This book Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh- is pretty much rocking my world in more ways than one…I just finished a chapter and I want to pretty much write the whole thing down and have you read it for yourself. It’s about fear, it’s about fear in relationships and loving well, and doing relationships well. People mean so much to me and my desire is to love them well- but so often I’m caught in the “what ifs?” and worry of this or that. Anne says we need none of that…
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 lightly because we were instinctively moving to the same rhythm. ( ahh such a beautiful picture)
A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and it built on some of the same rules. That 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 freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of it’s unfolding. There is no place for the possesive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing.
One cannot dance well unless one is completely in time with the music, not leaning back into the last step or pressing forward to the next one, but poised directly on the present step as it comes.
He who bends to himslef a joy, doth the winged life destroy; But he who kisses joy as it flies Lives in Eternity’s sunrise. – BLake
The dancers who are perfectly in time never destroy the “winged life” in each other or in themselves….Why is this so difficult? What makes us hesitate and stumble? It is fear, I think, that makes one cling nostalgically to the last moment or clutch greedily toward the next. Fear destroys “the winged life.” But how to exorcise it? It can only be exorcised by its opposite, love. When the heart is flooded with love there is room in it left for fear, for doubt, for hesitation…When each partner loves so completely that he has forgotten to ask himself whether or not he is loved in return….
That’s the love I want to have for people, and to have- there is so much more! So don’t live in fear! live in love…my idealistic ways I know but I believe them to be true!
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