During the visit, it was clear that Brian was fading. He tried to talk to us, but really couldn’t muster the strength to say anything coherently. I remember looking into his eyes, and saying “I miss our talks” and I’m almost sure he tried to say to me “Maybe we’ll have another.”
We never got another chance. He died Thursday.
Having spent a lot of time paying attention to how people write about dating, one of the most common issues I have seen is the tendency to focus on another person’s flaws.
What Rosenberg discovered working in situations where conflict was quite high and challenging was that when people spoke from a place of their feelings and perceived needs, instead of a place of judgement and evaluative criticism, not only was conflict reduced, but it became easier for everyone involved in a given situation to gain clarity about the truth.
When I consider the landscape today – in the US anyway – those social/cultural pressures are lessened, and the romantic “love-based” model of relationships is the norm. More and more folks are also ambivalent about, or completely against, the idea of life-long marriage to a single partner. This, even as the tide is beginning to shift towards freedom for GBLTQ folks to get married.
Sometimes, it feels like I’m drifting along, which my little mind associates with “wasting life.” Other times, it makes total sense. I really didn’t know what all was going in the past either; I just thought I did.
When I came upon this tree awhile back, I couldn’t help but stop and take a few pictures of it. With its bare limbs raised in the air, and almost everything around it dead as well, it’s the perfect image of our repetitive, habit driven minds. Chinese Zen Master Sengcan, in his great dharma poem […]
Last night, I was a member of a Quaker clearness committee in support of a friend who is getting married next year. It was the first of several meetings over the course of the fall/winter, during which the group will explore issues in their relationship, and support them going forward into marriage. From what I […]
The world of appearances is filled with the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance. Sometimes, our closest people have betrayed us. The world as it appears in conditioned reality and ordinary life, is filled with unpredictable and often unexplainable occurrences that definitely go against how we wish things would be. Because of our […]
The following is a wide ranging post on gender roles in response to this post and the comments that followed. When women are taking on masculine roles (doing, conquering, competing), it’s very difficult to transition into a feminine role (being, nurturing,emotional). ~ a comment by Michelle This is an artificial divide. It’s difficult to transition because […]
Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today. ~ By Thich Nhat Hanh I disagree with this statement. It panders too much to the stickiness that lies behind hope. The longing for a future that may […]
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