Hello friends! This week David takes us back to the very beginning (a very good place to start🎶) and shares what transpired that got this whole David-Mindy show rolling. I have to say that it was very sweet to read, especially not knowing that was his chosen subject for this week’s newsletter. I know I’ve talked about the Enneagram a fair bit here, but that’s only because it’s been incredibly helpful for me. Even this weekend I was googling once again, hoping to get a refresher on the patterns that are at play with a Four (me) - Eight (him) pairing. It really helps depersonalize some of our “charming” quirks [cough] and to see that some of it is just part of the personality package of the person we love so much. I found a great video on YouTube going in to the pros and cons of our pairing—he says that never being dull is both a pro and a con. I also had to laugh reading this on another website: While these two can have a lot in common, and often share a deep mutual respect, there is actually very little that is complementary about them. Indeed, they tend to be more catalyzing and triggering for one another than harmonizing. Because they both have deeply felt and often loudly expressed feelings, these two tend to step on each others toes and hurt each other's feelings more than they tend to offer balance, support, and grounding.

You don’t say…..😂 I can laugh about it now, but I definitely wasn’t laughing earlier this week. C’est la vie. If you’re in a less volatile pairing, I guess you can live vicariously through us? Or just enjoy your peaceful relationship.

WIthout further ado, let’s jump in. Thanks for joining us. 💕

-Mindy

Mindy and I fell in love on a research trip to the Amazon Rain Forest. We were helping with a genetic survey of the New World's largest freshwater turtle, Podocnemis expansa. We would lay out on a sandbar in the middle of the river through the night, staring up at The Southern Box–as zoologists, we had an embarrassing lack of applied knowledge about the southern hemisphere’s most prominent constellation–and wait for a mama turtle to finish laying her eggs in a hole dug into the sandbar. Once we heard the thump-thump of her shell packing the sand over her eggs, we’d grab the 120-200lb turtle and turn it over on its back until morning, when we would tag it and collect blood and then let her return to the river.

Neither of us knew that we’d fallen in love. Not when we first kissed atop a boat headed 8 hours up the Rio Trombetas to the biological reserve where we’d be staying. Not every evening thereafter when we  made out on the enormous window sill in the room we shared, just the two of us, alone in a room on a BYU sponsored trip. We would chat, and I would make Mindy laugh. We would get captivated by the scene from that window of the moon overlooking the river or a sky overflowing with stars. Maybe the situation was just too spectacular to even notice how intense the sparks were between us. That sparkle honestly felt on par with the setting and all the magic in that place. 

It wasn’t until we got back and Mindy chatted with her lab mate in a chemistry class that she took stock of what she felt for me. After dating for a couple of months, I finally admitted to myself what I’m sure everyone else could already see: I was utterly smitten with Mindy.

We were so lucky to have met on that trip, outside of time, ensconced in the natural world we both love so much, away from the influence of BYU and the Mormon/LDS church, or social expectations. Our professors were indeed so giddy with excitement at being in the richest, densest, most biologically diverse corner of the planet that they really couldn’t be bothered to worry if the two students were fucking.

We weren’t, but we sure had a lot of fun. I’ve imagined that time together, and of course, I have moments of fantasy where we fucked like the universe depended on it. But that’s not usually how I think back on that experience. It has always been easy for me to bask in the fantasy that actually happened. It was as perfect an experience as I could imagine there ever being.

When we got back to the edge of civilization, we stayed at the Marriot Hotel in Manaus, a city in the heart of the Amazon. Mindy and I took our room key and nonchalantly took the elevator up to our room. We were getting settled when one of the professors accompanying us knocked on the door and told us that Mindy and I would not be sharing a room. We looked at each other and laughed. It was ludicrous, but it made sense, given that we were waking up from a dream.

She unpacked, and we hung out together. A rain started, the first real rain since we arrived, and she wanted to go outside to experience it. I told her that those giant ditches on each side of the roads were to collect rainwater–I’d had plenty of experience with tropical rains living in Costa Rica–but she insisted. We started walking. The rain became a torrent, and she looked at me sheepishly. I grabbed her hand, and together, we ran to seek refuge in a bakery.

We sat in the bakery drinking Nestle’s hot cocoa while eating a pain au chocolat in silence, our hands playfully touching, watching the world get washed.

I found her endlessly enchanting. She’s always been cute. She has a pretty face, stunning blue eyes, and a blistering intellect, and yet she shows up as fun and playful, verging on silly, when at ease. It feels only fitting that my magical fairy princess happened into our ridiculously romantic “meet cute.” Our meeting in the Amazon has been a singular source of hope for me throughout many years of challenge in our relationship. While it was easy to cherish this memory that is so romantic, it’s often embarrassing to respond to the question so often posed by new friends: “So, how’d you two meet?” I admit I have struggled to cherish the rest of our story.

I’ve fantasized about how our lives could have been easier if only we’d done a few things differently. I have often felt hopeless–we didn’t want what our parents modeled but we didn’t know how to turn not wanting into a strategy or framework for right action.

We both value independence and freedom of thought. Of course, she wishes that I valued having a stable job with good health insurance and four weeks a year of paid vacation. I wish that she valued pursuing a career like her mom and having a small family. Instead, we got a self-taught tech entrepreneur and a homeschooler of five children with sparkling minds and intellects. Add to that that I carried a deep cynicism and fatalism that figured being an atheist-Mormon wasn’t any stupider than all the other bullshit beliefs and traditions, including 9-5 jobs, a “respectable” career, or most of the stuff we buy to show we’re successful. She carried impossible shame as a coping mechanism from years of emotional neglect. We both valued so much of the same things, but we couldn’t get aligned around turning that into something either of us wanted.

