DON'T SIT UNDER THE APPLE TREE But can one actually find oneself in someone else? In someone else's love? Or even in the mirror someone else holds up for one? I believe that true identity is found as Eckhart once said, by "going into one's own ground and knowing oneself". It is found paradoxically, when one loses oneself, one must lose one's life to find it. ..... a definition of the Scottish philosopher, MacMurray .... "a fully personal relationship into which people enter as persons with the whole of themselves"..........(they) have no ulterior motive ... are not based on particular interests ... . do not serve partial and limited ends. Their value lies entirely in themselves and for the same reason transcends all other values. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity when the only continuity possible in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity. Each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid, each cycle of a relationship is valid. Perhaps as Auden says in his poem For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone. An Indian philosopher says. "It is all right to wish to be loved alone, mutuality is the essence of love. There cannot be others in mutuality. It is only in the time-sense that it is wrong. It is when we desire continuity believing romantically in the one-and-only - the one and only love, the one and only mate, the one and only mother, the one and only security - we wish the one and only to be permanent over present and continuous...........There are just one and only moments." Anne Morrow Lindbergh