Live With Desire

Menu for tonight's dinner:

• Garden Salad with Homemade Raspberry Vinaigrette
• Grass Fed Buffalo Short Ribs braised with vidalia onions in homemade beef stock and a splash of red wine
• Baby Red Potatoes served with Raw Butter from Grass-Fed Cows

It really is true - real food just tastes so much better.

Posted under Food

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Posted under Uncategorized

"When these two life forces for individuality and togetherness are expressed in balanced, healthy ways, the result is a meaningful relationship that doesn't deteriorate into emotional fusion. Giving up your individuality to be together is as defeating in the long run as giving up your relationship to maintain your individuality. Either way, you end up being less of a person with less of a relationship."

"Differentiation is your ability to maintain your sense of self when you are emotionally and/or physically close to others - especially as they become increasingly important to you."

"True inderdependence requires emotionally distinct people."

"When we have little differentiation, our identity is constructed out of what's called a reflected sense of self. We need continual contact, validation, and consensus (or disagreement) from others. We develop a contingent identity based on a 'self-in-relationship.' Because our identity depends on the relationship, we may demand that our partner doesn't change so that our identity won't either."

"People whose identity is primarily dependent upon their relationship don't facilitate the development of those they love. They lose their identity when others change."

"Differentiation occurs by maintaining yourself in the presence of important persons, not by getting away from them."

"What I'm describing is mutuality. Differentiation is the key to mutuality; as a perspective, a mind-set, it offers a solution to the central struggle of any long-term relationship: going forward with your own self-development while being concerned with your partner's happiness and well-being."

~David Schnarch, "Passionate Marriage"

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Mike and I have started reading through a book called "Passionate Marriage". Makes for some nice evenings curled up on the couch. (And I'm thinking, hurray! We came up with something to do other than watch TV!)

The other day we read chapter two. There weren't any huge lightning bolt moments for me, as thinking about differentiating has become common for me in the two years since first reading this book. But the thought that kept hitting me over and over was:

This is really hard.

• It is hard not to need others to validate you.
• It is hard not to need others to understand you.
• It is hard not to expect people to want to hear everything about your life and tell you everything about theirs.
• It is hard to let people be who they are, and not who you expect them to be, or want them to be, or who they were yesterday.
• It is hard to let relationships change and not try to make them what they used to be.
• It is hard to disagree openly with someone who is emotionally charged about a topic that you have a different perspective on.
• It is hard not to define yourself by who you are in relation to others - whether a spouse, a child, or a friend.

Mutuality is hard. Intimacy - knowing yourself and freely offering yourself - is hard. It's much easier to settle into expectations and needs and demands. Unfortunately those are the very things that kill true intimacy, true knowledge of yourself and of another person. Maybe that's why, throughout history, we've often set up expectations of what "role" we are to play in life. In the Christian tradition, it's the whole  "man-as-leader/woman-as-follower" thing. Rather than mutuality, each spouse simply interacts on the basis of what is expected of them. They define themselves by how well they fulfill that role in relation to the other person.

The same sort of pathology can be seen in any relationship…two people who settle into a way of doing certain thing to fulfill certain expectations. The mystery of who I am, who this other person is - it's all negated for the easier path of doing what's expected of me.

I've often wondered, in the almost-two-years since we got married, why everyone says that marriage is so hard. We've been lucky in many respects, and married life is blissful. Not that we don't have tough conversations every now and again, but it really doesn't feel like marriage itself is hard.

What is hard, I think, is the work that we have to do on ourselves. We have to work at our own personal growth, our own personal identity. We have to work at differentiating, freely offering, walking together in mutuality. We have to work to be grown-ups, and let go of any and all expectations we have of the other person to fulfill all of our needs or fill a certain "role" in our life.

It's a hell of a lot easier to just read some book about what my role as a woman is, what his role as a man is, and strive to do the right things.

Much harder to figure yourself out, think things through, and become fully yourself while walking in close relationship with another person.

But also so much more worth it.

Posted under Books, God, Life, Musings, Womanhood

Typepad just ate a blog post of mine as I was trying to publish it. This has never happened before. Now I'm REALLY going to switch to Wordpress. Ugh.

Posted under Blogs

You.Must.Read.This.

Now.

Happy are the Spiritually Bankrupt

Posted under Blogs, God, Quotes

"I
want to love you without clutching,
Appreciate you without judging

Join you without invading,
Invite you without demanding,
Leave you without guilt,
Criticize you without blaming,
And help you without insulting.
If I can have the same from you,
Then we can truly meet each other."

