Speaker 1: Happily ever After is about as real as faith without doubt.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers
Speaker 1: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
Speaker 1: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
Speaker 1: think ring true, And yet for many of us, our
Speaker 1: thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 1: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 1: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 1: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 1: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 1: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 1: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 1: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks
Speaker 1: for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Danny Shapiro,
Speaker 1: best selling author of three memoirs and five novels. Her
Speaker 1: work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, tin House,
Speaker 1: The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times,
Speaker 1: and has been broadcast on nprs This American Life. Her
Speaker 1: newest book is Our Glass, Time, Memory Marriage. If you
Speaker 1: value the content we put out each week, then we
Speaker 1: need your help. As the show has grown, so have
Speaker 1: our expenses and time commitment. Go to one you feed
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Speaker 1: these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to
Speaker 1: make the show sustainable and long lasting. Again, that's one
Speaker 1: you feed dot net flash Support. Thank you in advance
Speaker 1: for your help. And here's the interview with Danny Shapiro. Hi, Danny,
Speaker 1: welcome to the show. Thanks Eric, great to be with you.
Speaker 1: I'm excited to have you on a couple of different reasons.
Speaker 1: One is Jonathan Fields, who's a friend of both of ours,
Speaker 1: recommended you, and uh, you mentioned that you're also a
Speaker 1: listener of the show, so that's always wonderful to have
Speaker 1: somebody on. And now, after reading a couple of your books,
Speaker 1: I'm even more excited to have you on. So I'm
Speaker 1: glad you're here me too. So let's start off like
Speaker 1: we normally do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's
Speaker 1: talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there
Speaker 1: are two wolves that are inside of us, that are
Speaker 1: always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents
Speaker 1: things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other
Speaker 1: is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and
Speaker 1: hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks
Speaker 1: about it for a second, and he looks up at
Speaker 1: his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins?
Speaker 1: And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd
Speaker 1: like to start off by asking you what that parable
Speaker 1: means to you in your life and in the work
Speaker 1: that you do. Yeah, I love that parable so much,
Speaker 1: you know, when I think of, you know, feeding the
Speaker 1: inner wolf. Part of where I go with it is
Speaker 1: the way that in my life in the past, when
Speaker 1: I was quite a bit younger, I I think I've
Speaker 1: fed the bad wolf a whole lot more than I
Speaker 1: fed the good wolf, and very particularly in terms of
Speaker 1: the fear part. So much of the choices that I
Speaker 1: made were based on fear or anxiety, fear based decisions,
Speaker 1: and fear based choices. All the while I had very
Speaker 1: very good and strong instincts that I wasn't really listening to,
Speaker 1: or I listened to them in some ways. In my
Speaker 1: life and and not others. In terms of my writing life,
Speaker 1: I tended to listen to my instincts, but in terms
Speaker 1: of other aspects of my life, not so much. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that really changed enormously for me
Speaker 1: was probably about a dozen years ago, when I was
Speaker 1: writing my memoir Devotion. I began to really feel in
Speaker 1: a very powerful way the way that we human beings
Speaker 1: are all internally very much the same in terms of
Speaker 1: really what drives us, and that sense of a partners
Speaker 1: and a loneness and danger. Uh, and fear really just
Speaker 1: kind of practically disappeared, and in its place where all
Speaker 1: the gifts of the good wolf. Yeah, I think fear
Speaker 1: is a big one. And reading your books, I can
Speaker 1: definitely see a strain of fear or you know, you
Speaker 1: could call it Jewish worrying, right, you know, that sort
Speaker 1: of threads itself through your books. And I was kind
Speaker 1: of curious since Devotion was written, Uh, you know, it's
Speaker 1: been a while, how you were you know with the
Speaker 1: Devotion is really your exploration for a spiritual life, I
Speaker 1: guess I'll call it, and trying to reconcile your modern
Speaker 1: life with your Judeic history and trying to find a
Speaker 1: modern approach to spirituality. So I was just kind of curious,
Speaker 1: what does that look like for you a decade later.
Speaker 1: One of the things I think that happened with Devotion
Speaker 1: is that the publication of Devotion fundamentally changed me. I mean,
Speaker 1: usually and always the writing of a book changes me
Speaker 1: in some way. But in the case of Devotion, the
Speaker 1: writing of it deepened me and was a tremendous learning experience.
Speaker 1: But the publication of it also was because while I
Speaker 1: was writing Devotion, as you said, it's a book about
Speaker 1: trying to reconcile the extremely religious upbringing that I had,
Speaker 1: coming from an orthodox Jewish family, and having fled that
Speaker 1: and finding yoga and finding Buddhism and honestly a creative life,
Speaker 1: that that was and is very much a spiritual practice
Speaker 1: for me. I was worried when I was writing the
Speaker 1: book that I was writing a book that no one
Speaker 1: would read, because it felt so idiosyncratically me Um, and
Speaker 1: it felt like you'd have to be Um, you know,
Speaker 1: a little bit Jewish and a little bit Buddhist, and
Speaker 1: you know, daughter of a difficult mother and a mother
Speaker 1: of a of a baby who had been sick and
Speaker 1: a wife and mother who moved from New York City
Speaker 1: to rural Connecticut. You have to be all those things
Speaker 1: to identify with devotion. And I really thought, now I've
Speaker 1: really gone and done it. I've I've told such a
Speaker 1: personal story that no one will relate. And instead, what
Speaker 1: happened was pretty much from the day Devotion came out
Speaker 1: and people started reading it, I started receiving letters and
Speaker 1: emails and invitations from people of every walk of life
Speaker 1: of you know, um, every religion, every creed, every color,
Speaker 1: every age, both genders, all genders, you know, like just
Speaker 1: just everybody, uh seemed to be connecting to it. And
Speaker 1: what they all were saying to me was, You've told
Speaker 1: my story. And I thought, well, how have I by
Speaker 1: telling my story in the deepest possible way that I know?
