earthspeaks: Partners

You know, it really is a cool thing being in love.

I hope everyone gets the human experience of loving another sometime in their lives. I hope, too, that everyone gets a generous helping of second chances because relationships first time around don’t always have the best track records.

I offer this blog/meditation today on having a partner to love because of the amazingly good time Cindy Lou and I had on our trip to England and Ireland. After the laundry has been washed and put away, phone calls responded to, the yard raked and tended, with jet lag not completely shed, we still feel a glow between us that had not been unknown to us, but now is perceived in a deeper and more connected way. We have, in fact, fallen more deeply in love with each other.

Cindy Lou and I have gone on plenty of trips over our twenty+ years together, some longer than others. Thirteen years ago it was three weeks in Alaska. We’ve spent lots of time in New Orleans. We do Hilton Head every spring of late. We’ve driven to California and Montana, the Maine coast and south Florida. We frankly look forward to spending time together in restricted travel space because at home we often find ourselves living different lives in different places. She has her TV spot and I have mine. I like sitting outside under that canopy in the summer. Her, not so much. It’s a bug thing. Can’t blame her. And now I’ve found sleeping in the guest room with music playing more to my liking. Music just keeps her awake.

I spend lots of time reading and writing on my Mac, often many hours a day. She has her computer time in front of the TV on the couch, too, and also spends a couple days a week with the wee friends she babysits. Such means we sometime don’t spent time eating our evening meal together.

These revelations might have the reader conclude we don’t spend enough time together, a conclusion with which I doubt we would disagree. Cindy has talked for years of going to dinner and a movie one night a week. Great idea, but we seldom do. We both end up feeling comfortable in our home space and hate to leave it.

The balance of being together and being apart reminds us both of the dance Anne Morrow Lindberg explained to all at so many weddings we attended back in the day. The reading I refer to is from her book Gift from the Sea, and explains the ‘country dance’ healthy partners perform:

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.

I fancy the image of our both dancing to our couple melody while performing our own songs as we feel them. Feels mighty healthy, actually.

I’m not saying Cindy and I did not find moments to be cross with each other on this trip. It happened a couple of times, both while we were dragging too heavy luggage down a London or Holy Head street with another heavy bag draped over a shoulder. Cindy said last night one shoulder still hurts from bearing the weight of the bag that included a few magazines, a laptop computer, and her Kindle. We have since concluded that whatever impatience we encountered with the other was really the product of stress. Nobody was trying to piss anybody off. It’s just that when one is tired, it just feels that way.

In the truth of knowing that and how much each wanted the other to have a really good time on this trip, a newly recognized flower bloomed within us sometime on our travels. I’ve seen something similar happen to Cindy before when we go to the beach. She is, in fact, a beach girl, and sheds accumulated winter by walking barefoot on the sand.

This time we didn’t have much sand to walk on, but in a different way of doing things, we both played big hands in how this trip came off. I usually do most of the travel planning, which is why this unfamiliar overseas trip didn’t come together for so many years.

This time in planning, we both had more to say about how our time would be spent. Cindy got her days in London and Norwich, special places she wanted me to experience. I got a quiet week at Holy Hill in County Sligo, which is another link in the chain of experiences fostered by the disparate likes of Paul Winter, the Sangre de Cristo mountains in Colorado, and the Spiritual Life Institute. Don’t get me wrong: Cindy wanted Ireland, too, as I wanted to see London. Still, we had different agendas when the planning began.

I told Cindy throughout the trip that she did not take a bad picture. Every time I turned the camera her way, she was beaming. If you followed our escapades on Facebook, go back and look at the selfies we took. Every single one of ‘em. She’s flat out gorgeous in each. Such a smile! ;-)

I am grateful for the chance to accompany Cindy Lou on this magical trip she’s been waiting for. It was supposed to happen eight years ago when she retired from teaching. Now, as it turns out, we celebrated a 60th birthday and a 20th year of marriage, to boot.

Truth is, we’ve grown together as we’ve grown older. We love each other deeply. And it feels damned good, I don’t mind telling you.