Max Said
Our living room and kitchen were transformed into a cozy performance space for 30 or so audience members and 10 performers today. Denise had her annual piano recital for her students. So we were host to parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, etc. while kids ranging in age from 7 to 17 showcased their piano talents. It was a great success as the past two have also been. Somehow having everyone sardined in to our converted living spaces creates an air of intimacy and informality that strikes just the right balance for both performers and audience. Denise tends to debate the issue each year of whether we should keep the recital in our home, or find an alternate space for it. But I, for one, am convinced that having it in our home is what truly makes it work.
The recital in our living room highlighted something for me that I think is another key to our successful relationship. Denise and I excel at creating the right space for special things to happen. Well, truthfully, I think Denise is truly the expert at this, but I have learned from her and do have a pretty well tuned sensitivity for creating these spaces.
I need to spend some time defining exactly what I mean by creating a space. Of course, part of what I mean is literally arranging a physical space in a way that works for the intended purpose, the feng shui part, I suppose. We had to decide how to position the piano for the recital, Denise swapped out a piece of artwork that was the backdrop for the performers, and seating had to be arranged, etc. But there is a great deal more to considered about creating the right space. One of the reasons Denise keeps the recital in our home is because this is where the students come to take their lessons, so they are comfortable with the space and they are playing on the instrument they are used to. Having the recital in a home, as opposed to in a hall or church, takes it out of the realm of a rigidly judged performance and places it more in the realm of a supportive celebration of the students' accomplishments and progress. So the emotional and psychological elements of creating the space are to be considered. Then there is the way in which Denise teaches her students. She expects, and nurtures, her students to have a love for music. And it is the uniquely individual way that each student can relate to and express that love of music that really drives them to learn and practice. For me this is a great example of the most subtle but powerful way in which one create a space. It is holding out an empowering context which creates a positive possibility for someone to grow into.
So seeing how beautifully the space for the piano recital was created today on all of these levels made me reflect on how important this ability and skill is to our marriage and our parenting. By always being willing to work on ourselves and grow individually, we clear the relationship space of our personal baggage. By building on a foundation of absolute trust, we have created the space for a depth of intimacy that I don't think many people experience. And I think the best summary I can come up with for our parenting and teaching philosophy is that we do our best to create the space that encourages each of our children to blossom into the miraculous beings that they desire to be.
So, how does one go about creating these spaces? Well, for me, the answer is simply love. If I care deeply about someone, or something that I am doing, I am naturally empowered and drawn to creating the space which best serves that person or undertaking. Certainly there are other skills involved, like listening carefully, empathy, and listening to one's own heart, but at the core following love creates the spaces that make us thrive.
Denise Said
Creating a space for love. Wow - very powerful, yet so simple my dear Max. I am always in awe at how you put things.
This reminds me of when we first started making the time, or creating the space, as you so nicely put it, to get away together on a regular basis. Making our relationship important and not lost in the day-to-day shuffle of our family life and our work lives is creating space for love to thrive. Love really does need space. For some reason our culture expects love and relationships to thrive all on their own, but honestly how can they? We as individual people are always evolving and changing as we grow older; learning more, changing habits, losing hair (or going gray) becoming wiser in certain ways, so it would make sense that our relationships therefore are always evolving. One easy way to nurture that evolving marriage relationship is to create a space - 10 minutes sitting over tea alone. Sometimes that's all we get in our week Max. Some weeks we'll find the space for an hour walk along the canal, or dinner in a quiet restaurant, or a racy few hours alone in hotel, or the most fulfilling - a weekend (or dare I dream week?) away with the phones turned off - and checked once in awhile for important messages.
It's been important for us to get away by ourselves for a weekend to remember "us" and to create a space where we can rekindle, remake, revisit whatever needs to be tended and nurtured. We discovered this 11 years ago, or so, when we snuck away to a hotel for a few hours. Just having those few hours to ourselves, having made the space - a sacred space in a way - made all the difference. Those few hours set a precedence - to make a space for us. It wasn't going to happen on its own. (It's lovely when it does surprisingly happen on its own once in awhile. ) When we first met we made the time to go places, take walks, talk, write to each other and surprise the other. This was creating a space. It fed us. It's brilliant actually to now have a phrase to use when I'm in need of having time with you. Creating the space for love.
Our relationship and love doesn't always need lots of time but it does need consistent time and space, even a moment in the day when I give you a look and tell you you're the best thing to ever happen to me. Or you say some quirky funny thing to make me laugh. This has all come about from years of having created time for each other. I'm not sure why this gets lost when people get married. We have much to share.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Luck had nothing to do with it.
