Anniversary anticipation I

For years and years and years--two thirds of our lives at this point--has this relationship endured. What, as anniversary approaches, to say?  It's continued existence to the year 2014 seem not so much an achievement, as the sum of successive non-extinctions. We could celebrate the oak tree in my yard for the same reasons: 'Goodness, still here.'

Like this blog, each new post is not an achievement but an expression of a kind of still viable vitality. It carries on not to go somewhere but to keep expressing what it is.

How to assess this relationship? Outsiders may admire it and insiders may extol it but largely as an artifact or an institution. What is it on the inside where I know it; you, Spouse, know it; and we mutually know it?

Back to '74, but even further, to '68, it's been a single encounter of different phases, episodes, occasions, and not yet over. Over the years, we've responded to each other, thought about each other, addressed each other, look ahead to more of the same, except that as my perception of you and yours of me as Other, yet Lover, have evolved, so our perceptions of same and different, permanent and passing have changed too. We are richer in history but poorer in prospects. At each moment, then, past and future balance themselves out on this time, this moment, you going to a meeting, me going to hold signs, we thinking about, later on, painting the porch and going peach picking.

As we have time in the next days, I propose we take time consider our encounter from a number of different angles:

starting with the history of its richness:
         how vivid the recognitions (your otherness!)
           how potent the acknowledgements (the Other in my space!)
         how urgent the addressings (it's nobody else but...!)
           how suspenseful the anticipations (Whatever comes, we're in this together!) as well as
        how intriguing (you stll are) and how impressive;

continuing with a consideration of examples of friendship, exploration and hospitality in our relationship: how were we, are we experimenting, teaching, companioning; launching, healing, visiting; investigating, hosting, celebrating; learning, feeding, feeling with; noticing, lending, grieving with....

carrying on to thinking about each other in terms of the other's potentiality, energy and power: how we have been, can be changed, generate change, influence change.

Finally, we might consider our encounter visa-a'-vis that of God-in-love and the Beloved as we see it and know it.

Of course, all of this 1. highly structured and formal, and 2. based foundationally on the framework of ideas undergirding this blog. Knowing us, I'm sure what results will be different than either would expect. That's where the life of who we will express itself. Shall we?