Relationship is a high-wire act. To the left is the irretrievable past -- your personal history, your previous relationships, your triumphs and your grief, the momentum which mechanically seeks to repeat itself, your helplessness. To the right is the uncontrollable future -- your expectations and fears, a thousand desires yet unfulfilled, fading dreams, your hopelessness. That is perhaps why Buddhist practices are called the Middle Way: a balancing of the heart and mind to enable unimpeded forward movement. Lean too far to the left and we become lost in guilt, anger, fear, self-protection, and cleverness. Lean too far to the right and we disappear into romantic fantasy, superstition, magic thinking, and a self-punishing sentimentality. The tightrope is the present moment, this very instant in which we attempt to maintain some balance between aspects of the underdream. When the balance is perfect, grace and disgrace dissolve equally into unconditioned love.

But in truth, relationship is the art of falling down. Or more accurately, the art of picking oneself up lightly. In those moments when mindfulness and heartfulness are not in balance, there is the tendency to trip over one's feet. To fall, once again, into old patterns, to be confused and unhappy. Our fear of falling automatically activates the "grasping reaction," only to find that we land on another high wire -- that we fall from tightrope to tightrope, from moment to moment as the path continues. Our growth is measured in the lightness of the fall and the tenderness of our resurrection.

Buddha said, "It doesn't matter how long you forget, only how soon you remember!"

Though each time we lose our footing we may imagine it is "a fall *from* grace," in truth, it is a fall *through* grace.

On the high wire, the balancing pole is our mindfulness, our practice, spiritual and psychological, the inner work which allows progress from moment to moment. This balancing rod is what the remarkable teacher Ramana Maharishi called the "great staff": the last as well as the first desire, the Great Desire, which stirs the fire of liberation in which lesser desires are toasted to a golden hue.

When two commit to such an acrobatic act, each provides balance and perspective for the other. Seeing a loved one leaning a bit to the right in fantasy and projection, the lover whispers, "A bit to the left, a bit to the left," bringing the other back to the present. Seeing the loved one tilting too far left, heavy with the past, the lover gestures, "Lean right, lean right," returning with the loved one to the center. Each brings an added depth of field to the balancing act. And when one trips, there, waiting on the new wire, is your collaborator to stabilize the fall.

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In the boneyard of all our previously unsuccessful relationships -- from which we increasingly learned to successfully relate -- we were working *on* that other person. Despising them for not becoming what we hated ourselves for not being. Persecuting them and ourselves in the shadow of our unresolved grief.

But eventually we stop attempting to create, and simply allow, relationship. We begin to sense the possibilities and opportunities missed in the moments we closed our heart to another's pain, moments when it was more important to be "right" than heartful. Moments of unintegrated grief expressed in tones too loud for love. Recognizing that unclear intentions produce unsatisfactory results, we explore the painful recurrence of unforgiveness and resentment. The unfinished business, the passive aggression and aggressive passivity that continually define the separateness between I and "other" -- the fears of our threatened self-image. The constant displacement of the present by the shadows of the past. The need to be wanted, grinding against the want to be needless. Conflict. Power games. The unwillingness to surrender.

Exploring the charnel ground of relationships we felt did not "work," we awaken as if from a recurrent dream, and relationship becomes what Buddha referred to as "the work to be done."

It means letting go at our edge. Moving out of safe territory into the unexplored and often deeply resisted. It means making a love greater than even our fear of revealing ourselves as unloved and unlovely. A love greater than our fear of pain.

When one commits to practices that clear the mind and expose the heart -- such as mindfulness, forgiveness, and loving kindness -- what once seemed unworkable may well become the very center of the relationship. In those moments when the least movement is possible, the least resolution of our grief, the most miniscule movement is rewarded for its enormous effort. Our intention itself has considerable healing potential. The very willingness not to suffer or cause pain to another becomes the expanse in which healing and peace occur. The open space into which our loved one may let go. Making room in our heart for our own pain, we make room in our heart for theirs.