Then, a few weeks ago, a bit flipped. Something so plain and straightforward clicked in me and I saw the effort we made as something precious and beautiful. I realized that Mindy and I had chosen to try and create the dream version of the families we were raised in. I think we both had a fantasy that there was real potential in our families of origin: smart parents raising a big family. We were each one of six children, spanning 11 years in my case and 16 years in Mindy’s. Each with three boys and three girls. I was the oldest in my family, and Mindy was the youngest, trailing her next closest sibling by six years.

This meant that we experienced things from almost diametrically opposed viewpoints. We we both felt we had to leave at 18 and so we did; she to University and me as a Missionary. I was drowning, and I knew that going away to school wasn’t going to be enough distance. So, I chose to go to Costa Rica as an atheist-Mormon missionary to get some much-needed space between me and my parents. I felt so compelled to get as far away as I could, but I also felt deeply guilty for leaving my five siblings to fend for themselves that I wept tears of guilt most months. It’s probably that I was the oldest, and maybe a bit of my inborn temperament, but I woke up to the reality of my situation very early. This meant I had a lot of protective barriers between my parents and me. Most of my siblings, beautifully intelligent and curious, never woke up to their reality, and most continue to battle against a missed expectation that they each carry so much to their detriment and self-development.

I spent my teenage years not being home as much as possible. At sixteen I had two jobs and was on an athletic team throughout the school year and in off-season practice all summer. I would often leave at 4 am to go work on a golf course and not return home until midnight or later if it was the weekend.

Serving as a missionary in the mid-90s meant that all correspondence was by mail except for two phone calls home: on Christmas and Mother’s Day. I definitely faced numerous challenges, but I never forgot that I chose it, and it gave me the space I so wanted and needed.

Mindy had the challenging experience of spending her adolescence entirely alone with her anxious and boundaryless father whose early retirement meant she was his sole object of obsessive worry. Her siblings were all on their own and her mother was consumed in a full-time nursing career–she worked nights for a massive chunk of Mindy’s childhood and was thus sleeping most of the time she was home. The details of Mindy’s story are not mine to tell, but the pain and hurt she carried from her childhood has been something I only just learned to hold with tenderness and loving awareness. 

For our own reasons, each of us wanted to create the dream version of the families we raised in, but we really didn’t have anything that we needed to do that. Looking back, I can see so clearly that we both wanted this so much. It would have been much easier and probably a little bit healthier to just step away from that dream but we wanted it so much. I think it’s a big reason why we stayed together even when we were both suffering a ton of hurt and a fair bit of trauma by choosing not to break up. What if we figured it out? What if that dream that found us together was a glimpse into the heaven we felt we could create if we just got our shit together?

We still have plenty to work on. I recently gave Mindy a list of challenging topics I’d still like to discuss and work through as part of our new practice of “20-minute arguments.” It’s going to be an ongoing process of becoming. But I want her and everyone reading this to know that I see that we have come so far.

At the beginning of June, we celebrated our oldest’s birthday. She turned 22! She asked to have a small affair at home, and she invited a half-dozen of her closest friends over for dinner, dessert, cocktails, some weed, and an evening sharing stories and laughing on the patio overlooking the pasture behind our property. I think everyone was on their way around 1 am when Mindy and I got a text from her: “Thank you so much for a lovely evening. All of my friends texted me, telling me they didn’t know families could be like ours.”

Later, as she and I were chatting late one evening, she reflected on how, as a child, she would fantasize that our family could be something magical and perfect–all the challenges did not dissuade her from this belief. She really believed that we had so much potential if only Mindy and I could get ourselves sorted and happy. And then, through happy tears, she said: “Now I know that little me was right to believe in you, to believe in us.”

Next month, Mindy and I will celebrate 23 years of marriage. We are each 46, so this will be our half-life anniversary. I feel so much gratitude for those two 23-year-olds who were running away from something and seeking refuge in each other. It has taken us a long time to stop running. We’re learning how to hold space for each other, and that’s come from being able to hold space for ourselves.

I know there will be torrents and storms of kinds we dare not think of in the future; I trust that we will take refuge when we need it and sit quietly holding hands to get grounded and dry before heading back out in it.

-David/Gonzo

NEAT!

Stuff we think is neat enough to share! (David⚡️ & Mindy✨)

• This week we hosted our second annual (we hope) Fort Vine backyard concert and it was absolutely magical. Give my top four songs a listen, and try to come next year to hear them in person! On Holiday, Oh How Nice, Primordial Mirror of Cosmic Reflection, and It’s Time to Open. 🎶✨

• This song has got to be one of the sexiest ever recorded. Rawr. 🎶✨

• Really this week was all about the music for me. That and really enjoying spending time with Trevor & Nyna of Fort Vine. Sometimes you get lucky enough to meet people who become family, and I feel like that keeps happening to us time and again. I could not be more grateful.

SOMETHING TO TRY

It’s after 3 a.m. and I’m trying to get this scheduled so I can go to bed. How about me trying to get to bed at a reasonable hour? 😅 Oops, failed on that one. Hopefully we’ll have something better to try next week!

PARTING

WORDS

PIC

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That’s all for this week! If you’re into this, share this newsletter with all your friends. Connecting with new subscribers is magical! 🧚🏻‍♀️

DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice.