Honeymoon

Well, my honeymoon with Butte and Montana is over.

You know how it is when you fall in love … every moment with the Beloved is filled with joy and every moment away from the Beloved is filled with anticipation. It’s a marvelous feeling.

And then, one day, you wake up and you see it all. You see that he picks his nose and farts, he has terrible taste in clothes, and his jokes aren’t really that funny. Like Titania waking in the morning with Bottom in her bower – you see that you’ve fallen in love with an ass. The honeymoon is over and the journey of your relationship diverges – there are three paths you can take…

You can sigh, look and around and think “well, everyone else is in relationship with an ass … I may as well be too” and you can fall into a numbness without love, passion, or connection….

You can focus on the nose, the farts, the clothes and the jokes .. the toothpaste cap, the dirty dishes, the poor taste in TV shows .. and you can fall into the horror of having loved an ass – anger, hatred, and volatile breakups are at the end of this path.

Or … you can realize that when you take the whole of the Beloved – the joy and anticipation, the laughter and long conversation – the farts, and the nose, the jokes and the clothes – and you can say – I love that ass … this is the path of a mature love.

And so – a few days ago I took my newly repaired car out for a drive far from Butte – and I found that I was no longer in raptures over the landscapes, the mountains, the rivers, the sky. I found that the unbounded joy had settled down … the honeymoon was over and I was left with a simple, deep, and quiet appreciation.

For me, this place in space .. and in time .. its not perfect. I see the good and beautiful – the bad and the ugly – and still – I love it. Not with rapturous vapors – but with a simple and solid appreciation. Perhaps, the best kind of love there is.