by Diane Covington-Carter, July 21, 2022
We have been busy living our lives and celebrating our love, so we haven’t been blogging much. So now, with our 8th anniversary coming up, we are both remedying that.
This year, 2020, We didn’t plan on staying in New Zealand past our normal three months. But then Covid-19 hit and we became locked down here, all flights cancelled and borders closed.
What a wild ride we’ve all been on since March, when the world had to stop, to try to control this pandemic. We have been blessed to be in a safe and sane country during this time and at this moment, there are no new cases and things are beginning to open up again, with a semblance of normalcy.
Throughout this challenging time, I have felt so grateful to be going through this with Landon as my partner. During eight weeks of lockdown, when we were staying at home, sheltering in place, it felt harmonious and good to be together 24/7.
As things began to open up, when we discussed our options, whether or not to try to fly back to California, we have been able to listen to each other and look together to find what seems best.
I went through some real homesickness for my farm in the spring, when we plant the garden and flowers and I celebrate the beauty as my apple trees blossom. Landon listened to me and understood my feelings.
On the other side of those feelings, was the certainty that I was unwilling to risk flying back, if it was at all dangerous. Our lives together are precious and we are of the age that we are urged to be extra careful. We celebrate every day together and so are opting to stay here for now.
In general, I feel so grateful to have the deep and satisfying relationship I have with Landon, which is all that I ever dreamed was possible. As we were talking yesterday, at the beginning of one of our ‘dates’, (which always begin with talking), we were talking about our commitment to each other. Landon said, “one of us will die in the other’s arms.” Powerful, simple and true. We made that commitment to each other, “as long as we both shall live,” in our wedding vows.
I look forward to our ceremony of repeating our vows on June 9th. It won’t be at the Yuba River this year, but we will find a beautiful place here in New Zealand to have our ceremony.
Don’t give up on true love. It is possible.
Stay safe and all the best,
Diane
Our relationship is really, really phenomenal, great, and wonderful, but what does that look like?
On one level it means we have more and more freedom to express ourselves and this is especially critical in the game we have chosen to play together:
To be pursuing our own evolution and to use the relationship as the arena to heal old wounds and transform dysfunctional behaviors and thinking that cause us both suffering.
By living this way, the years have brought a deep level of love and trust, that gives us permission to say what would otherwise not be said for fear of offending the other person and losing their love and potentially the relationship.
What this takes is a commitment to total honestly, no secrets, no withholds, and the courage to say what needs to be said. It is uncomfortable, but we have related this way so much now, we trust it will work. The end result is freedom from the dominance of the mind with its old interpretations and dysfunctional patterns.
And this provides a Be Here Now experience of deep connection and ecstatic joy – the reward for the work done and any discomfort we went through.
Here is an example. We set up a time in the afternoon to have a date when we are both energetic and not tired. Then we sit and talk, sometimes for hours. We review the time since our last date and look for upsets that occurred that tended to make us feel separate, or put upon by the other, annoyed, invalidated, or in other ways upset.
Diane, who is the most courageous in this arena, usually starts by saying “I have something I don’t want to talk about.” I think, “Good she has found something for us to clear up” rather than “Oh no, she is going to criticize me and I am going to feel bad.”
What she says may sound like blame and criticism, but that is not how we hold it. We each know that we are responsible for the reality we are creating and living within, so underneath any harsh words is the understanding of “no blame” and “I love you, I am suffering over here, and I want to clear this up.”
Just the other day, Diane was trying to get me to stop making a call I was going to make. She thought it was too late at night. To me she was yelling at me and trying to control my actions, which I initially resisted. I didn’t make the call, but I was upset in having to do what she wanted me to do (similar to resisting my mother telling me what to do).
Of course she had her reasons, which I later agreed with as being better than my reasons, and which I gave up after talking about it. And more importantly, we both looked at the dynamics of what happened, apart from the actual content of the incident.
I felt put upon, not trusted to do what I wanted, annoyed with her, frustrated by the incident and she felt she had to yell at me to stop me from doing something she considered not in my best interest.
I had to look at how in my male dominant mind set, she did not feel that I honored or respected her point of view – an old pattern for her based on her upbringing in the male dominant society of the fifties and sixties.
By looking at all of this, it disappeared between us, we laughed about it and our level of intimacy that followed was once again an ecstatic, joyous, mindless experience – the reward for the work and a furthering of the trust and deep love we are creating together.
Keep doing the deep work. It is so worth it.
All the best,
Landon
June 17, 2015
Dressed up in our wedding clothes for our celebration
Landon and I just celebrated our third wedding anniversary and continued our tradition of going down to the river and repeating our vows. We sat on a rock as the river flowed by and the sunlight sparkled on the water as we said the precious words to each other.
I love our vows, and saying them again, they mean just as much to me or more, as they did on our wedding day. I especially love the one where Landon promises to be open to my point of view and to value it as he does his own. (I’ve had to remind him of that one a few times.)
I let Landon’s words sink into my soul as he told me that he promised to love and cherish me all of his days.
For one of my vows, I promised to love him, to look for his goodness, his strengths and his greatness. It felt so good as I said those words again to know that I do that, I’m committed to that and that is where I stand.
Over the past three years, we have continued to explore the depths of our relationship and have been thrilled to discover deeper intimacy and that we’re more in love than we were on our wedding day, and that is saying something.
We dressed up in our wedding clothes and went to the New Moon restaurant to celebrate, as we’ve done each year. Buzz, one of the owners, remembering our tradition asked, “which one is it, #3 or #4?” If you’ve read “Falling in Love Backwards,” you know that our first ever date was at the New Moon, though it wasn’t really a ‘date’ or very romantic. That has changed!
As someone whose parents didn’t get along and modeled disharmony, it is especially powerful for me to be living a ‘happily ever after’ scenario in a relationship. We are committed to sharing what we have discovered with others because if we can have this, then others can too.
The path requires knowing yourself, clearing up as much of your own personal baggage as you can and then being committed to using the intimacy and the wounds that surface in the relationship as a deep path to more freedom. No blame, but surrendering to authenticity, truth telling, powerful listening and compassion for the humanity that is guaranteed to appear once you get close and vulnerable.
Landon wrote his book, “The Awakened Relationship,” as a handbook to go with our book and to outline how to set your relationship up this way. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments or if we can be of any assistance.
Wishing you a summer full of love and blessings,
Diane
January 1, 2015 Nevada City, CA
In exploring the dynamic of “This Isn’t It” at an ever deeper level, I have come to some realizations.
First, the whole notion that tomorrow will be better than today if I do something about it–work harder, fix something, or just get lucky–I can now see as a trick of the mind. The collapsing of the two distinctions, “satisfaction” and “how something is” into the notion of “I will be more satisfied if things look different, or better, than they look right now,” leaves me in a constant state of being dissatisfied now and under pressure to do something or fix something today. It is never ending, and robs me of being satisfied with the way things are now.
Of course I have many things I think about from this distorted context of “this isn’t it.” For example, I need to get better in my rowing or I need to accept my waning abilities better. I need to fix the mower or complete my taxes or start a promotional campaign to make things better. It is never ending as the satisfaction is never reached and as I grow older, it just seems more and more hopeless to go down that road. Something has to change.
The solution involves living in the paradox of being satisfied, grateful and appreciative of what I now have (I find I have to actually look for it) and enjoying the process of making tomorrow better than today, just because it is fun to do and gives me a sense of accomplishment. The satisfaction is always now in the doing, the living, the appreciation of my life now.
Second, I recently realized that all my life, I have had a pattern of looking for faults or flaws in the beautiful women I was attracted to. Once I saw that, I could also see how odd that was and how it has also led to a “not seeing the world and the women in it as beautiful.”
Possibly, by finding the flaws, I could then justify in my mind not “having” that woman. As if in some bizarre sort of primitive DNA programming, I was the alpha male and I wanted all the beautiful women for my harem, but I could pass on this one because I found some flaws.
This could be the source of a pattern of looking for what doesn’t work or isn’t up to my standards or needs to be corrected. Which means I have a hard time living from my preferred reality, or creating my preferred reality of finding and seeing and acknowledging beauty all around me–seeing the good aspects of the half-full (usually a lot more than half-full) glass.
Diane often says, “you could tell me I look beautiful” and even though I want to see Diane as beautiful all the time and know I should say it more often, it doesn’t occur to me. So this is a practice I need to take on to counteract my programmed normal (dysfunctional) way of operating.
The third aspect of “this isn’t it,” that I have just seen relates to the ‘phantom lover’ who has stood behind my female partners in the past. This phantom “ideal lover” would whisper to me that the woman I was with “wasn’t it.”
Now what is fascinating is that this “fantasy ideal phantom” wasn’t even fully defined! If I looked closely, I could not see her face, or exactly how tall she was, her hair or her body. So in actual fact, she was less formed than a phantom, yet she was always there as my ‘hold out’ for not fully committing to the relationship I was in.
I might see glimpses of aspects of “her” in the pictures of women in a magazine or in some woman in a restaurant or walking down the street, but of course never the entire perfect woman.
Luckily with Diane, I know that she is my chosen partner and I have often seen her as radiantly beautiful and I am grateful for the life we have together, so these dysfunctional patterns seem easier to see against the backdrop or perhaps the looking glass of our relationship.
I can see that these are all mind tricks, ways of taking me out of present time and fooling me into continuing to carry out patterns that do not give me the happiness and joy I want in my life.
When I am in the present moment with Diane, my life is full and I am happy. Our love making, after we clear away any upsets that have surfaced, is ecstatic.
So why can’t I just stay in the moment, why do I have to keep fighting my own mind? I do not know the answer other than to say that this seems to be our nature as human beings and our challenge to see if we can resolve the dilemma by straddling the paradox of NOW and a life lived in Time.
All the best for 2015
January 1, 2015, Nevada City, CA
An “Owie” in the kitchen
During 2014, Diane and I participated in a nine-month course to become more conscious about our money and our life directions. It is run by Dave Ellis, Lynne Twist, and Tammy White and we both found it excellent. They are doing it again in 2015 and if you want more information contact us.
As part of the course, we periodically go over our finances and our budget. Our end of the year time kept getting put off, so on New Year’s Eve, we finally set aside time for what turned into a two-hour process of making sure all expenditures were in the correct categories.
At the end of it, Diane expressed that she was disappointed because she didn’t want to do our accounting on New Year’s Eve and that she had hoped we would have a date and then go to a friend’s party. When she said it, she sounded annoyed, then slammed the door and went outside to put the chickens away for the night.
I felt a little blamed in the process, as if I had somehow forced us to do this long tedious process. But I was able to see that feeling blamed was just my old pattern when my partner or my mother was upset and that in this instance, we had worked together the whole time, and Diane had an opportunity to object to what we were doing at any time along the way. So I let that go.
When Diane returned a few minutes later, she said that she was not blaming me, but was just expressing her dissatisfaction with the lengthy process and on New Year’s Eve. She also stated her desire that in the future we should do it monthly rather than the three-month interval we had just accounted for.
I agreed that this was a good idea as well, so in the end, her slight upset led to a good outcome. We would have a better chance of correcting our spending if we were getting feedback once a month rather than every three months and it would take less time if we kept up with it each month.
In reflecting, I saw that because of our love and trust of one another, Diane has the space or permission to express feelings and desires that in the past would have been unconscious, covered up or ignored. And I can notice and let go of feeling blamed which Diane wasn’t doing. She was just expressing her pent up frustration, musing to herself out loud.
However, in the past this outburst could have resulted in some form of withdrawal by both of us. I would feel blamed and hurt, feel resentful and angry on top of the hurt and withdraw my affection and affinity. Diane could have retained the anger and blamed me, rather than seeing it was her unexpressed and unfilled expectation that was the source of her upset and then withdrawn her love and affection.
Instead we recognized that her outburst was a result of our deepening relationship and in essence it was an old wound of hers coming to the surface to be healed–all in the space our love creates for that to happen.
After we talked and cleared all this up, we then had one of the best love making dates ever, deeper, more in sync, and more ecstatic than previously. But I have to say that it is hard to codify the mindless space and the experience of being with each other in that beautiful way of making love.
So once again it confirmed for me that if we can keep letting the old patterns and wounds surface, talk about them and explore the mechanisms of our own minds, that it will lead to an ever deepening connection and more freedom to express ourselves just as we are.
By the way, we also made it to the party and had a great time. So Diane’s expectations were fulfilled after all!
All the best for 2015,
Landon
It happened like this. I was in the kitchen and irritated that Diane wasn’t putting things away the way I would. My thought was, “She should do it the way I do.” And I wasn’t liking her at that moment.
I realized that judgment is my ego’s way of pushing someone else away and decreasing the love and connection we normally experience. In fact the statement, “She should do it my way,” is a denial of the reality of the way she is and puts me in this narrow angry box of fighting for the rightness of my position to the detriment of what I actually want.
I want the connection and love I have with Diane and I don’t want to live in a world in which everyone is exactly like me – how boring! But my ego/mind seems dedicated to not giving me what I really want
As I looked deeper, I realized I was already feeling frustrated with the lack of progress in the projects I was working on. And that this “helplessness” in regard to the actualization of my intentions, brought up a deep fear, the solution to which has been my propensity to keep things in order, to have “a place for everything and everything in it’s place”. My solution to my discomfort with chaos.