Speaker 1: How how is it that I've all so told yours?
Speaker 1: And that was a profound shift for me. I stopped
Speaker 1: being afraid of public speaking, truly. I was cured of it,
Speaker 1: which is a good thing because I do it all
Speaker 1: the time. And it used to feel like, you know,
Speaker 1: a heart attack, you know, every time I did it,
Speaker 1: or I would have to medicate myself or I would
Speaker 1: have to you know, just do so many things in
Speaker 1: order to feel okay getting up in front of an audience,
Speaker 1: and since two thousand and ten, when Devotion came out,
Speaker 1: I can get up in front of an audience of
Speaker 1: any size, thousands of people and feel really truly at
Speaker 1: at ease. And it came from that sense of, oh,
Speaker 1: we are connected. What I'm saying, if I am really
Speaker 1: true to my own authentic experience in all of its complexity,
Speaker 1: if I'm really true to it, it is going to
Speaker 1: tug on your heartstrings as well. And that was huge. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's an incredibly powerful book, and I do think it
Speaker 1: does touch on a particularly modern malady I guess I
Speaker 1: would say, which is, as we go on in life
Speaker 1: and we start to look for meaning for a lot
Speaker 1: of us, if we look back to the way we
Speaker 1: were raised, that it brings up a lot of questions
Speaker 1: that aren't easily answerable, right It if just with what
Speaker 1: we know with science these days and with what we
Speaker 1: were told as children, and immediately create some sort of conflict.
Speaker 1: So we look there and we're a little bit drawn
Speaker 1: that direction. And then there's all this other spiritual stuff.
Speaker 1: I think spiritual but not religious might be one of
Speaker 1: the largest, you know, identifications of people these days. So
Speaker 1: you tapped in perfectly into a very modern malady that
Speaker 1: I think more and more people and you know, that's
Speaker 1: what I'm doing with this show, and I think more
Speaker 1: and more people are kind of going through that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure, I think I had spent years of my
Speaker 1: life and the time that I really fled Orthodox Judaism,
Speaker 1: it felt to me that if I was fleeing that,
Speaker 1: if I was fleeing the music I know, you know,
Speaker 1: and the rituals I know, and that we're you know
Speaker 1: ingrained in me, you know, that we're almost part of
Speaker 1: my DNA, that if I did that, then I wasn't
Speaker 1: entitled to have anything. And I spent a lot of years,
Speaker 1: all of my twenties into my thirties, with that sense
Speaker 1: of um, all or nothing. I have to be in
Speaker 1: the world that I came from and was brought up in,
Speaker 1: or I don't have a right to anything else. And
Speaker 1: and that was you know, it was okay for a while.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think their phases in life where a
Speaker 1: spiritual life doesn't necessarily feel front and center or the
Speaker 1: most essential. But then reaching my mid thirties and getting
Speaker 1: married and having a baby. And you know when my
Speaker 1: son was born, about six months after he was born, uh,
Speaker 1: he became very very ill, uh in a in a
Speaker 1: very terrifying way, and we were not at all sure
Speaker 1: that he was going to recover from this rare disease
Speaker 1: that he had. And I found myself constantly praying, constantly,
Speaker 1: you know, every moment when I was rocking him to
Speaker 1: sleep at night, I would be praying, and these Hebrew
Speaker 1: words would fly into my head and um, it didn't
Speaker 1: even have anything to do with believing them or even
Speaker 1: understanding them, but it had to do with the sense
Speaker 1: that I that I had to pray, but I didn't
Speaker 1: know who or what I was praying to, and there
Speaker 1: was no form for it anymore. And and I think
Speaker 1: that that was really the beginning for me. My son
Speaker 1: did recover, Uh. I don't think it was because my
Speaker 1: prayers were answered. I think we staggeringly fortunate. But it
Speaker 1: left me with that feeling of anxiety terror. Uh. Having
Speaker 1: a window into what can happen that is so scary.
Speaker 1: I think if you're a parent, probably the sense of um,
Speaker 1: potentially losing your child or losing your child is the
Speaker 1: worst thing that can happen to any human being. It's like,
Speaker 1: one of the only things I feel like I know
Speaker 1: for sure is that that's the worst thing. Any other
Speaker 1: loss is not that loss. And so having been used
Speaker 1: with that, then this sense of what do I believe?
Speaker 1: And then when my son started reaching an age where
Speaker 1: he could ask those kinds of questions, he started asking them,
Speaker 1: do you believe in God? What do you think happens
Speaker 1: when we die? You know, those kinds of questions, and
Speaker 1: I felt like I had to address them. I grew
Speaker 1: up with answers, right the people surrounding me had answers
Speaker 1: for how to live. And I didn't buy that um,
Speaker 1: and I didn't buy the US and them mentality of
Speaker 1: most organized religions. But I did feel that it would
Speaker 1: be a very beautiful and very important thing to live
Speaker 1: inside the questions and really explore uh spiritual wisdom UM,
Speaker 1: and open myself up for the first time to other
Speaker 1: wisdom UM, and not only to the language of my
Speaker 1: childhood or the religion UM that I was born into.
Speaker 1: And you know that I am I mean, I am Jewish,
Speaker 1: But does that mean that I can't read Thomas Merton
Speaker 1: or Tick not Han or Pama children or uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the list goes on and absorb the magnificence of their wisdom.
Speaker 1: Are they off limits to me because they're not part
Speaker 1: of the religious canon? You know? I think? I think no.
