Alone Together

photo by Amy Brandon

“So many of us are reaching out, hoping someone out there will grab our hands and remind us we are not as alone as we fear.”  ~Roxane Gay

A little over a year ago, I started working part-time and from home. For the first time in my life, my days are neither full of other people nor structured by any outside influence. Think about how strange that sounds. I don’t think my life has been like this since before kindergarten. I expect that would be true for most of us. It’s been like learning to be a different person. More properly, I suppose, it’s been like learning to be fully myself. I absolutely love it, but unforeseen learning curves have presented themselves.

One of the hardest questions I’ve had to ask myself has revolved around the questions of solitude and community. How much solitude is too much? How is community defined anyway? When I feel, as I often do, that there is no such thing as too much solitude, I begin to second-guess myself, to doubt my goodness as a person. What kind of misanthrope just wants to stay home all the time? But then when I do go out, I find both my social skills and my patience with what passes for entertaining interaction these days have atrophied to the point of being almost useless. And how about community? Is spending time with my husband community enough? Does online community count? Do I have to force myself to go out and do things I don’t necessarily want to do just to meet the requirement of being a well-adjusted person? Because here’s the thing, the days I feel the most well-adjusted are the days Ken and I are home alone together all day. Is that solitude or community? Maybe our cultureal expectations for what passses as well-adjusted are not right for some of us. I don’t know. I don’t have answers here, just hunches based on my own recent experience.

A few months ago I was asked to be involved in a small group based on the idea of a “Circle of Trust,” as defined by Parker Palmer in his book A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life. I didn’t stay with the group, partly because I didn’t want to have to shower and dress and drive an hour round trip in the dark to go, but also partly because I don’t think I am ready for that level of openness with others right now, but that’s a different issue. What I did do was to buy the book and begin to read slowly through it. Just tonight, as I was contemplating emailing the group leader (who is also a pastor) and asking him for help with the questions I mentioned above, I picked up the book instead and came across this passage:

“If we are to hold solitude and community together as a true paradox, we need to deepen our understanding of both poles. Solitude does not necessarily mean living apart from others; rather, it means never living apart from one’s self. It is not about the absence of other people -- it is about being fully present to ourselves, whether or not we are with others. Community does not necessarily mean living face to face with others; rather, it means never losing the awareness that we are connected to each other. It is not about the presence of other people -- it is about being fully open to the reality of relationship, whether or not we are alone.”

I love that passage, but I feel like I don't quite fully understand it yet. Last Wednesday night my son and I were having a conversation about what we should and should not expect from our relationships with others, both friends and partners, and some of his words helped me begin to broaden my understanding a bit. He said that we don’t need to expect a lot from most of our friends, if we have one friend or partner who is truly a reliable emotional partner to us. He said that what each of us needs is consistent, meaningful interaction with one person we trust, someone we feel free to be our true selves around. If we have this, we don’t need a lot of interaction with other people, but when we don’t have it, we feel driven to look without forethought and sometimes almost desperately for it elsewhere, and usually don’t find it because it is such a difficult thing to develop between two people. I had never formed that thought, but it explains a lot of the drama and distraction of periods of my own life when I felt that kind of connection lacking, as well as a lot of the drama and distraction of other people’s lives I watch from a distance.

As I said, at this point, I don't have any answers even for myself to most of these questions, but I am going to try to be more attentive to my own inner voice telling me what I need, even if that's just to sit on the porch with the dogs and watch the birds. Having fully internalized the puritanical, capitalistic work ethic of our society, that kind of need makes me feel selfish because I don't feel like I am contributing to society. I struggle with this a lot, but something I saw last week on Facebook, of all places, helped me re-frame my thinking:

Rough Notes on Lila

I’m going to try something different with this post. This post is going to be an unedited version of the notes I made while I read Lila by Marilynne Robinson.  I started this blog to help me remember the books I have read, and I’ve found that I’ve worried too much about perfecting the product and not enough about recording my thoughts about the books. So in this post, I’m going to be less of a perfectionist about the post and more true to my original intent. Following are my unedited notes about Lila by Marilynne Robinson from my journal in the order I wrote them.

Undated:  This books is a balm for the overactive mind and weary soul.

