At last you find your ideal home and partner—at the same time. A year after you move into an 1850 farmhouse with land to seed your mutual dreams, you marry your partner there. A year after that, lightning strikes. Literally. It hits the black walnut tree outside your home study, to be exact, and travels through your room of books, fuses an electric wire, and decimates the room where your ideas take shape. After all the smoke and able firefighters’ water damage, you must move out as your home—and your soul—get gutted.

Two autumns ago I wrote a piece for these pages called “My House, My Spouse: Zen and the Art of House Hunting,” which told the comedic story of how my partner Hillary and I, as girlfriend and boyfriend, madly searched for, and finally found, our dream home. It ended, like most classic comedies, with a reference to our engagement and wedding plans.

This sequel may not have a happy ending. And it might err on the side of melodrama. But put yourself in these shoes: last May, a wave of inexplicable angst overcame me. Everything on the outside seemed to be swimming. What was the problem? Well, Hillary and I were trying to conceive of something more than yet another working project—a baby. Although all of our friends seemed to be blooming babies, we weren’t. In June, Lyme disease laid me on my back for three weeks. I surrendered, tried to take the lesson to let go, give in, all that good yoga and Zen stuff.

Then, the Sunday afternoon after I recovered, Hillary and I went on a local farm tour, which was unexpectedly washed out by an eerie storm that struck the Rondout Valley. The storm rolled in with the dark clouds and awe-inspiring electric lightning I knew well from growing up in tornado-rife Texas. When we returned to our house, a police officer headed us off 100 yards away. We could see four red trucks’ worth of firefighters pointing hoses at our home.

You could say we were fortunate. Neighbors called firefighters in time to salvage much of the original farmhouse. We weren’t home when it struck. Our cat, Miklos, was saved. We have insurance. Friends and neighbors packed our stuff, brought us food, and consoled us.

Still, when a writer who’s already weathered a rough summer walks into his dream study and sees what was once his closet of clothes and 15 years of files now a heap of black char, his altar a pile of ashes, his philosophy and poetry section a ruin of black crust and water—William James’s stream of consciousness splattered on the wall—and his laptop melted, he might have a right to a little self-pity and self-doubt. As in the Job brand of self-doubt: “What the hell is going on here? What are You asking of me?”

I don’t wish to elevate our situation to classic tragedy. After all, King Lear I ain’t.

Still, the day after the fire, we learned we would be out of our home for nine or more months. Heaps of charred clothes, furniture, and books lined the lawn like a derelict’s yard sale. Our home felt tattered, bruised, and beaten. I walked into my study’s ruins and found buried the book I had just finished—Mark Epstein’s How to Fall Apart Without Going to Pieces. And then I found my copy of a book I had been wanting to re-read after 20 years—Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.

The phenomenologist-cum-poet describes how mind and house reflect and shape one another. Drawing upon Jung, he suggests our attic houses our rationality, our basement our unconscious, and under the basement, the ancient collective unconscious. But when something stirs in the basement, he quotes Jung as writing, why does a man go to the attic? Indeed. When someone feels deeply troubled at the foundation, why do we try to wash down those feelings too quickly with a rational explanation or New Age truism? “Well, something good will come from this!” or, “At least you’re alive.” Or, “Well, it may be hard to see, but another year from now you will have a better, more insulated house!” Gee, Mary Poppins, thanks for the spoonful of sugar!

Tragedy honors complexity. And the phenomenologist, the poet, and the yogi know that material reality is part and parcel of psychic reality. House and mind entwine. For a while, following a house fire, they’re both shattered. Rebuilding takes time. Leave it at that.

And what about my and Hill’s relationship? Well, we’ve reconfirmed we’re damned good together in the best of times and in the worst of times—often the best and worst happening on the same day. If marriage is about anything, it is about what existentialist psychologist Rollo May calls “standing in love”—what can happen after falling in love. In the house we’ve been renting for a few months, we are each other’s sanctuary. We diligently review the architect’s new designs. We contend with the insurance company’s jovial but overworked adjuster. Each weekend, we go home to care for the gardens and to re-connect with the trees and pond and stones I sorely miss.

Hillary is not just my wife. She is, I must admit—like a bad poet who has lost all sense of subtlety—my lover and my flame. When I awake at 3 a.m. haunted by images of rolling fires, she wraps her arm around me or unwraps my clothed body. When I fume about the tedious insurance process, she consoles me and my upset stomach with a hot bath. Each day, over and over again, I keep falling, even as I stand, in love with her.

Maybe there’s a happy ending to this tale. This winter morning, I made Hillary a cup of Darjeeling and asked her to sit in my temporary study with me. As she sipped her tea, I walked to the barren bookshelves and turned on Mozart’s Violin Concertos and then pulled off the shelf the blackened copy of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus and started reading aloud some of the miraculous poems to breath, to cut flowers, to the soul’s music, to the heart’s inherent interweaving with gardens.

“What are you doing?” she said, grinning.

“I’m playing music and reading poems,” I said, pointing to her belly, “to you and the little sprout.”

We’re expecting in July. By then, we plan to be back home. We will refuse to name her or him Phoenix.