~ Virginia Satir

Posted under Quotes

How many levels of letting go are there? How many layers of giving
up this war with reality, surrendering the compulsive daily movement
meant to reassure ourselves that we are doing something that will "make
a difference." I have dropped down below surface layers of hanging on
and pulling away, but I am still miles from the bedrock of being. But
ideas of time and distance do not really apply here. Willingness and
grace melt ceaseless struggle in an instant. The gift of sweet
surrender meets all resistance like sunlight dissolving a whisp of
cloud in the clear blue sky. And it is a gift, this surrendering, not
something any "I" can achieve or make happen, a generosity, a
continuous flowing toward me whether I am mindful or forgetting, at my
best or my worst or- more often- somewhere in between.

Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Posted under Quotes

An encounter with a friend a while back left me thinking about choices…specifically the power we all hold, in our choices, to determine the course our life takes. We live in era of unprecedented freedom in that regard. In former times, people just had to do what was necessary to survive and put food on the table. Today, most of us in the Western world don't have that problem. Instead we face many choices - about education, careers, hobbies, who to marry, whether or not to stay married, how many kids we want to have and when, etc.

I read Kelly's post the other day about how she didn't grow up to be the person she wanted to be, about how her life has turned out so differently than planned…and she is discontent.

As I was reading I was thinking something along the lines of…"Hmm, my life has pretty much gone according to plan.."

And yet I, too, am discontent.

My "plan" for my life, of course, has already morphed a few times by now.

When I was a kid, I thought I had life all figured out: what I wanted
to be, how it was going to happen, what it was going to look like. One
choice at a time, my life took on a different shape than I ever
imagined at the age of 12, which was the last time I really knew everything. I grew up a "good homeschooley girl" whose goal was to be a
wife and mom; college wasn't in the picture until halfway through high
school, when I realized that the truth of the matter was that I loved
the violin and really didn't want to get married and start producing
babies when I was 19. So I went to college. Upon graduating, still not
married or engaged or even dating, I expected that I would start
teaching violin lessons and (hopefully) get married before too long.
Instead, an offer to go to Germany for nine months showed up on my
door. In the face of a lot of questions and fears (how am I going to
pay off my student debt? what if I hate it?), I ended up deciding to
go, largely influenced by my friend Brian, who asked me a very simple
question: "What story do you want to read?"

I think that was the first moment where I started thinking about the creative power we have in our own lives.

When I got back from Germany, I didn't know that a few months later I would start dating my now-husband. I decided I missed school and wanted to pursue grad school. It didn't work out, largely because I had undiagnosed health issues that kept me from being 100% during the preparation and audition cycle.

I started my violin studio.

Almost two years later I got married.

No kids yet, but I'm sure they'll come in time.

See? According to plan. But…so what? Is this, just this, the life I want? I've felt bound, in a way, not just by what I previously thought I wanted, but by being sick. There are so many things I can't do right now that I want to do - I want to go dancing, I want to go hiking and camping, I want to explore the world. I want to write books. I still want to go to grad school…for music AND maybe for psychology or theology. I want to play my violin for people, not just teach it. The thought of which makes me very tired right now. But I still want it.

There are so many things I want. And so many things I don't think I've let myself want.

I've been struck recently with the tendency many of us have to treat life as something that happens to us. We are practical fatalists, making choices when we absolutely must…but generally avoiding them at all costs, preferring to wait and see what happens, take what comes. So we stay in a bad marriage or bad job, seemingly unable to make the choices that could transform our present situation. Worse, we often think of our circumstances as something we have no control over, rather than a reality we helped choose to create.

Certainly there are things that happen to us that we have no control over. Victims of abuse or natural disasters do not choose their lot. But too many victims of abuse refuse to walk away from their abuser, and too many of us likewise refuse to acknowledge the choices we do have, even when life is being shitty.

It is true that God is sovereign, and is the ultimate Author of our story, but I think sometimes we take this truth too far and begin living like fatalists who believe all the choices have already been made for us. Rather than accepting responsibility for the choices we make that influence the way the story is written, it's easy to start behaving like victims - victims of the choices other people make, and even victims of "God's will."

There is such a thing as true victimhood - the child who is abused, the woman who is raped, the member of a religious group who experiences spiritual abuse. They did not choose those things and are in no way responsible for the abuse.

There are other things we don't choose - like natural disasters and the deaths of people close to us.