I love this phrase "Luck had nothing to do with it!" It's one that Max has used when people have said that Max and I were lucky to have found each other as mates. I've even said many times I am lucky to have Max as a husband. But I do think he's right though that luck had nothing to do with it. It's been many years in the the making. Years of learning, re-adjusting, losing my ego in the relationship, and hard work. It's not magic, yet magic begins to occur again, like in the early days of a courtship, once a couple reaching a level of committment and acceptance for the other.
First of all I remember at 16-years-old really getting clear about what kind of boyfriend/husband I wanted. (Wow! That seems very young to me now.) There were certain qualities he had to have. He had to be kind and gentle - those two were the most important. He had to love me dearly, and also think I was beautiful. Beyond that he could be whoever he was. I even wrote down these qualities and how old this man should be, our wedding date, and I stuck that paper in a drawer and forgot about it for years. I found it not too long ago, and astonishingly it had all happened as I had written it down, even to the date of the wedding. (well I had the year wrong)The Law of Attraction really works, quite amazingly. Something I need to always remember.
We met when I was 16 and Max was 18 at a festival in PA. He came up to the blanket I was sitting on and said, "Are you Denise?" I saw immediately in his eyes that I knew him from a different time. This young man was person I had been looking for. He didn't quite get it as quickly as I did but somewhere in him he must have felt it too because he held my hand that very same night on the walk back to the group campsite. It felt very right.
It took 4 years of growing and dating before we got married. That was a sweet time as well as a conflicting time too. There were many expectations of what we should and should not be doing. College was one of them, but that is another story.
Getting married and moving to New York City began the next crossroad. I would be lying if I said we never fought. There were terrible fights and patterns that we got into. Control issues, many mine. Luckily we waited to have a baby. We waited 5 years into the marriage. I wanted the baby. Max wasn't so sure about the whole idea. Let me tell you - you better have a lot of your shit together before having a baby because otherwise it really comes out under the stress. It's no longer him and me; it's three.
So our marriage continued, still having the same arguements and patterns, but less frequently with a baby keeping us busy. Basically we were happy, but there were those moments that didn't make sense until I started learning more about relationships. I was doing a lot of things wrong I learned. I did a women's weekend with Justin Sterling, of the Sterling Institute of Relationship, and worked with women to start healing and transforming my marriage relationship. I had women to go to now with my complaints - not my husband. No one wants to hear nagging about things you don't like about them. This is where the acceptance part started coming in.Interestingly I began to understand that the relationship is an entity unto itself. It doesn't thrive unless it is taken care of. We all find it easy to care for the relationship in the beginning when it is new, but it withers and dies if not tended. Marriage consists of three parts - the husband, wife and the marriage itself.
I've been fine-tuning my relationship with Max ever since that women's weekend in 2000. Sometimes sticking my foot in my mouth and saying the absolute wrong things still, but I am getting better at nurturing my marriage and more and more say the right things or NOTHING AT ALL. It's not luck. It's not magic. It's like gardening and I'm tending to the marriage to best of my ablility in each moment.
I am the Luckiest...
Sorry, could not resist the counterpoint in the title... That Ben Folds song always makes me think of you, Denise.
What strikes me most about your post is how clearly it comes across that the success of our marriage is an excellent example of how the universe is meant to work for us. So, while we have been blessed in many ways throughout our relationship, we get credit for recognizing the blessings and taking action to follow the lead of those blessings.
Although, as you say, I was slower on the uptake in terms of knowing that we were destined for one another, we both remember the shared late night moment of absolute clarity when we knew that we were going to be together for the rest of our lives. There was so much certainty and simplicity in that realization. I always refer back to that moment as the perfect example of thought creating reality. It was simple, clear, absolute and filled with overwhelming joy. In short, it had all the most powerful elements of creative thought.
We say in the men's circle that absolute freedom is having no choice. Knowing that we had each found the one person that we were looking for as a lifetime partner so clearly so early on in our story gave us the freedom to pour ourselves without reservations into making our relationship flourish. This was the taking action part on following the blessing of that divine certainty. We received an inspiration, but we also did the hard work to make that inspiration and ongoing reality.
And, if I step back and look at our ongoing story, I can see the little signposts along the way to help us stay on track. The people we met that provided insights into our own ways of being, the experiences that these people led us both to, etc... The Sterling work was certainly a big one that has helped to put practical understanding and tools in our hands for shaping and nurturing our relationship.
I love the metaphor of tending a garden. While the process by which seeds become the fruits they were meant to be is full of all the mystery of the universe, it is the very simple, earthbound work of caring for the garden that provides a space for the plants to flourish.
And this carries through very well into how we have approached parenting - we provide the space and all the basic things that our children need to flourish into the beautiful creatures that they were each meant to be - but how exactly that happens and what they will become is a wonderful mystery.
