Relationship is not strangled by claims. Intimacy is tempered by lightness of touch. We have moved through our day like dancer, 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 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, like a country dance of Mozart's. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the mobement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place here for the possesive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touching in passing. Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back--it does not matter which. Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it.

The joy of such pattern is only the joy of creation or participation, it is also the joy of living in the moment. Lightness of touch and living in the moment are intertwined. One cannot dance well unless one is completely in time with the music, not leaning back to the last step or pressing forward to the next one, but poised directlyon the present step as it comes. Perfect poise on the beat is what gives food dancing its sense of ease, of timeliness, of the eternal.

The dancers who are perfectly in time never destroy the "winged life" in each other or in themselves. But how does one learn this technique of the dance? Why is it so difficult? What makes us hesitate and stumble? It is fear, I think, that makes one cling to last moment or clutch greedily toward the next. Fear destroys the "winged life". But how to excercise it? It can only be excercised by its opposite, lvoe. When the heart is flooded by love, there is no room for fear, for doubt, for hesitation. And it is this lack of fear that makes for the dance. When each partner loves so completely that he has forgotten to ask himself whether or not he is loved in return; when he only knows 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 rythm.

The "veritable life" of our emotions and in 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, it is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, or 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 in not owning or possesing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what 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 interrupte 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....

Excerpts from GIFT FROM THE SEA by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

*** I gave this excerpt to Nelay way back in first year...LOL! Right Nelay?