Speaker 1: So that was all very very present for me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think oftentimes the religion of our childhood is often
Speaker 1: the hardest to hear for us. Sometimes it's the hardest
Speaker 1: to turn back to when things are difficult, and conversely,
Speaker 1: sometimes it's the easiest. I like what you said about
Speaker 1: all or nothing. I actually pulled that out of the book,
Speaker 1: as as something that you had mentioned. You were talking
Speaker 1: about buying, and I don't know how to say the words,
Speaker 1: so I'll ask you to help me with the word.
Speaker 1: But missus masusas, you were buying masusas, and you couldn't
Speaker 1: just buy one. You suddenly felt like if you were
Speaker 1: going to get one, then you had to follow all
Speaker 1: the rules and get one on every single door in
Speaker 1: the house. And I really relate with that all or
Speaker 1: nothing thinking, and I think moving away from that has
Speaker 1: been probably one of the most healing things I've done
Speaker 1: in my life, is to start to recognize that tendency
Speaker 1: and moved to the middle for myself on things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was such a revelation for me. Uh that moment
Speaker 1: where I was with my family, we were in Italy.
Speaker 1: We went to the Jewish ghetto in Venice, beautiful place,
Speaker 1: and there was this store that was selling you know,
Speaker 1: beautiful judaica, beautiful artifacts and religious symbols and yet a missussa.
Speaker 1: For people who don't know what it is is it's
Speaker 1: considered like a protective object that is placed on the
Speaker 1: doorpost of your home to protect the people inside the
Speaker 1: home from harm. And it's a lovely idea. But the
Speaker 1: way that I grew up, there were missussas on every
Speaker 1: single door, not just the outside doors, but all of
Speaker 1: the inside doors as well. And then so there I
Speaker 1: was in this store and I was about to do
Speaker 1: this lovely thing of buying this one missussa from my
Speaker 1: home and you know, adopting one small piece of the
Speaker 1: traditions that I was raised in. And then what stopped
Speaker 1: me was, Oh, I can't do that. Wait, what's the blessing?
Speaker 1: I don't know the blessing. Do I need a Rabbi
Speaker 1: to come to bless the mississa? Do I need to
Speaker 1: buy them for all of the doors of my house?
Speaker 1: And the feeling that I had at that moment was
Speaker 1: all or nothing has always led to nothing for me.
Speaker 1: If my only two choices are all or nothing, I'm
Speaker 1: going with nothing. And then so where does that leave me?
Speaker 1: So so much of the exploration, not just in writing Devotion,
Speaker 1: but in the years following Devotion have had to do
Speaker 1: with what the Buddhists would call the middle way. Or
Speaker 1: you asked me before what the years after Devotion and
Speaker 1: and spiritual practice have been like? And you know, one
Speaker 1: of the things that happened when I finished that book
Speaker 1: was I really just wanted to continue writing that book
Speaker 1: for the rest of my life because I got to
Speaker 1: do nothing but stare out the window and think about
Speaker 1: spiritual matters and practice yoga and meditate and and get
Speaker 1: paid for it. Like I was, I was just living
Speaker 1: and you know, read great spiritual texts. I was living
Speaker 1: just an absolutely magically powerful spiritual life during the years
Speaker 1: that I was writing Devotion. And then I finished it,
Speaker 1: and there was you know, kind of a now, what
Speaker 1: how do I continue now that I'm not writing this book?
Speaker 1: Because I didn't. I didn't go on the journey to
Speaker 1: write the book. I wrote the book so I could
Speaker 1: go on the journey and you know, that's a that's
Speaker 1: a real distinction between certain kinds of books. Um, this
Speaker 1: was something I needed to do. And as a writer,
Speaker 1: the way that I do, the way that I find
Speaker 1: a way to do the things I most need to do,
Speaker 1: is I write about them. And so after Devotion came out,
Speaker 1: my son was reaching an age where if he was
Speaker 1: going to be bar Mitzvahd, we were going to have
Speaker 1: to get on that. Uh. And I had been trying,
Speaker 1: and I write about that in the book. I had
Speaker 1: been trying to find a synagogue where we would feel comfortable.
Speaker 1: And it was like a comedy of errors, like it
Speaker 1: just wasn't one. I could not find my home. I
Speaker 1: could not find a home for our family. Nothing worked.
Speaker 1: It was either too religious or too ecstatically weird or boring,
Speaker 1: or just nothing felt right. And and finally, one day
Speaker 1: when he was about eleven and a half, so children
Speaker 1: are bar mit sad at the age of thirteen, so
Speaker 1: time was really you know, ticking, and Um, I had
Speaker 1: this thought, and the thought was, I have been complaining
Speaker 1: about how this doesn't exist, and I can't find a
Speaker 1: synagogue anywhere within an hour and a half of our home.
Speaker 1: I've tried, it just doesn't exist. And the thought that
Speaker 1: I had was, how about stopping complaining about this and
Speaker 1: feeling victimized and bad about this, and how about building
Speaker 1: it yourself? Um, if it doesn't exist, you know, why
Speaker 1: not make it happen. And as soon as I thought that,
Speaker 1: I had become friendly with a lot of rabbis and
Speaker 1: a lot of spiritual leaders of different faiths. While I
Speaker 1: was writing devotion and I sent an email to one
Speaker 1: of my rabbi friends, one of my new rabbi friends,
Speaker 1: and I said, how would I go about finding a
Speaker 1: rabbi who maybe would come to my home once a
Speaker 1: month or so and I would gather whatever kids around
Speaker 1: that I could find, Just shake the bushes and find
Speaker 1: whatever Jewish kids or half Jewish kids, or kids who
Speaker 1: were interested in Judaism or whatever, and just have a
Speaker 1: really smart and fun rabbi come to my house and
Speaker 1: do something with the kids. And this was my friend Rachel,
Speaker 1: who's a rabbi. And Rachel said to me, well, what
Speaker 1: about Surrey. Surrey is Rachel's wife, and Surrey is also
Speaker 1: a rabbi. And it turned and I hardly knew her
Speaker 1: at all. And it turns out that Surrey was a
Speaker 1: middle school teacher and had raised a number of kids
Speaker 1: and bar mitzvad them herself of her own kids, and
Speaker 1: she was like, if you had looked in the dictionary
Speaker 1: for a perfect person for this job, there she was.