Probably much more to be said on this topic, but I really wanted to bring out this one point. I hope we can both truly embrace how powerful the creative thought that began our journey together was and apply this lesson to continue to expand ourselves and our relationship into the beatiful, majestic and fruitful tree of life that it is and can be.
First of all I remember at 16-years-old really getting clear about what kind of boyfriend/husband I wanted. (Wow! That seems very young to me now.) There were certain qualities he had to have. He had to be kind and gentle - those two were the most important. He had to love me dearly, and also think I was beautiful. Beyond that he could be whoever he was. I even wrote down these qualities and how old this man should be, our wedding date, and I stuck that paper in a drawer and forgot about it for years. I found it not too long ago, and astonishingly it had all happened as I had written it down, even to the date of the wedding. (well I had the year wrong)The Law of Attraction really works, quite amazingly. Something I need to always remember.
We met when I was 16 and Max was 18 at a festival in PA. He came up to the blanket I was sitting on and said, "Are you Denise?" I saw immediately in his eyes that I knew him from a different time. This young man was person I had been looking for. He didn't quite get it as quickly as I did but somewhere in him he must have felt it too because he held my hand that very same night on the walk back to the group campsite. It felt very right.
It took 4 years of growing and dating before we got married. That was a sweet time as well as a conflicting time too. There were many expectations of what we should and should not be doing. College was one of them, but that is another story.
Getting married and moving to New York City began the next crossroad. I would be lying if I said we never fought. There were terrible fights and patterns that we got into. Control issues, many mine. Luckily we waited to have a baby. We waited 5 years into the marriage. I wanted the baby. Max wasn't so sure about the whole idea. Let me tell you - you better have a lot of your shit together before having a baby because otherwise it really comes out under the stress. It's no longer him and me; it's three.
So our marriage continued, still having the same arguements and patterns, but less frequently with a baby keeping us busy. Basically we were happy, but there were those moments that didn't make sense until I started learning more about relationships. I was doing a lot of things wrong I learned. I did a women's weekend with Justin Sterling, of the Sterling Institute of Relationship, and worked with women to start healing and transforming my marriage relationship. I had women to go to now with my complaints - not my husband. No one wants to hear nagging about things you don't like about them. This is where the acceptance part started coming in.Interestingly I began to understand that the relationship is an entity unto itself. It doesn't thrive unless it is taken care of. We all find it easy to care for the relationship in the beginning when it is new, but it withers and dies if not tended. Marriage consists of three parts - the husband, wife and the marriage itself.
I've been fine-tuning my relationship with Max ever since that women's weekend in 2000. Sometimes sticking my foot in my mouth and saying the absolute wrong things still, but I am getting better at nurturing my marriage and more and more say the right things or NOTHING AT ALL. It's not luck. It's not magic. It's like gardening and I'm tending to the marriage to best of my ablility in each moment.
I am the Luckiest...
Sorry, could not resist the counterpoint in the title... That Ben Folds song always makes me think of you, Denise.
What strikes me most about your post is how clearly it comes across that the success of our marriage is an excellent example of how the universe is meant to work for us. So, while we have been blessed in many ways throughout our relationship, we get credit for recognizing the blessings and taking action to follow the lead of those blessings.
Although, as you say, I was slower on the uptake in terms of knowing that we were destined for one another, we both remember the shared late night moment of absolute clarity when we knew that we were going to be together for the rest of our lives. There was so much certainty and simplicity in that realization. I always refer back to that moment as the perfect example of thought creating reality. It was simple, clear, absolute and filled with overwhelming joy. In short, it had all the most powerful elements of creative thought.
We say in the men's circle that absolute freedom is having no choice. Knowing that we had each found the one person that we were looking for as a lifetime partner so clearly so early on in our story gave us the freedom to pour ourselves without reservations into making our relationship flourish. This was the taking action part on following the blessing of that divine certainty. We received an inspiration, but we also did the hard work to make that inspiration and ongoing reality.
And, if I step back and look at our ongoing story, I can see the little signposts along the way to help us stay on track. The people we met that provided insights into our own ways of being, the experiences that these people led us both to, etc... The Sterling work was certainly a big one that has helped to put practical understanding and tools in our hands for shaping and nurturing our relationship.
I love the metaphor of tending a garden. While the process by which seeds become the fruits they were meant to be is full of all the mystery of the universe, it is the very simple, earthbound work of caring for the garden that provides a space for the plants to flourish.
And this carries through very well into how we have approached parenting - we provide the space and all the basic things that our children need to flourish into the beautiful creatures that they were each meant to be - but how exactly that happens and what they will become is a wonderful mystery.
Probably much more to be said on this topic, but I really wanted to bring out this one point. I hope we can both truly embrace how powerful the creative thought that began our journey together was and apply this lesson to continue to expand ourselves and our relationship into the beatiful, majestic and fruitful tree of life that it is and can be.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Our new blog...
