LETTERS FROM HOME: CLAIMING THE FLIES IN THE OINTMENT, THE HAIR IN THE SOUP

June 11, 1998

Dear Pat,

My friend C.C. and her husband have split up, though since they live in California they're still sharing a car.

She moved out on the spring equinox and was at first shocked by what she had done. But, she reasons, the late '90s seem a time of changes and uncertainties for many people.

"I sense it is part of some cosmic plan though I haven't figured out quite what the plan is yet," she writes in a letter announcing her new status to her friends.

She wonders if we are experiencing this kind of "major shifting about" in our lives.

C.C. has left us guessing about the circumstances of this upheaval. D.C., who doesn't know C.C., comes as I do from a line of people who stayed married until death parted them and is suspicious of cosmic shifts as grounds for divorce.

I argue that we don't know the facts much less the feelings involved. Besides, anyone who says marriage is easy isn't married.

And that would be D.C.'s point.

The people who probably have the most trouble with the adventure of marriage are romantics who wooed or were wooed with the intoxicants of flowers and fine words and soon find themselves face to face with mammoth yawns and unresolvable conflicts.

Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, acknowledges the problem: Life isn't the way we think it ought to be.

He wrote: "Generally we refuse to admit within ourselves, or within our friends, the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of the organic cell."

Campbell: "We tend to perfume, whitewash, and reinterpret; meanwhile imagining that all the flies in the ointment, all the hairs in the soup, are the faults of some unpleasant someone else."

They are our flies, our hairs.

Marriage is life's ultimate adventure -- physically, emotionally and spiritually -- and terrifying it can be. On some level, it can seem a threat to your very identity. The clarity of a monkish existence seems enviable, though I think marriage, not asceticism, offers the greater opportunities for enlightenment.

At those stakes it's no wonder some refuse the call to engage the other. When one goes on the adventure and the other holds back, marriage has ended. Perhaps this happened to C.C.

She has moved to a new apartment in Fairfax, a Bay Area burg known as the hippie town of Marin County. I hung out there one uncertain summer. Though broke, jobless and alone, I was more excited than afraid.

Each morning I would go to a coffeehouse and knead the "Help Wanted" ads for some sign that my prayers had been answered. And one day just before the next month's rent I didn't have was due, they were.

A month earlier at Yosemite, beneath the face of El Capitan, I had lain awake most of the night in my tent, wondering what direction to take my life. Arising at dawn and walking in a mountain meadow blanketed by a cloud, I put the question to The Great Outdoors: What am I to do?

When the sun appeared, the cloud began turning into individual wisps of white that floated skyward like ghosts departing for the netherworld. And an answer appeared in my head. I instantly knew what I wanted to do. Knowing is the hard part. The rest is details.

I think we all are part of some cosmic plan hopeless to decode. All we can do is try to fathom our own purpose, which is nothing more or less than to fulfill our promise.

When we do satisfying work, when we take ourselves seriously enough to play, when we show people our love, when we reveal more of our true selves to our beloved each day, we nourish our souls and return the love the cosmos has showered upon us.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.