Speaker 1: And all it took was one email. It's that. It's
Speaker 1: that beautiful quote from Gerta. I don't know if you
Speaker 1: know it, but Gerta once he said or wrote, UM,
Speaker 1: if you want to do something, begin it, because action
Speaker 1: has magic, grace and power in it. And it's all
Speaker 1: I had to do was begin, and it all unfolded,
Speaker 1: and within a year and a half I had created
Speaker 1: this thing that was really meaningful to a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of families, Um and from my family. When my son
Speaker 1: Jacob was barmitzvat the barmitzva happened in a old meeting
Speaker 1: hall on the village Green in our town in Connecticut.
Speaker 1: You know, one of these like Puritan um meeting halls
Speaker 1: that certainly had never seen a barmitz But inside of
Speaker 1: it it was too lesbian rabbis performing the service. And
Speaker 1: the reason why that's important is because when I grew up,
Speaker 1: women were not allowed to touch the torah. Certainly not
Speaker 1: to become rabbis, never to read from the sacred text.
Speaker 1: All of that. Um, there was music. My son's a musician,
Speaker 1: and so am I. We sang Leonard Cohn's Broken Holla Uya,
Speaker 1: and you know, I played the piano and he played
Speaker 1: the ukulele. And there were readings that friends gave from
Speaker 1: Cole Ridge and Hannah Aren't and um. And it was
Speaker 1: the most beautiful day of my entire life. I felt
Speaker 1: that day like I had somehow broken something open for myself,
Speaker 1: where I had found a way to do something that
Speaker 1: felt genuinely meaningful, um, religiously rigorous in terms of my
Speaker 1: son actually learned the Hebrew and he read from the Torah.
Speaker 1: But it was also spiritually inclusive and rich. And I
Speaker 1: had people coming up to me after his barmits was
Speaker 1: saying with tears rolling down their faces, saying, I've never
Speaker 1: been to a barmitzva like this. But it was the
Speaker 1: permission that I gave myself, finally, after a huge struggle,
Speaker 1: but that I gave myself to open it up and
Speaker 1: allow for that all or nothing thinking to just go away. Hey, everybody,
Speaker 1: before you hit that fast forward button, I want to
Speaker 1: tell you about another book giveaway contest we're running. This
Speaker 1: is the last week for it. We're giving away Tom A.
Speaker 1: Sucker's book I Am Keats, which has been signed by him.
Speaker 1: So we've got five copies. So I will draw at
Speaker 1: the end of this week five winners from the pool
Speaker 1: of people who have donated at any level, and I
Speaker 1: will send you that book. Go to one you feed
Speaker 1: dot net slash support to enter the contest and to
Speaker 1: support the show. If you're getting value out of the show,
Speaker 1: if you compare it to other things in your life
Speaker 1: that you spend money on, whether it be a cup
Speaker 1: of coffee or a Netflix subscription or wherever you spend money,
Speaker 1: compare the value you're getting out of the show against that,
Speaker 1: and if you are getting some value, then go to
Speaker 1: one you feed dot net slash support to make a contribution.
Speaker 1: So go to one you feed dot net slash support. Now,
Speaker 1: thank you, and now back to the episode with Danny Shapiro.
Speaker 1: I want to change direction because I could talk about
Speaker 1: devotion for the next four hours. But you have a
Speaker 1: new book called Our Glass Time, Memory and Marriage, and
Speaker 1: it's really a memoir about your marriage to your husband,
Speaker 1: which is a beautiful marriage from the sounds of it.
Speaker 1: And I want to ask you some questions from that
Speaker 1: book that I think are related to some of the
Speaker 1: things we've been talking about. One of the things you mentioned,
Speaker 1: I thought this was a concept that is useful for
Speaker 1: marriages in particular, but I thought in relationships in general.
Speaker 1: And you talk about this idea of a third thing,
Speaker 1: you say third things are essential the marriage is what
Speaker 1: is a third thing? Oh, you honed in on one
Speaker 1: of the most important aspects of our glass for me.
Speaker 1: I think when I came across this idea, it originated
Speaker 1: in an essay by the great poet Donald Hall, who
Speaker 1: had had a really magnificent marriage to another great poet,
Speaker 1: Jane Kenyon, who passed away tragically quite young. Don was
Speaker 1: much older than Jane, and he's been left widowed, and
Speaker 1: you know, and elderly. He's in his late eighties now,
Speaker 1: and he's been alone for it almost as long as
Speaker 1: they were together now, And he wrote this essay that
Speaker 1: I stumbled across, and in which he described the third
Speaker 1: thing being something that needs to be central to all marriages,
Speaker 1: all long partnerships. And the idea is that there's something
Speaker 1: outside of the two of you, something that both of
Speaker 1: your gazes can look upon and share uh, you know,
Speaker 1: a passion, um, a shared interest. And Donald Hall and
Speaker 1: Jane Kenyon did not have children. He had children from
Speaker 1: a previous marriage, but they didn't have their own children.