1/23/18:  I’ve just read the scene in Lila where John Ames baptizes Lila. I think these may be five of the most moving, most perfect pages I have ever read. It cracked my hardened heart right open. Love, conciliation, grace, peace, remission. Remission? What does that mean? Remit like payment?  Like a bill has been paid? The remission of sins -- I’ve never really thought about what that means before. Is that true? Is that a thing? Is it even possible? Because if it’s true, it changes everything. If the remission of sin is true, then that changes everything. And if I choose it to be true for me, then maybe it becomes true. I must think on this more. Maybe this is where hope comes from. If the birthplace of hope is in the remission of sin, then not having been acquainted with the concept of the one, no wonder I have been unable to have the other.

1/27/18: Talked some with Ken about the above and about how I feel that if this concept, the concept of the remission of sin, is true, then that pretty much negates anyone’s right to judge another person.  If your bill has been paid without your own participation, then hadn’t you better just be glad for that and keep your nose out of everyone else’s business?

2/11/18: In a world of this kind of grace, there is no place for “the spirit of self-destruction and nonbeing” (Dostoevsky) because that spirit often turns outward into judgement, cruelty, and destruction of others, all of which is antithetical to “salvation” or the “remission of sin.” If your own mistakes are wiped away, then there should never be any place in your heart for judgement of others, because judgment implies superiority.  If you ask people straight up if they think they are better than others, they will say no, then they will proceed to live their daily lives as if they do, in fact, believe this very thing. But really, this “remission” thing is always a choice. You have to choose it to be true for you, first by forgiving yourself, then by accepting forgiveness from others, which changes the way you look at things and gives birth to hope.

When your only experience of life has been of its bleakness and meanness (like Lila), then you are only able to see bleakness and meanness.  What you are unable to realize is that it is possible to forgive yourself. You are unable to see any path to wholeness. Any language of redemption and remission sounds overused and otherworldly, out of your frame of reference, so you just reject outright any exploration of the true meaning of or possibility of those concepts. Conversely, if your only experience of life has been ease and acceptance, you accept those concepts without ever really being able to grasp what they mean, I think.

2/14/18:  This may be one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read.

2/18/18: Lila’s rescuer, Doll, is not a Christian but behaves and lives more like Jesus than do most church folk, although Robinson does not make the church folk in her story unlikable or judgmental or ungiving. If anything I would say Robinson is more than fair in her portrayal of church folk. Matter of fact, the entire “gypsy” group Doll and Lila join remind me somewhat of the lives of Jesus and his disciples. These people are outcasts with no knowledge even of religion, yet they live in harmony and care for one another even though they aren’t all blood relatives, at least until the going gets too rough for survival. Doll never puts herself first. She trades any chance she has for her own life to save Lila, who is not even her kin. She is humble and always “turns the other cheek” to hide the burned scar on one side of her face.

Boughton and his beliefs, to me, epitomize one of the main problems with organized religion.  He sits in his safe, warm, comfortable house, out of the weather,well-fed, loved, supported, coddled, and respected. He surrounds himself with a well-worn belief system, applying it to all, regardless of circumstance. He almost alienates Lila completely with his views on the afterlife. My view has always been why would you spend your time worrying about something (the afterlife) which you cannot truly have any certainty of, especially in reference to other people? Particularly if those views are going to hurt and alienate people in your life who need love and acceptance. Maybe I misunderstand Boughton and need to re-read him a little, but he seems to have a pretty rigid, exclusionary interpretation of the scriptures.

The Reverend, on the other hand, seems too good to be true. To have lived his whole life in a small town surrounded by people who both agree with and respect him...well, it’s hard for me to believe he would end up as open-minded as he is. He did suffer a tragic loss as a young man, and tragedy does tend to open one’s mind. But the perfect love, perfect acceptance, perfect understanding that he offers Lila, who has had so little of any of those things in her life, defies belief. It’s a beautiful love story, but in real life, people are never that loving, understanding, or accepting.

2/26/18: After posting this, I realized I had said very little about Lila herself. Ironic, given that part of the reason I loved this book was that I identify so much with Lila. Maybe that needs to be its own blog post. We'll see.

