Initiation--brain bookmarking

As previously mentioned, I'm reading a book about the Odyssey and the ways one can expand the story of Odysseus' trials into one vast, mushy metaphor for one's own life muck. ...I'm buying it in bulk.
I always feel a lot like I should be dressing (and perhaps speaking) like Prof. Trelawny in the Potter movies when I find myself flailing in recognition while reading things that might be rejected as New Age tripe by more logical minds, but I have never really credited myself with a logical mind. Also, I imagine at 50, I will be THAT woman....with the large jewelry, funky glasses on a beaded chain and floaty clothes, so perhaps it is entirely appropriate that I am already identifying with that particular earth motherly archetype.
Moving right along...
This book has me thinking about the ways the trials of my life have been nothing but preparation for initiation into the possibility for a whole new me...a whole new stage of self. (There are about 900 layers of this. Bear with me.)

I'm beginning to come up with a reason to accept what is happening to my marriage. I don't have to like it, but I am coming up with reason.
My Odyssean trials--my Cyclops, poor winds, Scylla, Charybdis, death of my crew, etc--are (aligned with no particular image):

• reaching the end of my undergraduate career, drowning in doubt as I realize/decide that what I thought I wanted is not what I want...and thus nearly failing every class my senior year because I ceased to have direction;
• a hereditary mental illness that decided right in the middle of all this crap was a great time to kick it into high gear,
• the dissolution of friendships that had been important to me,
• and a complete lack of faith in my ability to get into grad school or do anything important with myself for fear that my head would just eat me alive again.

Into the vortex of Charybdis I go, clinging to pieces of my ship--my raft: my relationship with DB. It is at this point, I spend my seven years on Calypso's island. ...in the form of what I thought was a nearly idyllic relationship (ok...in my case 7 years was more like 9). Still with me? No? Damn. Moving forward anyway.

Jean Houston writes of Odysseus: "So, battered, naked, stripped of all his symbolic veneer, the brilliant "man of many ways" lands on Calypso's womblike island, dead to his former self.... [Calypso] provides him with a regular daily life in which he has no need for the cunning and wily qualities that saw him through the Trojan victory and his subsequent adventures. Instead, he must learn to use the qualities of sensory enjoyment and emotional relationship."

This is where I started underlining just about every other sentence. Post HU (part 1?) I was lost...in need of a serious Restyle of Self. I rested in my relationship with DB, content to have one person with whom I was most intimate, content with the quiet in my life. I learned things about compassion in this time. I learned things about selflessness. I learned about sharing myself in my most unbound states. It was comfortable, and I was completely different from the girl who dove headlong at knowledge for fortune and glory, eschewing all personal attachments. This was not, as it sometimes felt, a stuck place, this may actually have been a period of "hibernation...presaging a fundamental renewal or restructuring of personality." (Houston again)

Now, though I may not like the way in which it is occurring, I may be ending my time on Calypso's island of rest and renewal. DB may have done what he was supposed to do in my life, and now I am ready to return to Ithaca (school, intellectual life, my abandoned "path"?) with less ego and true humility.

The difficult thing, but potentially the most selfless thing, is to realize that I might be the same thing in DB's life. Even though his movement does not look like "forward" movement looks to me, it might be.
(Now is the part of the show when I start mixing my spiritualities with as much verve as the Swedish Chef...)
It is very human to hang on to things you have seen as yours, but attachment causes suffering, right? And if there is an end to suffering, one must let go.
Insert applicable quote here:
"How do you let go of things? This means you leave them as they are; it does not mean you annihilate them or throw them away. It is more like setting down and letting them be. " (from Buddhanet)
And this is very much what I have been trying to practice in this situation, even as I come to look at DB as my teacher in the ways of various mysteries...as someone I may have to leave in order to take on what's next.

Not that any of this zenning makes what I'm going through any less painful. It is, in its own way, a set of trials. It is nice, in the midst of turmoil, to have this way of viewing what has been, and it does not feel false in any way.