You’ll Be Back….

So many people move away from my home town in Indiana only to crawl back a couple of years later. When I moved away, that wasn’t going to happen to me. Don’t get me wrong — it’s a great little town! But it’s not the whole big world. That’s out there. By my observations, it was clear that two years was the hump — if people could survive in the outside world past two years, they were likely to stay out there. I made it 20 years.

I was hired to do camera work for a documentary about a fifth grade class in Rhode Island that had studied the Civil Rights Movement and was going on a summer Southern pilgrimage through various epicenters of the Movement. That’s where I met Sylvia; she was traveling with and observing that same group of children for her Phd thesis on creating a beloved community aligned with Martin Luther King’s principles of nonviolence.

After the trip I was hired to videotape a peace conference in Rhode Island and was paid with free participation in a two-week nonviolence training. Sylvia was there as well, and in the intensity of our focus on universal love at the heart of Kingian nonviolence, we quite naturally fell in love.

I moved to Rhode Island to live with, and then marry Sylvia, help raise her son and start a career as a teacher. Twelve years into my new life, everything fell apart — my life, my marriage, my sense of self. All of the addictive and self-destructive behaviors, that I had managed to make a life despite of, brought everything crumbling down.

The trauma that I inflicted on myself and on Sylvia could have one of two outcomes: Death or Life — giving up or turning inward in order to turn outward as a new person. This was true for both of us. In the next several years, each on our own paths, we found healing. In my case, I sought professional mental health support and worked to understand my behaviors. To rid myself of addictive and unhealthy behavior meant to let much of my ego — my old sense of who I was — die. The ego resists death (that’s its job) so this was a slow process.

In the 20 years that I had been away from my home town, my parents grew old. They needed me, and I needed to be with them, back home again in Indiana.

Seemingly coincidentally (are there coincidences?) on the eve of my move back to the midwest, Sylvia and I reconnected. This would not have been possible during the intervening years of suffering that I had inflicted on us. But now, when I finally felt safe and able to trust my newly liberated mind, both of us were able to open ourselves up to the love that had always been there.

So now here I am, back home, but not. Home was always with Sylvia. We have a lot of figuring out to do. I’m here, she’s there but our hearts are connected. I think my new life will be a hybrid of home town and connection to Sylvia on the East Coast. I don’t know how it will work, but I am done running away from fear and discomfort through mind-numbing behavior. I am here, now, and open to the unknown.