Debt, Divinity …and a cabin in Cornwall

It has been a long and arduous journey since my last post in April. It’s been more than enough to live through it, let alone write about it and so a third of the year has passed unmarked. I wish I could say I felt the same!

Yet although I recognise that I am exhausted, for the first time in the five years since I discovered my husband was having an affair, I actually feel there is an end in sight. In this third of a year we have finally sold our family home in Scotland, after four years of trying and I have had the interesting experience of clearing several hundred thousand pounds worth of debt, mostly not my own. I now know more than anyone would ever want to about the many ways of moving massive sums of money without going over the banking limits…

Along with weeks of woman-handling property transactions and money have unfolded the closing chapters of a marriage… of what it means to unravel a shared life and to divide up everything from crockery to children. How can such a thing even be possible? And yet it has to be and it has to be done well, with as much grace and love as one can muster. One of the greatest temptations, I’ve found, is to allow oneself to be taken over by anger and blame and the accompanying greed for personal security and maximum spoils. It’s a little like being the Narnian character, Eustace, who in ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’ falls asleep on a dragon’s hoard and wakes up as a dragon.

As ever, the trick is to remain conscious, to remain awake. I have to acknowledge my inner dragons and sometimes I need their fire, their fighting spirit. But I don’t need to unconsciously let them take me over because we all know what happens then…homes get destroyed and people get burned. So I’ve sorted through the hoard but not gone to sleep on it. In fact, mostly I’ve given it away and ended up both a lot lighter and a little free-er.

Everyone makes mistakes. Don’t we know this really when we finally get tired of posturing and blaming others, trying to cover up all the shame and guilt and insecurity we each feel deep down about all the ways in which we too are ignorant and foolish, slow to learn and just plain wrong. In the end I’ve found I’m more interested in being fair than being right, because it feels better and it’s easier to sleep at night. When I picture or think about divinity, for me it is imperfect, co creative, evolving…a divine process of growing and awakening that everything is part of.

In recent times, for the first time in a fair, few years, I’ve really struggled to find a way to survive, to make ends meet and my heart has gone out to all the many people in this country and beyond who are doing just the same. At such times faith becomes a truly radical choice… not a safe, middle class Sundays only option. There is every reason to despair…. in the face of our own sufferings and those of our loved ones, in the face of the sufferings of the world from earthquakes in Japan to riots in London… but the choice remains to hope, to have faith. I choose faith over despair, like I choose fairness over blame, simply because it works…it means I can get up in the morning!

 

Recently, for the first time in many months, I sensed my life could start again to be about more than ‘dealing well with difficulty’. I sensed it could be possible to create again. I’ve bought an eco cabin in Cornwall with its timber deck cantilevered over the lake and could imagine myself and others going on retreat or having time to write there. We’ll see…