Speaker 1: And um, he he allows as to how children can
Speaker 1: be a third thing. Um, but I have I have
Speaker 1: some thoughts about that that I would share. But he
Speaker 1: what he what he's talking about is he says, keats
Speaker 1: uh Dutch interiors. Um, you know uh bach you know
Speaker 1: he's he talks about the idea of training your gaze
Speaker 1: at something that is beyond you, that's in the world.
Speaker 1: And I found that to just be immeasurably beautiful. And
Speaker 1: I started thinking about couples that are in my life
Speaker 1: who have been together a very long time happily, um,
Speaker 1: and they all have third things. I was thinking about
Speaker 1: my friend. Actually I mentioned her in the book, not
Speaker 1: by name, as my eighty year old Buddhist friend, but
Speaker 1: it's definitely Sylvia Borstein, the great Buddhist teacher. And the
Speaker 1: only reason I didn't mention her in Our Glasses because
Speaker 1: I didn't use any names in our class. It was
Speaker 1: such a delicate little book. But Sylvia I sent an
Speaker 1: early copy of our glass too, because she's been married
Speaker 1: sixty years and she completely resonated with this idea of
Speaker 1: the third thing. She and her husband have traveled the
Speaker 1: world listening to performances of Wagner's ring Cycle, like that's
Speaker 1: a thing of their's. Another thing of their's are bicycle
Speaker 1: trips that they've taken for years and years and years,
Speaker 1: and and also bicycle together even into their eighties when
Speaker 1: their home in northern California, And and I was thinking
Speaker 1: about other couples, my in laws who had a beautiful
Speaker 1: marriage of of um sixty years I believe so sixty years,
Speaker 1: who m owned a real estate company together, and so
Speaker 1: in many ways, work was their third thing, but they
Speaker 1: loved it, and it was both of them and sort
Speaker 1: of outside of them, talking about houses, talking about the
Speaker 1: people who were they were selling houses to, talking about developments,
Speaker 1: all of that, and and so, but in terms of children,
Speaker 1: you know, this is something I was really thinking about
Speaker 1: because I see it around me all the time because
Speaker 1: our son now is a year a year away from
Speaker 1: going to college, and so we're surrounded by our peers
Speaker 1: of people who are getting ready to send their kids
Speaker 1: to school. And the thing about your kids being your
Speaker 1: only third thing is they're going to graduate, um and
Speaker 1: they're going to move away, and and way too often
Speaker 1: I see people then in that situation kind of looking
Speaker 1: at each other going, well, now what you know, we've
Speaker 1: raised this family, we've lost ourselves and our own passions
Speaker 1: in the process. How do we And then some people
Speaker 1: come together at that point and some people fall apart
Speaker 1: at that point. But that that sense of of the other,
Speaker 1: of um, the beauty of that. And in terms of
Speaker 1: my husband and myself, I think in many many ways,
Speaker 1: it's been writing. We're both writers, and so we talk
Speaker 1: about writing and reading and what we read, and we
Speaker 1: share our work with each other, and so even though
Speaker 1: it's of us, it's also outside of us and something
Speaker 1: that we're sharing and we're looking at together. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it's a wonderful thing. And the other challenge with children,
Speaker 1: at least can be sometimes there's differences in thoughts on
Speaker 1: exactly how to parents, so the children become a source
Speaker 1: of stress in certain cases, not a true third thing.
Speaker 1: There's not a lot of stress about how you appreciate
Speaker 1: John keats together in the same way, right, But it
Speaker 1: can also be an enormously bonding thing. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think in our glass. One of the things that I
Speaker 1: thought a lot about was because I was really thinking
Speaker 1: and writing the book about what it means to walk
Speaker 1: alongside another person over time, like how do how do
Speaker 1: how do we do that? How do we? You know,
Speaker 1: we we grow at different rates, We don't always see
Speaker 1: eye to eye, you know, so forming ourselves sort of
Speaker 1: towards and against and alongside and away from this other
Speaker 1: human being was a completely separate human being, but you
Speaker 1: know you're sharing this this journey. And one of the
Speaker 1: things for me to go back to that moment when
Speaker 1: our son was very sick as a baby, is I
Speaker 1: was so aware at that time that it could have
Speaker 1: meant that we fell apart. We were very newly together.
Speaker 1: We had a child within a couple of years of
Speaker 1: being together, and he was critically ill, and I remember
Speaker 1: at the time thinking, in almost a clinical way, like
Speaker 1: this is a statistic that I once heard somewhere, thinking
Speaker 1: marriages often don't survive something like this. And instead what
Speaker 1: happened was we really did come together in a very
Speaker 1: profound way as a team, and we we really truly
Speaker 1: never disagreed about what course of action to take. We
Speaker 1: never blamed each other, and there was a tremendous amount
Speaker 1: of kindness toward each other during that time, and that
Speaker 1: period of time is actually something that I think has
Speaker 1: sustained us during other more difficult times in our marriage.
Speaker 1: You know, you know as the years went on, where
Speaker 1: there that was something that we shared so powerfully that
Speaker 1: it became like a glue, really strong bond. You can
Speaker 1: definitely tell that through the book, the bond that you
Speaker 1: guys have, and it was really it's a beautiful thing
Speaker 1: to read to see how two people can come together
Speaker 1: and how how a marriage can work. It's not all
Speaker 1: roses and wine. But but I think what I was
Speaker 1: struck by most was kind of what you said was
Speaker 1: the coming together when things were challenging, was was really true.
