Vast Spaces Pt 2: Greeting Achy Bones and Baggage Like the Rising Sun

"I want to describe myself
like a painting that I studied
closely for a long, long time,
like a word I finally understood,
like the pitcher of water I use everyday..."
- Rainer Maria Rilke (read the whole poem here)

Most of the time I'm a morning person. I wake to music, take a hot shower, and try to remember to thank each part of me as I wash it, paying special attention to whatever part is particularly achy that morning. If I waitstaffed at a catering gig the night before, for example, it'll be my feet: "Thank you feet, oh good little feet. You carry me so far. What humble, useful feet I have."

Back in my room I light an incense, make my bed, open the curtains, practice yoga asanas, and meditate, but not necessarily in that order. Each day necessitates its own rhythm. Tuning in, I re-introduce myself to the guests lodging in my consciousness, and relax into the mode of a most solicitous hostess: "Anxiety, why are you wearing coat hangers for earrings, running over the neighbor's cat with the lawn mower? Come have a seat here and tell me about it. Or keep running amuck like that, that's fine too, but know the offer still stands. I'm just going to pay attention and breathe."

In the kitchen, I make oatmeal and turn on the faucet for the cat to drink from. I sit at the table with my breakfast and write somewhere around three pages, letting whatever's on my mind spill into my journal with as little filter as possible. Among other topics of interest (joys, dreams from the night before, hopes, interactions, epiphanies), I write about those nuissances, my fears. A wise friend of mine once said that naming your fears declaws them.

Things I'm afraid of, as far as I've noticed: being misunderstood, being confined by an idea, being more of a burden than a help, not writing anything that people will want to read, and a whole array of issues having to do with money and the lack thereof.

Phew! Now you know. It's a relief, like shining a flashlight into a dark corner where you thought something really horrible was lurking, and it turns out to be an overweight poodle, just sitting there with its tongue hanging out, crapping all over your hopes and dreams. Which is kind of nasty, sure, but nothing you can't laugh at and clean up after. Take it outside and play some fetch, for God's sake.

Then I drink a cup of coffee and read for twenty minutes or so.

Most mornings, by the time I head to work after a couple hours of glorious alone time, I have an idea of where I'm at. On good days I can actually absorb what's going on around me. I can experience the primal joy of sensory overload that comes with sharpened attention. I have the mental space to laugh in sticky moments. On bad days I notice, "ah, yes, I feel funky today" and ask what I can do to offer myself the most support. More often than not, I'm more tuned in to what's going on with other people, too. I'm learning to be a better listener.

It seems like a paradox at first, especially in a culture where we can be made to feel guilty for taking time for ourselves (I think this especially pertains to women, who are more often expected to put their families' interests before their own). But I would argue that this variety of self-absorption is sacred. When we take the time to hang out and be real with our selves - even if it means we have to get up two hours before the sun - we break down the defenses that keep us from connecting with others. Alone time makes us better company, because we can't offer anyone anything that we aren't able to offer ourselves first: attention (which is another word for love), patience, honesty, trust, a mind open to possibility.

Just think of how much kinder a place the world would be if we'd all just confront our poodles. What have you done for your self today? What will you do tomorrow?

Vast Spaces

Earlier in the week I woke up before the sun to send two friends off at Logan airport. On the solo drive home it occurred to me, as it has so many times before, that loneliness, though saddening or irritating at times, begs you to know yourself. I hold it dear.

It looked like dusk as the sun rose in an overcast sky. NPR news was quiet on the radio. At first everything I passed gave the impression of turning inward - the run-down commercial lots unopened at that hour of the morning, the streetlights shutting off - but I realized that that was just how I felt. It's the middle of my 24th New England winter, a season when introspection comes naturally. But knowing what comes next, I also feel optimistic.

Soon the pavement will be washed of salt and turn black again, with a few more potholes to show for its trials. Soon the harbor down the street from my house will fill with boats, and people will shed their knitted goods like reptiles shed dead skin. Last night I dreamed I was planting seedlings in a garden. Spring is already happening in my mind, though it is still a couple months away.

I felt it viscerally on the drive home: isolation, exhaustion, and hope. A poignant emotional sensation seemingly spawned from thin air.

To get back to my point about loneliness: the frustrating thing about being human, and a writer especially, is that no matter how many words I use I'll never be able to convey the whole truth of that morning drive home. You will still only have a snapshot of my experience, because you can't possibly know all the things that led up to it. A whole lifetime has gone into crafting this complex filter of associations, where each new stimulus inspires a recollection of things already felt. We are fundamentally alone in the way we experience the world. No one else can see through our eyes.

In the novel Gilead by Marilyn Robinson, the protagonist (an old preacher in rural Iowa) expresses this sentiment very eloquently:

"In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us."

I think learning to value our inherent solitude is essential, because if the self is the only person we can ever really know - and even that is a huge task - then we must learn to pay close attention to the weather inside. I try to find time every day to be alone, to poke amongst the ruins of my private civilization and see how they serve as a springboard for the way I carry myself in the world.

More on this theme next time...

If I could give the world a mix tape

Here is a playlist I hope will make you feel good.
Happy Valentine's Day!