A Good Relationship Has a Pattern Like a Dance 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, like a country dance of Mozart's. 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. 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. |
A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one's husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it. |
After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood. |
America, which has the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future. |
Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem or saying a prayer. |
Charles is life itself-pure life, force, like sunlight-and it is for this that I married him and this that holds me to him-caring always, caring desperately what happens to him and whatever he happens to be involved in. |
For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one. |
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after. |
Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way. |
Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me. |
I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living. |
It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded. |
Life is a gift, given in trust - like a child. |
Marriage is tough, because it is woven of all these various elements, the weak and the strong. "In love-ness" is fragile for it is woven only with the gossamer threads of beauty. It seems to me absurd to talk about "happy" and "unhappy" marriages. |
Men kick friendship around like a football but it doesn't seem to break. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces. |