Follow the Donkey

Happy Valentine's Day, people

Note to my aunt Mary Ellen (and others who are just getting used to this platform): You can listen to me read this post by clicking the audio link right above this sentence.

Not long after my last post, I got an email from an auntie-friend of mine, a woman who took me in a few years ago after I went through a gutting breakup. Ricki Carrol. Right before that breakup, I’d given a talk at Ricki’s town hall about my first book, “Walking to Listen.” She reached out the next morning to invite me over for tea and by the time I landed in her kitchen a few weeks later I was, quite unexpectedly, in full-blown My-Life-Is-Falling-Apart mode.

Until that point, I didn’t know that being the one to initiate a breakup sucks just as much as being the one who gets the bad news. Might even be worse. I’d never had to be the executioner of a years-long relationship in which there really, actually was a lot of love. It’s the love that makes it difficult, makes it mean, makes it everything you don’t want it to be. If there was no love, it would be easy to walk away.

My girlfriend and I had a fight one night, went to bed with it, and early the next morning I left for a week-long hike with my brother on the Appalachian Trail. I couldn’t look Luke in the eyes for the first few days on the trail. He’d been there for the fight. He saw what it was, knew what it meant, understood what was coming. He held his tongue, but the truth was in his eyes, so I had to look down, look away, look somewhere, anywhere else.

But the truth, I believe, is like a dandelion or a cockroach. It will grow through concrete. It just won’t die.

“I don’t know if I want to be with her,” I finally said one night at camp, and this quickly became, “I don’t think I want to be with her,” and then, to my relief and utter dismay, it didn’t take long at all for the words, “I don’t want to be with her,” to fly out my mouth like little secret golden eagles I was supposed to keep caged inside, and god damn it those eagles were beautiful and wild and full of strength and I hated them for what they meant I had to do and I loved them for how they were here to save my life.

It’s not like my actual life was being threatened. Far from it. We’d moved in to a gorgeous rental homestead in the hills of western Mass together, made a garden, got a puppy, hosted friends and potlucks and ceremonies. Bought a rider mower to keep the big field mowed. Really made a go of it, really believed. Just a month or two before the little golden eagles flew out my mouth, I even thought I might marry her. I had to think that, in order to stay in the relationship, because I was sure I wanted to marry someone, and if she was not the one, well then what was I still doing with her?

The puppy died. Chronic kidney failure. The dandelion grew. The cockroach scuttled about, evading the rolled up newspaper of my wishful thinking. My mother moved in with us for a few months there (which, in retrospect, was a poor decision on my part, or an excellent decision because of how it sped everything up). Then, we had that fight (I think it had to do with me not having dinner ready by the time she returned home from a long day of work, but dumb little things like that tend to belie serious, bigger things beneath) and my brother was merciless in his willingness to just listen to me, mile after mile on the trail, and the silence of the forest midwifed the unfortunate, inconvenient, and heartbreaking realization that I had to be the executioner for this one. I had a dream, our last night in the woods, that my arm was gangrenous at the fingers and rotting its way heart-ward. I had a sword, but there was no one else around. It had to be me.

When my college girlfriend made the cut for us, nearly ten years before this more recent breakup, at least I got to hit the sweet smack of self-righteous indignation. God that felt good, to just hate her and rage. But now, breaking up with the woman who had said yes to making a home with me, who I loved but did not want to marry, there was no such pleasure. I just felt like an asshole. And yet, there was no way around it. I didn’t want to see what I saw, what had to be done, but I saw it, and saw it clearly, and could not unsee it. Having seen the truth, I had now to live it out. She saw it on my face when I got home. “What’s wrong?” she said. I started to cry, she started to cry, and we both didn’t stop for about two weeks.

Ricki served me tea in her kitchen. I told her about the breakup, and when I confessed that I didn’t know where I was going to live now, she said “Well, if you need a place to stay, you can always stay here.”

I lived with Ricki for about seven months. Her house is a work of art. It has a soul. It’s huge. Each room is meticulously curated. Every square inch of the basement bathroom is literally bejewelled (it took her one whole winter to do it). At one point it was a community house and they all lived off the land. I think babies have been born in that house. I’m pretty sure elders have died in it. All kinds of life has moved through those halls and rooms, but at that moment in time it was just Ricki. And now me, too.

Ricki Carroll, dude. She has a massive heart, and indeed, giant wooden hearts are carved into the sunset-yellow-splashed siding of that house trimmed in aquamarine.

So, anyways, after my last post, in which I depict myself as the somewhat clueless and bumbling captain of this newsletter, Ricki sends me an email that basically says, “I’ve got some feedback about your newsletter. You want it?”

