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February 2 - February 2, 2023
In their changing roles the two partners may have grown in different directions or at different rates of speed.
For “there is no one-and-only,” as a friend of mine once said in a similar discussion, “there are just one-and-only moments.”
One comes in the end to realize that there is no permanent pure-relationship and there should not be.
Life must go on.
All living relationships are in process of change, of expansion, and must perpetually be building themselves new forms.
the oyster shell is a good one to express the middle years of marriage. It suggests the struggle of life itself.
Perhaps middle age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.
Perhaps one can at last in middle age, if not earlier, be completely oneself. And what a liberation that would be!
One might be free for growth of mind, heart and talent; free at last for spiritual growth;
Argonauta” (Paper Nautilus),
We are adventuring in the chartless seas of imagination.
Woman must come of age by herself. This is the essence of “coming of age”—to learn how to stand alone.
once the realization is accepted that, even between the closest human beings, infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!”
For we are, actually, pioneers trying to find a new path through the maze of tradition, convention and dogma.
What release to write so that one forgets oneself, forgets one’s companion, forgets where one is or what one is going to do next—to be drenched in work as one is drenched in sleep or in the sea.
To begin with, it is a pattern of freedom. Its setting has not been cramped in space or time.
It has a natural balance of physical, intellectual and social life. It has an easy unforced rhythm.
A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules.
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,
One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.
Too many activities, and people, and things.
The simplicity of life forces me into physical as well as intellectual or social activity.
when I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.
Here, where there is time and space, the physical tasks are a welcome change. They balance my life in a way I find refreshing and in which I seldom feel refreshed at home.
We never would have chosen these neighbors; life chose them for us.
multiplicity of the world will crowd in on me again with its false sense of values.
Values weighed in quantity, not quality; in speed, not stillness; in noise, not silence; in words, not in thoughts; in acquisitiveness, not beauty.
Island-precepts, I might call them if I could define them, signposts toward another way of living.
Simplicity of living, as much as possible, to retain a true awareness of life.
Simple life
Balance of physical, intellectual and spiritual life. Work without pressure. Space for significance and beauty...
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The search for outward simplicity, for inner integrity, for fuller relationship
We are asked today to feel compassionately for everyone in the world;
The interrelatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our hearts can hold.
We were brought up in a tradition that has now become impossible, for we have extended our circle throughout space and time.
Can one solve world problems when one is unable to solve one’s own?
The present is passed over in the race for the future; the here is neglected in favor of the there;
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.
Europeans today are enjoying the moment even if it means merely a walk in the country on Sunday or sipping a cup of black coffee at a sidewalk café.
We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here,
The waves echo behind me. Patience—Faith—Openness, is what the sea has to teach. Simplicity—Solitude—Intermittency
The sea teach
Perhaps the greatest progress, humanly speaking, in these past twenty years, for both women and men, is in the growth of consciousness.
