I have been thinking about what we learn in relationship over and over: what our experience teaches us is self-specific and not exactly generalizable to anyone else. So love means offering ideas and concern in a spirit of humility that we don’t really know the exact right answer for anyone else, even the people closest to us.
What Any Lover Learns
Water is heavy silver over stone.
Water is heavy silver over stone’s
Refusal. It does not fall. It fills. It flows
Every crevice, every fault of the stone,
Every hollow. River does not run.
River presses its heavy silver self
Down into stone and stone refuses.
-
What runs,
Swirling and leaping into sun, is stone’s
Refusal of the river, not the river.
Archibald MacLeish
Collected Poems 1917 – 1952
Comment on this poem from a good friend: We do prefer that the world be fluent satisfaction to our own need and perception, and it is only in denial of that satisfaction that we grow and learn and change.