Speaker 1: There's a scene in the book where you are in
Speaker 1: the car with Um that's your your husband in the book,
Speaker 1: and you guys are driving and I'm just going to
Speaker 1: pick up the scene. There's there's been something going on
Speaker 1: with you guys, and you say, I don't ask what's
Speaker 1: wrong or if everything's okay, I don't fill the car
Speaker 1: with chatter. I know that everything is both okay and
Speaker 1: not okay. I'm so glad that you brought up that moment,
Speaker 1: because that's another really important moment. That idea, it's uh.
Speaker 1: Actually to go back to Keats, it's Keats talks about
Speaker 1: negative capability, the idea of holding contradictions in your hands.
Speaker 1: It was so important to me to attempt to tell
Speaker 1: the truth from inside a yes, contempted but also real marriage.
Speaker 1: So the disappointments, the challenges, the losses, the you know,
Speaker 1: the sense of you know, great imperfection, you know, two
Speaker 1: imperfect people trying to build a life together. That's that's
Speaker 1: I think a definition of absolutely every one who ever
Speaker 1: walks down the aisle. And so that sense of things
Speaker 1: being okay and not okay, sitting with that, you know,
Speaker 1: sitting with that discomfort of or maybe even a comfortable
Speaker 1: discomfort like yeah, this is this is where we are
Speaker 1: right now in this car as we're speeding home in
Speaker 1: the darkness. Is complex and that's okay. Yeah. I love
Speaker 1: that idea of things being okay and not okay. I
Speaker 1: don't know if I could really explain it, but I
Speaker 1: do understand that feeling. I think it's not okay is
Speaker 1: in the thing that's happening right now is I don't
Speaker 1: like or in even worse than that, In a lot
Speaker 1: of cases, the thing that's happening now is a awful thing,
Speaker 1: and yet underneath it there's a deeper sense that everything
Speaker 1: is okay. And I was really struck by that, And
Speaker 1: I was also struck by the fact that you had
Speaker 1: the wisdom in that moment to sort of, you know,
Speaker 1: allow him to be where he was. I think that
Speaker 1: the way you're describing that is exactly my tension and
Speaker 1: an eloquent expression of that, because that sense of almost
Speaker 1: as you were saying that, what I envisioned was it's
Speaker 1: like a sea, like a sea of history and a
Speaker 1: kind of solidity, even though that's not a good metaphor
Speaker 1: with ce, but like a sense of a woven net
Speaker 1: of a backdrop of okayness that can therefore tolerate the moments,
Speaker 1: the times, the passages of time, even of things not
Speaker 1: being okay, or you know, the smaller not okay against
Speaker 1: the larger okay. Yeah. And I often think to me,
Speaker 1: that's what the spiritual search in the spiritual life is about,
Speaker 1: to a large extent, is finding that broader background okay
Speaker 1: while the vicissitudes of the world kind of happened and
Speaker 1: they are going to happen. And you talk about and
Speaker 1: devotion a lot the you know, the Buddhist teachers are
Speaker 1: always talking about you know, gain and loss and sorrow
Speaker 1: and joy and we all get all of it. And
Speaker 1: I think that's for me. What what has always appealed
Speaker 1: to me, particular about Buddhism, but a spiritual life in general,
Speaker 1: is how do I how do I have that background
Speaker 1: everything is okay, even though the moment to moment may
Speaker 1: not feel that way. I love that. And actually I'm
Speaker 1: as you're saying, that I'm making a connection between devotion
Speaker 1: and our glass that I hadn't really made before, which
Speaker 1: which has to do really with you know, in devotion,
Speaker 1: that sense of that I had had when I began
Speaker 1: writing that book, that doubt wasn't okay. You know, that
Speaker 1: doubt meant that I wasn't doing it right somehow. That
Speaker 1: spiritual journeys are spiritual enlightenment whatever that is, means that
Speaker 1: one doesn't experience doubt. And then I started reading all
Speaker 1: the great thinkers, and all the great thinkers wrestle with doubt,
Speaker 1: and I came to understand that doubt was an element
Speaker 1: of faith, that that faith is a struggle. And then
Speaker 1: you know, in thinking about our Glass, this whole idea
Speaker 1: that we have of you know, that's perpetuated by just
Speaker 1: the culture and the media and all that of like
Speaker 1: happily ever after, Happily ever after is about as real
Speaker 1: as faith without doubt. Um. A young person who was
Speaker 1: interviewing me recently said, I feel like Our Glass is
Speaker 1: a book that every mother of the bride should give
Speaker 1: her daughter, you know, before she walks down the aisle
Speaker 1: of like like almost a window into the realness of
Speaker 1: what a marriage, a good marriage really is like over time,
Speaker 1: you know. And yet you know, we we so often
Speaker 1: sort of waltz into these things with this feeling. And
Speaker 1: I look, I know that because I did that earlier
Speaker 1: in my life. I've waltzt you know, with with very
Speaker 1: little thought of, um, you know what it really what
Speaker 1: it really means to walk down that path. But walking
Speaker 1: down that path with someone really does mean that you're
Speaker 1: going to have periods of time of disc comfort and
Speaker 1: and maybe even of doubt right right inside of it.
Speaker 1: But that's okay, too. Brings to mind a line you
Speaker 1: have and I think it might end our Glass, but
Speaker 1: I could be wrong. So I won't swear to that,
Speaker 1: but it's a beautiful line and I thought it summed
Speaker 1: up so much of the book very well, and it
Speaker 1: was we understand that suffering and happiness are no longer
Speaker 1: individual matters. Tonight we will stay at the edge of
Speaker 1: the dark forest until together we are brave enough to
Speaker 1: go back inside. Yeah. That's another really really powerful moment
Speaker 1: for me, of that awareness that you know, that sense.
