Good morning…
Thirty-three years ago today, I walked down the wedding aisle with my dad. Then I walked back up the same aisle married to Steve Allen. I don’t think there is any other choice in my lifetime that has paid off such deep, divine dividends.
I just finished my annual journey through the pages of Gift From The Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, written in 1955 and very powerfully poignant for each moment since. Every year as I enjoy her pages, I am a year older, a bit wiser, more open to integrating God’s covert, ancient wisdom. These are the two pages most piquing my interest this year, as Steve and I celebrate our own dynamic dance.
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Gift From The Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, pages 96-97
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.
The joy of such a pattern is not only the joy of creation or the joy of 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 directly on the beat is what gives good dancing its sense of ease, of timelessness, of the eternal. It is what Blake was speaking of when he wrote:
He who bends himself to joy
Doth the winged life destroy,
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.
The dancers who are perfectly in time never destroy “the winged life” in each other or in themselves.
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Tuned to God’s inner music, we each dance, year by year, in the freedom of “the winged life”. Lightness of touch and living in the moment are intertwined. May it be said of each one of us, “Your ozone-drenched garments are fragrant with mountain breeze. Chamber music—from the throne room— makes you want to dance” (Psalm 45:8, MSG).
…Sue…
P.S. Yesterday, a subscriber wrote:
Hi Sue,
I just love those passages from C.S. Lewis for perspective. I am a big fan of Mo Willems children’s books – “Knufflebunny” and the Elephant & Piggie series never get old! Mo was on Jimmy Fallon the other night and they mentioned a book I was not familiar with, but I discovered he collaborated with Jon Muth, author and illustrator of another favorite children’s book “The Three Questions,” which I searched for and reread last night. Like your message this morning, it gives great perspective on why we are here – this is my favorite page xo:
