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 September 27, 2004
The intermittency of life
Really like this passage from Anne Morrow's 'Gift from the Sea': "The life of the spirit," said Saint-Exupery, "the veritable life, is intermittent and only the life of the mind is constant... spirit... alternates between total vision and total blindness. Here is a man, for example, who loves his farm-but there are moments when he sees it only as a collection of unrelated objects. Here is a man who loves his wife-but there are moments when he sees in love nothing but burdens, hindrances, constraints. Here is a man who loves music-but there are moments when it cannot reach him. The 'veritable life' of our emotions and our relationships also is intermittent. 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 exactly 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 at its ebb. we are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity: when the only 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 in 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, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, 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, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, continually visited and abandoned by the tides. One must accept the security of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency. Amen, Anne, brave words. May they echo in my spirit throughout my life. And thanks, Jess, for loaning me your mamas book! :) 
Sayeth rzan at
02:08 PM
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