Doing something innocent, dangerous and wonderful all at the same time may be the perfect metaphor for understanding one of the demands made by a marriage of marriages: the need to live in multiple contexts, multiple layers and with multiple people all at the same time without choosing between them. A kind of spiritual and imaginative multitasking,

I may spend so much time assuming the mask of invulnerability and righteousness that I find it difficult to admit that I don’t know where this conversation will lead or whether my partner, if I let down this mask of control, will be still there at the end of it; if she will really love the one underneath all the protections.

Our refusal to have these conversations out loud, to take these marriages seriously, makes no difference; they will occur with our conscious participation or without it: they are foundational to human belonging. My refusal to follow my vocation to please my spouse will only result in my demanding of her, at emotional gun-point, all the qualities I

In closing off our vulnerability, we close off the authentic exchanges that tell us we are actually having a real conversation. Vulnerability is the door through which we walk into self-understanding and compassion for others. Being

I must learn to live at a kind of frontier between what I think is me and what I think is not me, so that my identity is more of a meeting place; an edge between past and present rather than an island around which the events of life swirl and move on. Even the pouring rain is part of my identity, though if I have the choice, I may move out of it.

It is remarkable how deathly afraid we are of any real quiet that might start to open up a spacious noncoercive relationship with the self or the world. Much easier to turn on the iPod, the laptop, the BlackBerry. In unmediated silence we intuit all our flaws being made abundantly clear to us and all our previous actions being revealed in their

One of the ways we recognize we are married to the right person is that we find not only that we can live with the person’s particular foibles, but also that we can live with the particular form of insanity we create together as a couple. Like a particular marriage, every work has its own particular rhyme and reason but also its strange

halt the flow of corrosive shame we have about our selves when we cannot get to a work we know we were made to do.

Though we must have vision it is important not to overburden our work with abstract expectations. My exploration of far horizons may not need a Jaguar XK 150 to find satisfaction in the world. My desperation for peace and quiet in which to do my work may not need a view of the mountains of Connemara. My expression of love and affection for my