So rather than just notice my fear of chaos, I judged Diane for a little disorder, making her wrong, me right, and me loosing the love and connection between us. The price I pay for judging and being right!
This is my notion of how judgment always works. Something in yourself that is not complete and you are not neutral and unattached to, gets triggered by outside circumstance and you judge it or them and push it/them away form you. “That is not part of me,” you say. It is the pushing away and the loss of affinity that distinguishes judgment from discernment.
Discernment is a way of recognizing distinctions and making choices that can define who you are choosing to be and the life you are choosing to live. Judgment is the negative side of that same process. And they have two very distinct accompanying experiences – one is fulfillment and satisfaction and the other is only righteous alienation.
May we all be letting go of the suffering judging brings.
All the best,
Landon
We just celebrated the Fourth of July Holidays with Landon’s daughters and granddaughters and an extended family reunion with Landon’s brother Terry’s family. We had three generations swimming together in lakes and rivers, jumping off rocks and floating down (gentle) rapids, watching a parade and fireworks and enjoying yummy meals together. We shared such fun and sweet times and created such rich memories that we’re going to make it a yearly event.
Here at the farm, the garden is producing zucchini, growing tomatoes, and the plump and ripe blackberries are a treat each morning. Our chickens are robust and happy and about to start producing eggs. Life is good.
One month ago, on our second wedding anniversary, June 9th, Landon and I were across the planet from each other–I was in Paris, at the end of my 70th anniversary D-Day tour and Landon was at home in Nevada City.
Before I left, at the end of May, I suggested that we write each other a love letter that we could each read on our anniversary. So he handed me a letter to tuck into my suitcase and I put his card onto his desk.
I wrote my letter on a card I’d saved for many years, which had the Chinese symbol for ‘Journey’ on the front of it. I’d had it on my desk as a reminder that life is a Journey. I know that our life together is a shared journey, so it felt right to write my love letter to Landon on that card.
As I sat in my hotel room under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and read Landon’s deep and loving words, it felt so good to know that he was reading mine on that same day. When I got home and after I got over some jet lag, we sat together and read our letters out loud to each other.
Soon we’ll go down to the river and repeat our vows, which we did on our first anniversary, then out to dinner at the New Moon, our favorite restaurant, wearing our wedding clothes, to celebrate.
In the two years since we exchanged our vows here, surrounded by family and friends, our relationship has deepened and we feel even more harmony and joy. We’ve discovered that without the drama that can come from upsets and disharmony, our space has opened up tremendous creative energy and expression.
In that space, I just completed my book, “Reunion, La Réunion, Finding Gilbert,” which I had been working on since before I met Landon. His support made completing the book possible and it is now available on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Finding+Gilbert
Our book, “Falling in Love Backwards, an Unlikely Tale of Happily Ever After,” came out in 2013. And now we’re working on a “Handbook for Happily Ever After,” to share in a simple, “how to” format, what we have discovered works so well in our relationship. I am also creating a “Handbook for Attracting your True Love, Life Partner,” based on what I did to create the space for Landon to show up in my life.
We’ve started working with couples here at the farm, who come to stay for a weekend of coaching and breakthroughs. And we’ll offer a weekend workshop in the near future. So life is rich and full with time for each other, time for family and time for discovering and exploring our amazing lives.
So stay tuned! Good things to come. Send us an email and let us know how you are.
Wishing you blessings on your life and love,
Diane
It is encouraging how the space of our relationship provides a mirror to show me when I am not connecting to Diane and others; when I retreat into myself or become isolated or controlling and short with people.
A recent example: during the 4th of July week, two sets of children (mine and my brother Terry’s) and grandchildren arrived for a mini-reunion, 18 people including babies. During that week, I experienced a range of levels of participation, from fully engaged playing with my grandchildren or talking to my daughters or Terry’s gang to sitting isolated reading my book, to being irritated and rigid as I gave instructions on how to pitch a tent or do something or other.
As I reflect back on my participation, I noticed that I don’t like chaos. As a matter of fact I am afraid of chaos and have organized my life to know where things are (a place for everything and everything in its place) and to be in control. While this has greatly diminished as I have gotten older, it surprised me to see that I had wanted the children to visit, but then I missed some of the action, by being isolated. I actually felt tired and needed a break from time to time, yet I seem to have plenty of energy to row in regattas and do the training to keep me in top shape.
The nice thing is that when Diane pointed it out to me, we were able to talk about it without me feeling “not good enough”. In fact I got interested to learn what original trauma made me so resistant to the normal chaos of life. I know I was very unhappy with the chaos following my birth and I think when my brother was born 13 months after me, I withdrew in response to my mother withdrawing, but other than that I am not sure. In any regard, I can now be more aware of my isolating, kind of cold, tendency and do something to change my behaviors around it. Get more into the action.