And I’m like, “Yeah, I want it.”

She’s like, “You sure?”

I’m like, “Give it to me straight.”

And so she does.

You make it sound like you are floundering, cursing and being unsure of yourself. I see a lot of the opposite in you. Anyone who can listen has compassion, love, and a deep understanding of the human soul. 

Be the storyteller you are, your path lays at your feet and in your heart. Love yourself and show others your strengths. The strengths that have grown out of the searching, the strengths that come from your listening even to those with totally opposite views. Have confidence in yourself, stop whining and move forward into your powers. We have a lot to be grateful for even through hard times. We are not going to fix all the world’s problems, offering our goodness to others is a big start. 

By the way, you can through this email away, be hurt and never want to talk to me again. Take in anything that might resonate and no matter what I’ll still love you just the same.

Wow, right? I mean, damn. That’s incredible stuff. Would that we were all so lucky, to have an auntie-friend like that to tell us what’s up. I mean, I still think my last post was pretty good, but I hear what she’s saying.

So. A story for Ricki.

That breakup was in some ways the beginning of my life.

At that point, I thought the act of “following my heart” would only ever lead me into fabulous adventures, like walking across America. I didn’t realize that the heart you’re supposed to follow is like a donkey, and sometimes the donkey of your heart doesn’t want to do the thing you want it to do. Just doesn’t. Just won’t. It stops, stands there, knows something you don’t want to know, waits for you to know it, too.

You can fight the donkey. You can whip it and kick it and coerce it till it does what you command. And indeed, sometimes it will finally submit and slog forward, with terrible pain, pain we must numb or ignore so as to remain capable of living our way forward into this thing that we don’t actually want, but can’t let go of because the stakes are now too high to go back, or so we think. But the stakes are never too high to fall, and even the highest towers fall when they’re not built on the simple, solid ground of the truth, and the truth, for me, was twofold: I loved this woman. And I did not want to marry this woman. A difficult thing to realize for a man who did want to marry, and marry now.

The twofold truth guided me through it. I knew I loved her, which kept it kind. And I knew she was not my person, which kept it moving. I attempted to give explanations for my decision, but eventually these attempts felt less true than simply saying, “I don’t know why, exactly. I just know,” which was of course infuriating to her and somewhat terrifying to me. To not know why, but to still know? That is the way of the heart.

The donkey just knows what it knows, sometimes. Doesn’t need to know why. Just knows. I remember confiding in a friend about this baffling and terrifying clarity, and when I asked him for a reflection he said he didn’t trust my inexplicable certainty. He wanted to believe such clarity existed, but never having experienced it himself had difficulty trusting that I wasn’t simply deceiving myself, evading the more difficult task of simply being uncertain and accepting the fact that “partnerships are work.”

I remember going to her parents’ house to pay my respects. I remember her mother saying that same thing, that a partnership is work, and that if I wasn’t willing to do the work now with her daughter, then it would have to be with someone else someday. It would come around. I remember listening to the barbed arrows of her beliefs, watching them sail right by me. In the car after that visit, I scanned myself for any wounds, any ways I’d been affected by her judgements, her stories about me and what she thought I was going through. I couldn’t find any. I remember a strange outburst of energy upon realizing I’d walked through that volley untouched. I remember laughing and hooting and cackling like a madman. I didn’t have to care what they thought about me. I didn’t need them to believe me or understand me. That felt new, strange, free, one of the many gifts my donkey led me into during that season of rending and getting rent asunder.

So many gifts, but they’ve taken time to emerge. For example: She’s getting married this summer, and I hear she’s really happy with him. And it just so happens that the week after she gets married, I’m getting married. To Tana. I imagine I’ll tell you more about Tana later. Suffice it to say for now that I will walk through the volley of your stories about what it means for one person to be obsessed with another and say to you, crowingly, glowingly, that I am 100% certified-organic cage-free grass-fed obsessed with her. But it took that brutal cut, and all the cuts that came before. And it took so much more time alone after that, and more unbearable loneliness in that house with Ricki, and more time in the dojo of my doubt and fear when I left Ricki’s for horizons unknown. And surely it will take more from me, because one day Tana will die if I don’t die first and who knows what we’ll lose along the way, but it is also giving us what both our donkey hearts always knew was there waiting for us, and I don’t make my donkey go where it doesn’t want to go anymore, or at least not for too long anyway, and she doesn’t either. Tonight, they’re taking us out to dinner.

Happy Valentine’s Day, people. May your hearts get broken wide open, gloriously shattered and forged and clarified. May your hearts be revered and respected for their delicacy and fortitude. May we fertilize the dandelions, let the cockroaches be, and follow the donkey forever.