Gift from the Sea
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
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 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.