The Unclad Soul

The Sundance Now, BBC series, The Split, brilliantly captures the emotions, heartache, messiness, and collapse of relationships both in marriage and divorce. I recently subscribed to Sundance Now and while browsing the program selections found this gem. Marriage has got to be one of the most complicated of human relationships we will ever enter. Society, Church, and Hollywood, have too often created an illusion surrounding marriage that simply does not exist in reality. Marriage is hard work. Most relationships are. But marriage requires a stubborn love, a willingness to change and grow, an unconditional acceptance of the other in all of their character flaws, irritating habits, stubbornness, sensitivity to criticism, and well, just being a human being. The idea that we can be married a lifetime is a lovely concept, but life has a way of interrupting things, and staying together to the end is not for everyone. I have often suggested to friends there ought to be ter

I want to run along the ocean and feel the waves wash over my feet erasing my footprints in the sand I want to skydive and sense myself falling watching the landscape below me seeing everything so clearly so cleanly until I love it all more than ever before I want to play guitar in an old bar and sing on a wooden stage with a drink at my feet making music that turns the crowd toward their dreams until all the hurts in the room melt in tears I want to write beautiful lines and put them in a book where the pages burn with longing and the reader sighs and blinks and walks toward a lost love until all of self is whole again I want to stand on a mountain ridge where the sun spreads light on slow moving cattle below where the Alfalfa smells sweet and the sky is a cloudless blue I want to ride a galloping horse in an open field until the air stings my eyes and I hear the pounding of the horse’s hooves and feel that floating that comes when you’re carried by forces beyond you and yo