Learning to be Tenacious

Looking out on the Pacific Ocean, I feel eternal gratitude for the life that Mark and I have achieved over the course of the past twenty-eight years.  We have come from a place that was built on the dreams of two idealistic college students, to a reality that neither one of us ever could have conceived of.  We began with so little, yet so much.  We came from two divorced families.  We held numerous odd(and I do mean odd) jobs throughout our college years so that we could put some boxed macaroni and cheese on the table, while studying our way through endless text books and political science classes.  We withstood the rocky behaviors of our teenage years in a relationship that was well beyond our years in maturity.  We were two young lovers who met the right person at what many thought, was the wrong time.  Different backgrounds, different religions, different geographical homes.  It shouldn't have worked.  So much to learn.   The numbers were against us.  Neither one of had a model of what a healthy adult relationship should look like.  Yet, somehow, and in some way, even when meeting the right person in the wrong time or place, we made it work.  There might have been many, many odds which were stacked up against us, but the one thing that we both had was tenacity.  Tenacity to ride out the tough times.  Tenacity to grow up together.  Tenacity to know that we were meant to do important things.  Tenacity to believe in each other.
I shot this series of photos over the course of a single day, last weekend.  I was interested in the way that the colors and textures and shapes could change so rapidly throughout the spans of the day.  From the luminous, full clouds drifting over the pier, to the wispy, ethereal puffs of white, transparently floating throughout the sky, no hour was ever the same.  No scene exact.
Yet each vignette, each transforming moment in time.  Each small shift in the hour of the day, shows both change and tenacity.  Tenacity to continue to be what is, while slowly evolving into what will be. 
And with the changes, come growth.  Subtle, evolving growth.  Until morning becomes day, becomes, afternoon, becomes, dusk, becomes nightfall.
Until the seagulls group together to feed off of the ocean and what lies underneath the waves.
Until the dusk begins to take over the scene and things change into something more.  Something deeper.  Something richer.
And then there is the calm.  When the clouds either disperse, or come together to form one, single blanket over the sky.  And all is as it should be.
As is typically so, I set out to write something entirely different when I looked at these pictures.  Yet the story evolved in a very different way.  It took on the subtleties of life and relationships.  

You see, there is never really a "right time" nor place for anything.  A relationship can start out with one hundred strikes against it.  Others may look in from the outside and say that it will not last.  Yet if we allow ourselves to flow with the natural rhythms of the day, if we take what is good at the core and then build around it, tenacity can see us through.  We must have tenacity; cohesiveness, courage, and perseverance.  We must be able to look at the larger picture in smaller fragments.  Accepting the changes as they come and working to incorporate them into something larger.  Understanding that there never really is a right time and place to do anything, but allowing life to happen anyway.