A week ago, if you were at White Water Six Flags and saw someone sitting a table in the corner reading The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd, that was me.

If you noticed that the someone was crying while reading and I mean really crying … not just controlled sniffles and an occasional wiping at the eyes but the full blown, near hysterics, snotty crying, yeah, that was me.

This book slammed me with parallels of my own spiritual and marriage journey. Now, you will read the book and might draw some wrong conclusions about that statement. If you know me well, you will know exactly what I mean. If you don’t, feel free to ask. My life is pretty much an open book.

Ever since I came home last week, I have wanted to write a post sharing the quips and passages that grabbed me and shook me hard enough to bring on those tears. I don’t know that I am up to much interpretation or adding dialogue to the quotes so I think I will just let them stand for what they are.

“I have come here not to find answers,” he’d written in his notebook that first year, “but to find a way to live in a world without any.”

Of course he’d taken the name Brother Thomas because he was the resident doubter, and it was practically a cliche’, but he took it anyway. He doubted God. Perhaps he would find there had never been a God. Or he would lose one God and find another. He didn’t know. Despite this, he felt God the same way the arthritic monks felt rain coming in their joints. He felt only the hint of him.

He was quiet a moment, watching a small egret fishing in the shallows at the edge of the water. “sometimes I experience God like this Beautiful Nothing.” he said. “And it seems then as though the whole point of life is just to rest in it. To contemplate it and love it and eventually disappear into it. And then other times it’s just the opposite. God feels like a presence that engorges everything. I come out here, and it seems the divine is running rampant. That the marsh, the whole of Creation, is some dance God is doing, and we’re meant to step into it, that’s all. Do you know what I mean?


“You know how couples always saw, ‘We just grew apart?’ That’s what I wanted to say at first. To believe that my discontent came from distance between us. It’s logical to think that after twenty years. But I don’t believe that was it. We didn’t grow apart, we grew too much together. Too enmeshed and dependent on each other. I guess I needed –” I stopped. I didn’t know what to call it. “What comes to my mind are ridiculous things like ‘my own space,’ my independence,’ but they sound so shallow. They don’t capture it.“

“I know, it’s hard to explain an impulse like that. The day I told my law partners I was coming here, they laughed like I was joking.” He shook his head and smiled a little, as if the memory amused him. “I never could make them understand that what I needed was somehow to be alone with myself. In a spiritual way, I mean.”

As he’d talked, his gaze had been on the twists and turns in the creek, but now he leveled it on me, “Around here they call it “a solitude of being.”

My eyes slowly began to fill up. Because I did understand what he meant, because he was offering these words to me — a solitude of being — and they were perfect.


How often did we do that, he wondered — look at someone and fail to see what’s really there?

“We all fail one another,” he said.

There was only so much I could say to her. I drew a breath. “This will sound ridiculous, I guess, but my life had started to feel so stagnant, like it was atrophied. Everything shrunk down to the roles I played. I had loved doing them, Dee, I really had, but they were drying up, and they weren’t really me. Do you understand? I felt there had to be some other life beneath the one I had, like an underground river or something, and that I would die if I didn’t dig down to it.”

I felt amazed at the choosing one had to do, over and over, a million times daily — choosing love, then choosing it again, how loving and being in love could be so different.

Each day we pick our way through unfamiliar terrain. Hugh and I did not resume our old marriage — that was never what I wanted, and it was not what Hugh wanted either — rather we laid it aside and began a whole new one. Our love is not the same. It feels both young and old to me. It feels wise, as an old woman is wise after a long life, but also fresh and tender, something we must cradle and protect. We have become closer in some ways, the pain we experienced weaving tenacious knots of intimacy, but there is a separateness as well, the necessary distances.

I look toward the window. I want to tell him. Yes, I’m coming back, Hugh. When I die, it will be your face I see hovering over me, whether in flesh or in memory. Don’t you know? What I want is you. What I want is the enduring. The beautiful enduring.

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