Dearest Denise,
So here we go... We have been looking for a way to share what we are about with the world so we have decided to start a blog about our life and relationship.
My hope is that this is an organic way for us to translate the often intangible things that have made our marriage so wonderfully succesful, joyful and nurturing into the realm of the left-brained. I have been contemplating how to do this for some time now. The men on my MDI team often look to me for input on what it is that makes a successful marriage tick and I have equally as often been rather perplexed as to what to tell them.
I know that it comes out of an unwavering committment to making our marriage what we want it to be. While there is certainly magic at work in our deep connection, there is a huge amount of hard work on ourselves and our relationship there as well.
I know, while it will sound like a cliche, that keeping our sense of humor at the forefront is an important element. Being able to laugh at ourselves and one another in a loving way has brought us through many difficult times.
I know that it comes from a desire to grow. We have both always looked to grow as individuals and at the same time looked to bring the fruit of this personal growth back into the relationship.
I know that looking inward and following our hearts has never failed us. In so many ways not allowing outside influences, outside ideas of the way things should look, to affect us and our relationship and parenting choices has served us very well.
So, that is what I know for now. As with all things we do together, my love, I look forward to this written journey together.
Love, Max
Dear Max,
I'm a bit nervous starting a blog. Usually when I write it's not for the world to read, but to a specific friend. As you said - here we go. So why not give it a try?
Hey! First things first I just realized this is a great way for me to get love letters from you again! This wasn't an alterior motive at all from doing this blog, but I'll take whatever perks I can get. Your many love letters and poems from the early years are stashed away for safe keeping and re-surface every few years, when I'm cleaning out stuff, for me to re-read. I cherish those early words of yours. The very makings of the foundation of us.
You have always been able to put into words so clearly and eloquently (it's great to be married to an English Lit. Major for the reason that he has a storage of wonderful words at his disposal all the time - a word master) how you feel about me and what you think about our relationship. You've patiently helped me time and again to explain the feelings that I have and can't put into words. So it seems appropriate now as we reach a new crossroad to try to put into words, not on paper anymore, but on a computer (oh how you drag me kicking and screaming into the 21st Century!) how we've stayed married, and happy, for almost 23 years. Our marriage is in the throes of making another leap. It happened 12 years ago and now here we go again! Here's to us and making something together, besides another kid!
I love you,
Denise
So here we go... We have been looking for a way to share what we are about with the world so we have decided to start a blog about our life and relationship.
My hope is that this is an organic way for us to translate the often intangible things that have made our marriage so wonderfully succesful, joyful and nurturing into the realm of the left-brained. I have been contemplating how to do this for some time now. The men on my MDI team often look to me for input on what it is that makes a successful marriage tick and I have equally as often been rather perplexed as to what to tell them.
I know that it comes out of an unwavering committment to making our marriage what we want it to be. While there is certainly magic at work in our deep connection, there is a huge amount of hard work on ourselves and our relationship there as well.
I know, while it will sound like a cliche, that keeping our sense of humor at the forefront is an important element. Being able to laugh at ourselves and one another in a loving way has brought us through many difficult times.
I know that it comes from a desire to grow. We have both always looked to grow as individuals and at the same time looked to bring the fruit of this personal growth back into the relationship.
I know that looking inward and following our hearts has never failed us. In so many ways not allowing outside influences, outside ideas of the way things should look, to affect us and our relationship and parenting choices has served us very well.
So, that is what I know for now. As with all things we do together, my love, I look forward to this written journey together.
Love, Max
Dear Max,
I'm a bit nervous starting a blog. Usually when I write it's not for the world to read, but to a specific friend. As you said - here we go. So why not give it a try?
Hey! First things first I just realized this is a great way for me to get love letters from you again! This wasn't an alterior motive at all from doing this blog, but I'll take whatever perks I can get. Your many love letters and poems from the early years are stashed away for safe keeping and re-surface every few years, when I'm cleaning out stuff, for me to re-read. I cherish those early words of yours. The very makings of the foundation of us.
You have always been able to put into words so clearly and eloquently (it's great to be married to an English Lit. Major for the reason that he has a storage of wonderful words at his disposal all the time - a word master) how you feel about me and what you think about our relationship. You've patiently helped me time and again to explain the feelings that I have and can't put into words. So it seems appropriate now as we reach a new crossroad to try to put into words, not on paper anymore, but on a computer (oh how you drag me kicking and screaming into the 21st Century!) how we've stayed married, and happy, for almost 23 years. Our marriage is in the throes of making another leap. It happened 12 years ago and now here we go again! Here's to us and making something together, besides another kid!
I love you,
Denise
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