Speaker 1: There's a there's a moment in the book. Well, there's
Speaker 1: multiple moments in the book that really form the shape
Speaker 1: of our glass for me that M says to me
Speaker 1: early in the book about something insignificant, like a household thing,
Speaker 1: I'll take care of it, And it becomes this motif
Speaker 1: you know, my loving to hear M say I'll take
Speaker 1: care of it. Uh, Like, who doesn't want to hear
Speaker 1: someone else say I'll take care of it? Really um.
Speaker 1: And then way later in the book there's a moment
Speaker 1: where he's a leap and I'm looking at him up
Speaker 1: late at night and it's a rough moment for him,
Speaker 1: and I'm looking at him sleeping, and I think to myself,
Speaker 1: I'll take care of it, And I felt like I
Speaker 1: had arrived at something important and true, not just about
Speaker 1: my marriage, but maybe about marriage in general. In that
Speaker 1: moment of two people who are passing this sense of
Speaker 1: you know, I can carry us for a bit now,
Speaker 1: like back and forth between them over time, you know,
Speaker 1: and then those moments where there's someplace deeper to go
Speaker 1: and they join hands and yeah, walk back into the
Speaker 1: dark forest because there's more that needs to be uncovered
Speaker 1: or more that needs to be figured out. So it's
Speaker 1: moments of individual bravery and then moments of joined bravery
Speaker 1: as a couple. Yeah. I think that's beautiful, and I
Speaker 1: think that speaks to relationships in general. I that idea
Speaker 1: of sometimes it's me being the strong one, sometimes it's
Speaker 1: you being the strong one, and that over any good relationship,
Speaker 1: over a period of time, friendship, marriage, whatever, you will
Speaker 1: see that happen. And I often think it's the inability
Speaker 1: for those roles to change that causes a lot of
Speaker 1: problems in relationships where one person always has to be
Speaker 1: the strong one er I'm always the one that's in
Speaker 1: crisis exactly, and it seems to me that's where things
Speaker 1: fall apart. Another part in our glass. You're referencing a
Speaker 1: children's book that you used to read to your son,
Speaker 1: called Fortunately Unfortunately, and it is a mirror of one
Speaker 1: of my favorite parables of all time, besides the Wolf
Speaker 1: parable about a farmer and a horse and his horse
Speaker 1: runs away and everybody says it's bad news, and it
Speaker 1: comes back it's good news. Tell me a little bit
Speaker 1: about that book, because it's just another variation on that
Speaker 1: that's even more fun and playful than a farmer and
Speaker 1: a Horse. I loved sort of arriving at that as
Speaker 1: many of the best parables are, and many of the
Speaker 1: best children's books are, uh, you know, it's about so
Speaker 1: much more than the you know, the simple story that
Speaker 1: that it seems to be about. So unfortunately, unfortunately, this
Speaker 1: little boy sets out to go to his grandmother's house.
Speaker 1: You know, Unfortunately there's a storm, but fortunately he has
Speaker 1: an umbrella and he jumps off the cliff and the
Speaker 1: umbrella saves him. But unfortunately there's you know, I'm kind
Speaker 1: of making it up here because unfortunately there's an alligator.
Speaker 1: But but fortunately he lands on top of the alligator
Speaker 1: and the alligators, you know, and then he gets to
Speaker 1: his grandma's has fortunately, but he's lost whatever he was
Speaker 1: going to bring to his grandmother unfortunately, but they are together,
Speaker 1: and so there's this sense of you know, we never
Speaker 1: know and you know, Actually, as we're speaking, I'm sitting
Speaker 1: in my office in my home in Connecticut, and there
Speaker 1: is this piece of art that I have on my
Speaker 1: wall by my friend Debbie Millman. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you know Debbie. I was on her show once, which
Speaker 1: was a deep honor to me. So yeah, Design Matters
Speaker 1: is another another awesome podcast, and Debbie is also an
Speaker 1: artist and she has and of all of her work,
Speaker 1: the one that I have hanging in my office is
Speaker 1: like a big piece of note paper and in her
Speaker 1: handwriting in the upper right hand corner of the notepaper,
Speaker 1: it says this, just this, I am comfortable not knowing,
Speaker 1: and that's everything to me. Like I I look at that,
Speaker 1: and I'm comforted by that, probably to any times a
Speaker 1: day when I forget and I think I know best
Speaker 1: and I think I'm in charge, and I think I
Speaker 1: know what's right and how it's supposed to happen, and
Speaker 1: you know, look, there's there's a moment in devotion where, um,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm asked by a man who I don't know,
Speaker 1: perfect stranger, a reader of mine, to meet with him
Speaker 1: because he wants to talk to me. Is very very
Speaker 1: urgently wants to talk to me. And it turns out
Speaker 1: that he was the last person to leave Windows on
Speaker 1: the World on nine eleven before the plane hit, and
Speaker 1: he he literally like got in the elevator and everyone
Speaker 1: who was in the restaurant obviously perished, and he he
Speaker 1: wanted to talk. I finally understood that he wanted to
Speaker 1: talk with me about this very idea really of you know,
Speaker 1: of fortunately unfortunately, of of this sense of you know,
Speaker 1: why was I saved? And now what am I supposed
Speaker 1: to do? What am I supposed to do with this
Speaker 1: you know, staggering gift that I've been given the idea
Speaker 1: that there's you know that what he was putting together
Speaker 1: very much was the idea that there was causality or um,
Speaker 1: you know, that he was saved for a reason. Um,
Speaker 1: I mean, I realized I'm kind of going slightly off
Speaker 1: off topic. Just felt to me like this idea of
Speaker 1: you know, you missed the plane, you know, or you
Speaker 1: don't go to all those people on nine eleven who
Speaker 1: didn't go to work that morning because they were taking
Speaker 1: their kids to school where they had a doctor's appointment,
Speaker 1: and you know they were saved. I quote a passage
Speaker 1: from a poem by the Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Shiamboska
Speaker 1: in our Glass. It's my favorite poem. I teach it
Speaker 1: all the time. Uh. And it begins it's called could
Speaker 1: have And it begins, it could have happened, It might
Speaker 1: have happened, It happened nearer farther off off it happened,
Speaker 1: but not to you. You were saved because you were
Speaker 1: the first. You were saved because you were the last.
Speaker 1: It goes on, and I always teach it and have
Speaker 1: my student all my students right as a prompt about
Speaker 1: what could have happened but didn't. And it's, of course
Speaker 1: this incredibly rich assignment. Nobody hesitates to begin to write
Speaker 1: when the assignment is right about what could have happened
Speaker 1: but didn't, because we all are always leading these lives
Speaker 1: where we understand that if we turn left or we
Speaker 1: turn right, it's going to actually affect, you know, the
Speaker 1: course of our day or our hour or maybe even
Speaker 1: our lives. And yet if we thought about that all
Speaker 1: the time, we'd be completely paralyzed. So we we don't.
Speaker 1: But you know how to live with that sense of
Speaker 1: it actually underscoring the beauty and the fragility of life,
Speaker 1: the beauty because it's fragile, and the kind of seizing
Speaker 1: of the moments precisely because we don't know what's going
Speaker 1: to happen next. In devotion, you talk about certain you know,
Speaker 1: bromides that people say, you know, like just to be comforting,
Speaker 1: and more of them is everything happens for a reason,
Speaker 1: which is one of my least favorite. Also, the other
Speaker 1: version of that is I've heard you know, good things
Speaker 1: come out of everything, or everything happens, you know, for
Speaker 1: the better. And there's a turn on that that I like,
Speaker 1: which is that you know, we can make the best
Speaker 1: out of everything that happens. And that works for me
Speaker 1: a whole lot better than believing there's some grand plan
Speaker 1: that orchestrates it, but believing that in every moment and
Speaker 1: everything that happens kind of like you were just saying,
Speaker 1: is the seeds of the next moment, and what are
Speaker 1: we going to do with that? Precisely, this idea of
Speaker 1: making meaning and we can make meaning out of the
Speaker 1: most painful and difficult moments, it is shaped my entire
Speaker 1: adult life. My father died when I was twenty three,
Speaker 1: and I was a complete wreck of a of a
Speaker 1: young woman at that time. I was you know, I
Speaker 1: was drinking heavily, I was um doing a lot of drugs.
Speaker 1: I was in a relationship with an older married man
Speaker 1: who you know, was just um. It was all like
Speaker 1: a catastrophe um and and my parents were in a
Speaker 1: terrible car accident. My father died and my mother had
Speaker 1: a shattered body um and was not expected to live.
Speaker 1: And she did survive, and she recovered. But and I'm
Speaker 1: their only child. And so it was a moment where
Speaker 1: I was either going to rise to that occasion and
Speaker 1: like shocked, you know, like shocked to my system, get
Speaker 1: my life together and take care of my mother and
Speaker 1: bury my father and mourn him. We were very very close,
Speaker 1: and I was a college dropout at that point. I
Speaker 1: had left Sarah Lawrence, and I was just kind of
Speaker 1: traveling the world as essentially the girlfriend of this married,
Speaker 1: very powerful guy. It was, you know, if if all
Speaker 1: that hadn't happened, if my parents accident hadn't happened, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure I would have survived. I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's a neat and tidy idea. But I
Speaker 1: really do wonder. But what I did know instantly from
Speaker 1: that moment on was that the only way that I
Speaker 1: was going to survive was going to be making meaning
Speaker 1: out of um, the loss of my father, the the
Speaker 1: the loss of you know, uh so much in terms
Speaker 1: of my family. And it made me a writer. It
Speaker 1: sent me back to college, It kept me in college
Speaker 1: and then in graduate school. It wrote my first novel,
Speaker 1: you know, and my second novel. It it enabled me
Speaker 1: to for once and for all, break up a relationship
Speaker 1: that was you know, he was he was also kind
Speaker 1: of very much a stalker, was very very hard to
Speaker 1: get away from him. It gave me the strength to
Speaker 1: get away from him, to do everything that I've done
Speaker 1: in my life, every single thing began with that sense
Speaker 1: of I'm going to make meaning out of this. Not
Speaker 1: it happened so that I would become this person, oh um,
Speaker 1: but it happened and I became this person. Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 1: I mean I think for me getting sober, um you know,
Speaker 1: from being a heroin addict and really close to dying,
Speaker 1: that was the moment for me. That was sort of
Speaker 1: the transformative moment that everything has kind of built from
Speaker 1: there and and making meaning out of that. Well, I
Speaker 1: could do this all day, and I've got about forty
Speaker 1: more questions, but we are at the end of time
Speaker 1: for this episode, so we will have to agree to
Speaker 1: do this again because it has been fun. I'd love it.
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed it. Well, thank you so much. Your
Speaker 1: book Our Glass Time, Memory and Marriage is available now,
Speaker 1: as well as Devotion. They're both great. We get a
Speaker 1: lot of people on this show, and most people have
Speaker 1: written a book, and you can you can always kind
Speaker 1: of tell when it's somebody who is a researcher or
Speaker 1: does something and then they write a book about it
Speaker 1: versus somebody who's a truly gifted author. And you are
Speaker 1: in that latter category. The books are beautiful to read.
Speaker 1: Thanks Eric, thank you so much. Okay, we'll talk again soon. Okay, alright,
Speaker 1: bye bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you,
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Speaker 1: Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support