All the best, Landon
Diane and I had recently had a great date and were happy with each other and our life. Appreciative and thankful.
So why was I Grumpy and Irritated with little things that she did, using too many spoons, not hanging up dish towels, stupid stuff that usually I don’t care about?
In looking into the pattern, I have discovered two things. One, I am full up with everything I want and not used to simply appreciating what I have without wanting something more, or better, or different: like setting an athletic goal, going on an adventure, doing something like skiing that is fun.
And second, is that I have been entrained in the pattern physically. It was my way of punishing others for not getting what I want. Or it was a reaction to my physical pain, or my not being as good as I used to be in things like rowing or skiing. What I actually saw was that I was physically grumpy, and emotionally grumpy, and I was desperately looking around for a cause!! And I couldn’t find a cause because I have what I want. So in this instance there was the grumpiness looking for a justification, caught in the act: a grumpiness without a cause!
I realize I now have all this extra time and energy being happy with where I am. I am no longer looking around for who I am going to be with and I am not so interested in just another goal or project to fill the empty space of boredom. And I am unpracticed at appreciating what I have. Finding beauty where I haven’t been looking. Counting my blessings for all the abundance within which I live my life.
In the past, irritation and grumpiness have gone hand in hand and I have been reluctant to say I was irritated about since the things I was irritated about were so petty. Now I have enrolled Diane in telling me if she notices me being grumpy and I am committed to getting off it, not being grumpy about her telling me I am grumpy!! Such are the benefits of having the relationship we have. I recognize that my grumpiness has just robbed us of the pleasure we so often experience together and I am committed to getting rid of that pattern.
May all our days be free from grumpiness!
All the best,
Landon
June 9, 2014
Nevada City, CA
Diane’s and my second anniversary today; she is in France with the WWII veterans and their families for the 70th reunion of D-day and I am at home, keeping the cats and chickens company.
I haven’t written my blog for a long time, as I have had little that was a “problem” to deal with. My usual modus operandi being that I would share how I resolved the upset. However with fewer and fewer upsets, and living more and more in the reality that this is it, it has dawned on me that my normal life is enormously satisfying just the way it is. So I am writing about that, a happy new phase in my life.
I am married to the woman of my dreams, I live where I want to live, do what I want to do, and the only thing missing is for me to find more ways to contribute to others and it would be nice if I was bringing in some money. But we have enough money, so even that area is not a source of concern, just an area of intention.
I guess in fairness, I should mention that I have some aches and pains in my body, and of course it would be nice if they disappeared, but they have come from a very active and wonderful life, so they seem to come with the territory of being 71 and I am not burdened by them, just work around them.
Diane and I have been participating in a course about money, how we spend it, save it and make it and it has brought up some deep conversations mostly based on childhood programming and some later life experiences. We are doing this so that we are on the same page about money. People say that most arguments in marriages are about sex or money. Sex has been so good, we wanted money to be just as easy and nurturing, hence the course.
In the process of doing this course on money which has really brought up every aspect of our life, “what do you want in this or that domain and how are you going to get it?” Mostly I realize that I have what I want and if I had buckets full of money I would still choose this life. What I really need to practice is appreciation. I am unpracticed in living in gratitude given that most of my life has had the undercurrent of “this isn’t it.” So I declare I am alive, happy, and prosperous.
I have also realized that in my relationship with Diane, there isn’t any subject that isn’t readily available for communication, nor an area in which we have any basic differences. The process we have gone through to get us to where we are, has cleared out all those potential areas of conflict. So now I find myself living with a partner in a transparent, open, and responsible relationship. Transparent to each other, open to any conversation, and each of us responsible for our experience. It is wonderful.
So now the ordinary is wonderful. We look forward to finding upsets and subtle aspects of life that throw us off and take us out of present time. It is an adventure of discovery, because we know that anything we can discover becomes the doorway to deeper connection, more time spent in a kind of mindless, experiential state, and more freedom to be ourselves, loved and accepted by the other.
Now we would love to be able to share this methodology with others. It is a guaranteed method for making a relationship work, if both people are genuinely committed to personal growth and enlightenment. It kind of turns your relationship into the space of an ashram with all the benefits of a loving relationship. So that is our challenge at the moment, how to get the word out there in a way that people understand what is possible for them.
I hope this blog finds my reader happy.
All the best,
Landon