I am looking back at the beginning of my journal as I am about to use up the last pages and start a new one. In the first few pages of this old one, I notice my notes from reading the wonderful book “Gift from the Sea” by Anne Morrow dated March 2010. Those notes were written when I started this journal over a year and a half ago. Then, I was still living in Austin and reading that book at my grandmothers in Wimberley; it is one of her favorites. I lost the journal a few pages in and I started a new one. I found this lost journal and started writing in it again a few months ago, and now I’ve almost used it up because I go through journals quickly. Its interesting to have a journal with some entries from over a year and a half ago alongside entries written within the last few months – and to have the older notes line up so much more perfectly with where I am at now then where I was at then:

“What makes us hesitate and stumble? It is fear, I think that makes one cling nostalgically to the last moment or to clutch greedily at the next…But how to exorcize it? It can only be exorcized by its opposite, love. When the heart is flooded by love there is no room for fear, for doubt, for hesitation” (106)

“A larger rhythm, a natural swinging of the pendulum between sharing and solitude; between the intimate and the abstract; between the particular and the universal, the near and the far” (106)

“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, yet this is exactly what so many of us demand.” (108)

“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, in 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 owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping even.

Live in the present relationship and accept it as it is now.

For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms. Only in space are events and objects and people – unique and significant – and therefore beautiful” (115)

“Patience – faith – openness, is what the sea has to teach. Simplicity – solitude – intermittency” (127)