Finding a Pot of Gold Here and Now

What to say, what to say.

Well, here I am. There’s a start. A year and four months ago, this place where I am now seemed all too distant to imagine. This new here. This new now. This new me.

And a new husband too? Well, that was unexpected. But then again, so is a vein of gold underneath a messy bog of dirt and debris.

I was talking to a friend about a moment in child birth that some mothers experience. The one where you have been contracting and pushing and straining for what seems like forever until the pain seems so powerful it will overwhelm you, until just when you think you can’t bear it anymore, just when you think your body will literally break, just when you are ready to totally give up – at that exact millisecond, you hear the attendant rejoice: “The baby’s here! One more push and he’s out!” From somewhere comes the last ounce – no, the last gram – of energy you can muster, and somehow it’s enough. Enough to bring new life to the world. You did it! How on earth did you do it?

Childbirth seems to be the standard for physical pain. “A kidney stone is worse than childbirth,” one says. “I’d rather give birth again than have that surgery,” exaggerates another. Much of Western, modern culture accepts childbirth as the barometer of painful experience. It’s sometimes used as a basic, universal measure against which other physical pains are compared.

Would it be fair to say death is the standard for emotional pain then? Or if not death itself, then loss? It just seems more romantic to consider that birth and death in their complimentary but sometimes identical realms are the standards for pain, in two of its own realms. Whether physical or emotional, pain is pain (just ask your brain). Birth and death bring it. And yet, it is also often the case that birth and death end it too.

So many paradoxes.

And…. Here I am again. Here I am still. (What continuity mortality boasts!) I haven’t moved at all, as I sit here writing. But I’ve actually traveled years and miles, wrapping my head around and around my experience only to find it’s not round at all. Not yet, anyway. It’s more like a handful of Jello. Just when you think you’ve got a hold of it, it changes form and slips.

I know, I know. Sand is a much more artistic representation of the idea, but my life seems more like Jello. So there.

Anyway, Jello does eventually take a form. Just takes some cooling off. That wait always seems like forever too. Jello also requires a mold to form right, not a clenched fist.

My new mold is set. My new life is born. I found a solid vein of gold beyond the muck and the mud. Here at this end of the rainbow, there is a pot of gold I didn’t even know I could access. My Kiss on the other side of the rainbow lead me to a treasure trove: I found a Kiss here. A new husband? A new love? Who knew? And I get to keep the old one too? A year and four months ago, this place where I am now seemed all too distant to imagine. How grateful I am that reality has made imagination obsolete.