, my mom loved him and that counted for a lot. “I feel peaceful knowing you are taken care of, Hanny”, she would frequently say. Beyond these reasonings, I felt if there was anything I could do to support our family together, I would do it. I dreamed of our babies constantly, I cried when I got my period and I swore I was visited constantly by their spirits. When I prayed, I prayed that our babies were not lonely wherever they were in the metaphysical world. I prayed that they would wait for the right timing to come through us. If marriage meant we could cross borders and live together with ease, then marriage was the right choice for us and our future family.
Intellectually, I believed in the idea of marriage as a union with a degree of self-determination by each member of the couple. I believed the commitment of marriage was up to each person involved, the terms and conditions being mutually decided upon. I don’t know if I believe that anymore. The reality is marriage does not just exist between two people, and two people never just exist as two people in the world. Marriage exists within the greater structure of our society, our relational networks, our culture. It is coded subconsciously and consciously in all kinds of meaningful ways. It is also an economic arrangement. I believe I had the ability to choose what my marriage meant to me, and for us, to the same extent that I can choose my relationship to any other social construct. There is the choice or intention we have, and then there are all of the ways we remain helplessly socialized, impacted, shaped, re-enforced, punished, rewarded, neutralized, and so on, by the social construct itself. There are all the ways our relationship to that social construct evolves over time. There are all the ways that identities, labels or structures that we once felt a sense of belonging or kinship with may at another later time feel entirely ill-fitting.
Because on some level I has previously regarded marriage as basically a piece of paper, I did not anticipate the symbolic and ultimately very real impact getting married had on me. What I did not expect about marriage, was the way it created a domino-effect in my life; I somehow felt beholden to another way of relating to the world, of relating to my life, because of it. I was a wife, and I had a husband. The words felt strange in my mouth, though they were true. I never dreamt of marriage, and I don’t believe I pedestalized marriage as a romantic formation above all others, or a higher degree of commitment. Growing up, many of the happiest couples I knew were unmarried and in devoted partnerships with children. I did not feel that I “needed” marriage, or that marriage even meant commitment. I knew many couples who were married and had emotionally abandoned each other long ago—if anything, this is perhaps more of what I was familiar with as a “marriage”.
A few years into my marriage, when feeling trapped, I wondered why R and I could not simply “re-shape” the terms of the marriage to better suit our needs as individuals. I tried to make sense of the impact that our marriage, and especially the vow of marriage, had on me. I found myself thinking of the ways ritual is woven into every single human culture as a binding mechanism. I thought about the impact that ritual has on humans in general, the way it bonds, connects, transcends time, generations, families, can initiate wars or genocide. If something is symbolic, like a ritual, can we not be creative and change the meaning behind the symbol? I thought about how thousand-year conflicts are started surrounding the interpretation of books which are indeed just pieces of paper with words on them—symbols. I thought about how language can be the tool by which we subjugate or empower, and these are real, felt, tangible human experiences—even if the tool itself, the words, are indeed just shapes that make sounds and have definitions. I thought of myself as a child walking backwards into school as I watched my mom sign from her car “I love you”, touching her eyes, making a heart shape with her hands, and pointing back at me. Rituals, I thought, are like a symbolic tether. They attach us to each other, and they are binding. Maybe the symbolic is as real to our human lives as anything tangible.
Reader, thank you for taking the time to read this more lengthy piece where I share personal parts of my own marriage story, the ongoing learning of what it means to live a good life and the experience of going about a good life in one’s own way. I don’t believe a good life is one which is easy, void of pain, mistakes, loss or heartache. All of these parts make up a good life, all are permitted, allowed and belong. Leave a comment with any of your reflections or own learnings and have a beautiful day <3
-Hannah
Thank you so much for sharing this! As someone who is going through a divorce and is doing a lot of searching to understand my inner self and my relationship with the world, your words really mean something to me.
This is beautiful!