The capacity for living...crying over spilled milk

No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now. - Alan Watts

I am on a weeks vacation. This is the first vacation in over thirty four years that has not been time spent with my soon to be ex-wife. I'm still grieving over what could have been/should have been. And when I review the tale of our marriage dissolving, I often feel the observer and not a participant. It did not seem that it could go any other way. And for me to concede (once again) to that of her role of the perpetual victim and of her inability to survive without my having to conform to her "high conflict-no resolution" mind and personality, I would have surely soon turned to stone. My hollowness of heart is being replaced with love and life and hope and I'm finding that it is a painful transformation.
Divorce does suck!
I am reminded however that that was then: and now is now. Life lived now, in a mindful and constructive way are the building blocks of a better future. The chickens, the garden, my Karmann Ghia; are just things. But they produce simple pleasure - and there is no harm in that. Meanwhile my children seek to find their way to manage their own feelings about the divorce. They are all adults. To see their parents apart is difficult, I understand. For them to see their mother flounder as the powerless and angry, yet controlling victim, is a challenge. The buffer (me) has been removed and my youngest daughter has felt compelled to pick up the mantle of responsibility. I hope that the weight of the ridgepole is not too much for her - but I hope in vain. It is her lesson to learn.
And I'm trying to learn mine. 
Ann - I love you!
But feeling the intense emotion of divorce or the numbness of trying to withdraw from pain is not the way. There is yet a middle way, as the Buddha himself discovered.
The grand master of the Complete Reality School of Taoism, Lu Ting-pin (Reid Chinese Health & Healing 1995)  via a Thomas Cleary translations stated: "Since the refinement of the three treasures requires the removal of emotions, it is necessary to govern the mind. What is governing the mind? The mind is originally pure, the mind is originally calm; openness and freedom are both basic qualities of the mind. When we govern the mind, this means that we should keep it as it is in its original fundamental state, clear as a mountain stream, pure fresh, unpolluted, silent as an immense canyon, free from clamor, vast as the universe, immeasurable i n its extent, open as a great desert, its bounds unknown".
 It is a a calm and serene joy. Not incapable of emotion; not a captive to emotion. It is light, free, airy and natural. Not some zombie eyed blissed-out state of mind. A man of Tao is a man of calm and joy.
So I return to alchemy, nourish the spirit, go to my acupuncturist, ride my bicycle in breath in-breath out/ leg up-leg down meditation.  
And the natural man, an undetermined mind, will ascend.