A Gift From The Sea

- ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH

When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility! It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet, this is what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror, its ebb. We are afraid it will not return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only real continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity-------in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. For relationships too, must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits-----islands, surounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides. One must accept the security of the winged life, of the ebb and flow, of intermittency.

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Lovely words for a soul like me. I love to think I can shrug off my baggage from the past and forget the worries about the future and cherish the present... Wish I can do that more effectively.

These also remind me of a article I read somewhere on the Metro about a woman who had a 'long' marriage of 40 odd years. She said, 'There was a lot of love in our marriage. I kept falling in love with Matt and Matt repeatedly fell in love with me. Well, there were times when we did fall out of love but those times we were good friends who shared their days together... till we fell in love all over again.... '

ebb and flow of the tide indeed!