Hello--I just found this site, and this thread jumped out at me. My wife and I began our spiritual journey together at the age of 15, when we were classmates in high school. It seemed at the time (1967--The Summer of Love), that everyone was looking for... well, something very different than we were--that's what drew us to one another. Very early on in our friendship, we acknowledged to one another that our searches were identical--we both sought Love, God, and Self. We spent our senior year as Yearbook co-editors, working together every afternoon until late, when I would drive her home. But we didn't become lovers until many years later--when we were 20, in college, and had been best friends for 5 years already. We were together for 34 years--she passed from this life to the next 6 months ago. Were we ALWAYS happily married? No, of course not--life is change, and ours changed constantly, as did we. Our first 10 years were passionately blissful--we lived together in an ashram for 2 years, became teachers of meditation, devoted our lives to our search for Love, God and Self--and found the path was through devotion to one another. Our middle 10 years were difficult--house-holding took a firm grip on our life, and the blissfulness of meditative silence we'd enjoyed together gave way to car loans, mortgage payments, credit cards, dirty diapers and career advancement. Although those years were still "happy", the unbounded joyousness we'd had before was much diluted, and sometimes it was difficult to see where we'd come from and what our goal really was. Our last 10 years were a return to our journey--the children were grown, the loans paid off and the careers winding down rather than ramping up. As the house emptied out, silence filled it once again. In that silence, we were able to focus more clearly on who we were decades before--seekers. We returned to our spiritual path with renewed devotion to one another, and the blissfulness returned to our marriage again. During our final years, health problems began to beset us--My heart attack and triple by-pass, and her cancer diagnosis, and a year of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Yet, throughout those trials, we remained more than happy--they served to narrow our focus on the only things that mattered--finding Love, finding God, and finding the true nature of Self. We found a new, deeper, larger devotion and love than we'd ever had. After my wife's recurrence 8 months ago, after the doctors told us it was terminal, after we knew she had only a few months or weeks left here, our lives narrowed still further, but deepened as well. Our sole concern was to love one another--to find what we always knew was contained in our hearts--love, god and self. My wife completed her journey here 6 months ago, amidst a joyous realization that our love had allowed her to find what she set out to find. I remain--quite alone, not know what is left here for me, but knowing that faith and devotion, practice and study, silence and action will allow me to complete my journey and join my beloved. If your marriage is not "happy", look deeper, take a different perspective, because it's always there. I only wish I had those middle 10 years back, the ones filled with trials, so that I could value them for what they really were--just further steps of our evolution...
Michael
