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.  It is even a lie to pretend to.  And yet
this is exactly what most of us demand.  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 premanency
on duration on continuity; when the only continuity possible
in life as in love is in growth in flexibility - 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 in owning or possessing, not in demanding or
expecting, not in hoping, even.  Security in a relationship
lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor
forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but
living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is
now.  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, continually
visited and abandoned by the tides.  One must accept the
security of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.

                             - gift from the Sea Argananta