But by and large, I think we have a lot more ability to influence and even change the story than we think we do.

I'm discontent. But I think I've stopped asking how I got here. Now I'm asking a new question.

What kind of life do I want to live, and will I make the choices that will take me there?

Posted under God, Life, Musings

I am planning to blog more. And I think I might switch to Wordpress, but Mike would have to help me because I have no idea how to do it. I just know I'm a) getting tired of paying Typepad, b) want more creative control over the look of my blog, and c) want to be able to import all my current posts (something I couldn't do if I switched to Blogger, which I also considered since Blogger is now much cooler than when I started using Typepad.)

But the most important thing: I want to blog more.

The end.

Posted under Blogs

"Integrity and integration are one and the same. You're describing a lack of integration between who you think you are and who you aspire to be."

"You don't think your way to a new way of living. You live your way to a new way of thinking."

This week, Mike and I started reading together through "Passionate Marriage", a book we read while we were engaged that has deeply influenced how we view marriage and relationships in general. Now that we're approaching our two-year anniversary, we decided to read through it again - together this time - and see how actually being married affects how we read the book.

One chapter in, and it is no less challenging than the first time around. Despite living with the concepts in this book for a couple of years now, I still struggle to fully be myself.

The central theme of the book, you see, is how to become more yourself, and hold onto yourself, while being married (or in a long-term relationship such as family relationships or friendships.) How do you share life deeply with another person - especially in those times when they might not always understand you or give you what you think you need? How do you grow in intimacy rather than grow in the number of topics you "just don't talk about" because those topics breed misunderstanding and offense?

A while back an engaged friend of mine asked me to define intimacy. I was well aware of the common ways we think of intimacy - knowing another person deeply, walking closely through life with another person. But what I said was this:

Intimacy is knowing yourself deeply, and offering that self freely to another person who also knows himself deeply and is freely offering that self to you.

Too often, I think, we think of close, intimate relationships as those in which we have a lot of common, those relationships where we feel understood, those relationships where we are constantly affirmed and validated.

There is nothing wrong with any of those things, indeed, they're all pretty nice to have in a relationship!

But I think we'd be lying if we said that our husband/wife/mother/father/friend/sister/brother *always* understood us, *always* validated us, *always* affirmed us, *always* got us.

And what happens in those moments when they don't?

That's what this book is about.

And that's still what I struggle with. I was telling Kelly last week, when we were talking about this, that the easiest people for me to talk to are the ones who affirm me throughout the conversation. I could care less whether they *agree* with me or not, but it's nice to know I'm being heard. It's nice, when I'm sharing something (especially something that requires me to be especially vulnerable), to have them say things like:

• "Mmmhmmm."
• "I hear ya."
• "How did that make you feel?"
• "That must have been hard for you."
• "You must feel really ___."
• "What next?"

Basically, anything that lets me know that this person is interested in what I have to say, is tracking along with me, and is "getting it" on a basic level. Again, I don't feel like they have to agree with me, I just like to know that they're not getting bored.

I think it's okay to want these things when I communicate with my friends and loved ones. But again, what happens when I don't get it? What happens when the person I'm talking to seems, for all intents and purposes, bored? What happens when we're on the phone and I can't see even their facial expressions and it seems like maybe they don't want to hear what I have to say (perhaps this is why phone calls are such a difficult medium of conversation for me)?

My usual response is to shorten the story, to leave out details, to finish quickly. If I think someone's not interested in what I have to say, I don't say it.

The problem is that I think a lot of times, people ARE interested in what I'm saying, but they don't show it or don't know how to show it. Meanwhile, I shut down, thinking they aren't really interested in me. And growing the relationship stops.

Re-reading the first chapter of "Passionate Marriage" made me wonder what it would look like if I just offered myself, whether or not it seems like anyone is interested? If I validated and affirmed myself, rather than expecting that from others?

I think I might talk a lot more.

And I think I might grow closer to a lot of people.

I don't think I'll ever morph into the kind of personality who just talks and talks and talks without ever being asked a question. But I think I can safely assume that my friends want to know me, and it's ok to just bring things up and talk about them without necessarily being asked. Even if those topics are hot-button topics or things that might not be popular. There might be some awkward moments, and maybe every now and then someone will even get offended or misunderstand me.

But I think that's ok. I don't want to be constantly crafting a version of myself that I present to the world, a version of myself that I think people want to see. I just want to be me.

Warts and all.

Posted under God, Life, Love Life, Musings, conversations