If I write out my feelings, I will feel better - basically the idea behind journaling. I will also become more clear and, as a natural-born teacher, I can offer my experience to benefit others. So here goes. I could have called it "Love Wears Many Faces or Acts of Love".

For many, many years my husband and I had created a morning ritual/habit whereby we get up very early which sort of fit our biological clock and gave us time to connect in the morning. But in many ways, it had stopped working.

I had been noticing that we were not that interested in what each other was saying. (Of course, the little girl in me wanted to say "HE is not interested in what I am saying and I go out of my way to care" but knowing that it takes two, let's just say it was "each other".

I had been wanting to sleep quite often later than 4am but got up anyway.
I was kind of tired of being so out of sync with most of the rest of my world. We almost never considered doing stuff at night because it...

My Martian and I had certain times that we set aside just for our relationship support. Every morning before school we had a little sacred time together. It certainly is not the same as a weekend in the country but it created a beautiful everyday-ness to our lives. The Martian left for work at around 6:30 a.m. We got up by 4:00 a.m. to have enough time to do what we did without him rushing off and us not having a few minutes to connect.

It's at these little meetings that we caught each other up on what was happening in our lives, planned events and even planned a little bit into the future - like going to visit our kids over the holidays.

In the past he had been at such a high level of stress by the time the semester was over, it was important that he had the time off to relax. Finally, after 8 years of teaching, he wasn't that stressed. He taught until he was 80!

In the past when he was on vacation, I had trouble adjusting to having him in my "workspace" -...

by Maia's Martian (Written a year before he passed away.

"Yesterday evening Maia and I were talking and she brought up the topic about how having sex too soon (whatever that means) in a new relationship sometimes seems to confuse things for women and not always in a good way.

Because I am wired and socialized as a Martian my first impulse was to think 'the more sex the better and the sooner the better, what’s wrong with that?'

As I thought about my own experience, however, I realized that there is more to it than that and so here is the view from an older Martian after 30 years in a successful relationship:

The word intimacy usually is a more polite way to say “sex”. Here is a more inclusive meaning of intimacy - INTO-ME-SEE - which maybe means “through sex, we are able to know each other.”

And that is the gift of an intimate long-term committed relationship. You develop a mirror to each other’s Soul. In simple terms, you get to see the Real...

If you have no way to handle your undermining thoughts and feelings, you will be bringing them all into your relationship with inappropriate behavior and words. On this day I wrote about my path which made me realize that in a very important way I've assumed the most important part of what makes a long-term relationship work - fully committed to following my own path. Which brings me to a past weekend...

On a Friday during the night, I developed my very first bladder infection. It is highly uncomfortable. What I've learned to do is to deal with it on the spiritual/emotional level and the physical level so I searched on the internet and found out that lots of water and lots of vitamin C would get rid of it and I also looked in a very important little book called Heal Your Body by Louise Hay. It says that bladder problems are about "Anxiety. Holding onto old ideas. Fear of letting go. Being 'pissed off'." It also says the positive affirmation to use is "I comfortably and easily...