I’m beginning with a poem that you may be familiar with, by the Lebanese poet, artist, and sculptor, Khalil Gibran.
Love one another but make not a bond of love
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls;
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup,
and give one another of your bread, but eat not from the same loaf;
Sing and dance together, and be joyous, but let each of you be alone, even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give of your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
For only the hand of life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love.
Marriage symbolizes the love and intimate sharing of two lives, yet this sharing is not meant to diminish but rather to enhance the individuality of each life.
A love that lasts is one which is continually developing and in which each partner is individually developing, while growing in understanding of the other.
It’s very much like a dance. A dance in the sense that the lovers are free, and yet connected… barely touching as they pass, and then embracing.
Partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, the same pattern, a marriage, a life together…
A good marriage, like a dance, is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently to the music of their love, 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, or the heavy hand.
For marriage is an unfolding.
It takes years to marry completely two hearts, even the most loving.
A happy wedded life is a long falling in love.
Too often we think that love belongs to the brown-haired and crimsoned-cheeked. Not so.
We marry in fractions. Now a small fraction, then a larger one, until, if we’re fortunate, after 30, 40, 50 years, we are married totally.
Yet the amazing thing about these fractions is that at every step of the way, they feel like whole numbers, it feels totally…
And then we discover that it just gets better and better. Because love has no boundaries other than those that we impose upon it.
My grandparents were a wonderful model of love. I had the privilege of witnessing the changing beauty of that love
My grandmother, in her late 70’s was in the hospital with a serious illness. My grandfather also became ill and was in the same hospital. Not wanting my grandmother to worry about him, he made everyone in the family promise not to tell her. Then every day he got out of his hospital bed, dressed in a shirt, tie and jacket, and went to “visit” his wife. Grandma never knew.
Or at least she never let grandpa know that she knew.
Two people, married for over 50 years, deeply loving and caring for and about each other.
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote about this love, a love in which there is no I or you, in Sonnet 17…
I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.
In marriage we need to care for each other so much that we know, as completely as possible, what the other is feeling.
It is your hand upon my chest…and when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close …
To be open, to be honest, to be exposed, without fear…
To share not only joys and successes, but also the burdens of sorrows and failures.
To care so much… to trust so much…to be vulnerable…to be imperfect and know that in that imperfection we are loved.
To know and be known in this way is beyond measure.
Such understanding and acceptance equips us to live with the problems and failings and worries that accompany every marriage.
Mik and Samantha give themselves in love today but they don’t give themselves away.
And it is in that tension between separateness and union that love-- whose incredible strength is equal only to its incredible fragility-- is born and reborn.
