any days have passed since the last time I settled down enough to complete a journal entry, and I already know that more than a few of you have wondered if I has already shuffled off this mortal coil, kicked the bucket, taken a dirt nap, gone down for the count, pushed up daises, or any of a number of other equally trite, cute, and/or cliche aphorisms.

While I would love to assure you that the thought had never crossed my mind, I have to be truthful here in these journal pages, so I will instead admit that I have spent far too much time during my recent hiatus thinking of ways to bring this long and painful journey to a halt, once and for all.

It isn't easy to celebrate your 30th wedding anniversary all alone, when just a week or so earlier you thought your life was as perfect as you ever hoped it could be...well, except for the wracking pain in every nerve fiber and the strange epileptic-like seizures that sweep over me every day. Unless you have experienced it yourself, there is no way I can ever convey the pain involved in finding out that your soul mate of the last 35+ years has simply decided that she no longer loves you.

Now, everyone gets their heart broken from time to time, and everyone tells me, "hey, life goes one!" but I dare say that those people don't generally have two thirds of their life tied up in a relationship with a single individual when they say things like that.

I've spent the last few weeks wondering how, why, and whether it is worth continuing this life when I can simply not imagine a future that does not include the two of us together. Like most men in my situation, I am sure I am singularly unprepared for a life on my own. I've been with this one woman since I was 17 years old. You can't possibly imagine what that's like if you have been married for less than at least a decade....much less unless you're married to the first girl you ever fell in love with.

Bah.

Now, before you go feeling too sorry for me, I should say that these events have transpired over the course of the last month or two, and we are well on the road to recovering our relationship. After 35 years, we've both learned a lot of techniques that allow us to communicate about virtually any issue that may arise, no matter how painful, and after the initial shock, we have both come to realize that we need t o work on some of the communication patterns that have set in over the last decades that have formed our patterns of communication. We're learning all over again how to talk to each other without letting automatic knee-jerk reactions take over the conversation. It's the toughest process I've ever faced, and if you know me at all, you know that says quite a lot.

You know, there are no guarantees in life. No one can say where we will be five, ten, or thirty years from now. Yet we make these lifelong commitments and we build our hopes and dreams on them until they become so huge and cumbersome that they almost inevitably collapse under their own weight.

Goes to show ya, kids. You've heard it said a thousand times that the secret to a good marriage is working on the communication every single day, and here's another clear example for you. Even after spending so long together, we still have to go back to step one (or at least something much closer to step one) and re-learn those patterns of communication. It's not that either of us stopped trying, just that like all humans we got comfortable with the patterns in our relationship and lazy about asking for clarity until it became so hard to communicate that we had to rip each others' hearts out just to throw some light on the situation.

I hope you keep the lines open with your significant other and work on your relationship every day so you don't have to break each others' hearts just to say what you need to say to keep yourself alive.

Me, I'll be fine. And, I'll be back here trying to journalize my life again to keep you all amused...and hopefully with much better subject matter next time!

I have not produced a single new piece of artwork for months, but I have been accumulating a lot of beautiful waterscape/sailing photos during the interim, so I hope to have some new stuff to post here soon. Meanwhile, thanks for being there, and thanks even more for letting me use you as a sounding board. Even though I haven't been around lately, having friends like you helps keep me grounded and reminds me that there are a lot of reasons to keep on plugging. Tomorrow is another day....

-=b=-