O How We Howl

photo by Amy Brandon

We are a broken people. The majority of the phone calls we get are from people we don’t know and don’t want to speak to. The majority of the mail we get is from people we don’t know and don’t want to hear from. Somehow we have convinced ourselves that digital interactions with people who check in with us on their own schedules are enough for us, that we don’t need to take the time to cultivate the living, to build non-digital relationships with others who, at times, will interfere with our own busy schedules. After all, we have hundreds of friends available 24/7 at the stroke of a computer key. Few of us , including me, seem to have the capacity any more to be real-life, in-person, on-call friends to one another in these times of digital ascendancy. It’s a lot easier to like a post or type “I love you” or “I’m praying for you” than it is to sit across from another person and let her pain assault you while you drown in your own helplessness. And we wonder why the most vulnerable, the most broken and isolated among us, break in horrific ways we don’t understand. We have neither the time, the patience, nor frankly, the interest, in being the right kind of friend, the saving kind of friend, any more. That is the hard truth. That is not the truth of the Bible we all like to say we follow.

In the midst of the horror and pain of this week, I finished reading Lila by Marilynne Robinson. Lila is a beautiful book. It is art of the kind that redeems humanity. As I’m sure you know if you’re reading this blog, I don’t review plots or discuss character development.  I hope you’ll read the book for that. But I do want to say that this book spoke to me in a particular way as I was able to identify so completely both with Lila’s logic and with her dysfunction. The one question Lila continually asks her husband, who is a minister, is why do things happen the way they do? Throughout the book, he evades the question until toward the end when he finally says what I discovered a long time ago. Some things just don’t lend themselves to being asked why. There is no fair, there is no deserve, sometimes there is no over-arching logic available to a human brain.  You can see where this line of thought could lead to nihilism.  Personally I think that is the lazy way out.  To keep trying to love, to keep working for peace, to keep hoping, these are the hard ways out. These are the paths of the brave.

No man is an island.  I’m pretty sure several famous people stressed this on several occasions over the course of written history, but we seem to do a fine job of forgetting it.  I struggle personally with this because I don’t like or need a lot of people. The truth, though, I think, is that most of us don’t need hundreds of friends. We need one friend, one friend who will hear us when we howl and who will be there to absorb that howl and to help us find our way out of it so the howl doesn’t overwhelm us all in the end.

Am I My Shadow Self?

photo by Amy Brandon

I realize this may sound strange, but I’ve waited until I was 50 years old to figure out who I am.  Some of the waiting was my fault; some was not. 

The first issue I should address is the who of who I am discovering myself to be.  This may be offensive to some of you. I prefer cats, dogs, and birds to most of the people I know. (If I’ve lost you here, you should probably stop reading.) Most of the time, I prefer silence, books, animals, trees, flowers, and mushrooms to people. Sometimes I think maybe I am a reasonably intelligent person, and then I find myself staring for hours at the birds on our feeders. I would go into debt to buy land for these birds, if my husband would let me.  This is not a sign of intelligence as we understand it. So you can see why I often doubt myself. For most of my life, I was told these qualities made me not likeable to the people around me.  The worst insult in my culture is “she's just not a people person.” This continues to be a problem. I’m pretty sure it will be until I learn to “fix that shit,” which, let’s be honest, at this point probably is not going to happen. I’ve given it (fixing that shit) a good go for 50 years though, which is why I still don’t quite really know myself.

 I go through periods of feeling like a kick-ass human being and periods of feeling particularly fragile and isolated. During recent months, mostly I’ve felt the latter. Through one of my current books, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd, I discovered May Sarton, specifically, her Journal of a Solitude. From the first entry in this journal, I felt like I was reading my own thoughts. First and foremost, I discovered that I am not the only person who goes “up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour,” and for whom, all too often, “every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation…the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting, and tormented self.” I can’t bring myself to delve into or elaborate on this journal right now.  I need more time with it, time to buy my own copy, mark it up, meditate on it.

Concurrent with my reading of The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and Journal of a Solitude, I also have been working through The Portable Jung edited by Joseph Campbell, Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, and Lila by Marilynne Robinson.  The intersection of thoughts and ideas in these works has felt eerie and has helped me begin to understand the underlying truth of Jung’s collective unconscious, the revelation that some things are true, whether or not we understand and accept them. I wonder if maybe this truth is what some of us call God.

I spent my childhood and adolescence pleasing my parents. I’ve spent my adult life shaping my children, who have turned out to be more than I could have ever wished. Now it’s my turn to find me.  I don’t think I could have better companions for this journey than the people whose works I am currently reading.  I just hope that in finding myself, I don’t lose others. That seems to be the danger, the narrow line women are asked to walk.  Find and acknowledge yourself or continue to prioritize everyone else?  Is this asked of men?  Why is this ever asked of anyone, regardless of gender?