Dancing by Constant Shores
I reflect on my neediness, struggles, fears and loves in relationships - with spouse and friends. I learn that I can receive from someone’s going as well as from their being present - and that my nostalgia for the past and my fears for the future can make me impatient, anxious, oblivious, even more needy, in the now of my life. I learn this as I read and reflect on the following, adapted from Anne Morrow Lindbergh -The Gift From the Sea.
Relationship is not strangled by claims. Intimacy is tempered by lightness of touch. We have moved through our day like dancers, not needing to touch more than lightly because we were instinctively moving to the same rhythm.
A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay, and swift and free . . .To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing.
The joy of such a pattern is not only the joy of creation or the joy of participation; it is also the joy of living in the moment. Lightness of touch and living in the moment are intertwined.
It is fear . . . that makes one cling nostalgically to the last moment or clutch greedily toward the next . . . It can only be exorcised by love. When the heart is flooded with love there is no room in it for fear, for doubt, for hesitation. And it this lack of fear that makes for the dance. When each loves so completely that he has forgotten to ask himself whether or not he is loved in return; when he knows only that he loves and is moving to its music - then, and then only, are two people able to dance perfectly in tune to the same rhythm.
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 we demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationship. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror 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.
How can one learn to live through the ebb-tide’s of one’s existence? How can one learn to take the trough of the wave? It is easier to understand on the beach, where the breathlessly still ebb-tides reveal another life below the level which mortals usually reach. In this crystalline moment of suspense, one has a sudden revelation of the secret kingdom at the bottom of the sea. . . . So beautiful is the still hour of the sea’s withdrawal, as beautiful as the sea’s return when the encroaching waves pound up the beach, pressing to reach those dark rumpled chains of seaweed which mark the last high tide.
