Solitude

Someone recently referred to this blog as "a confessional website." The reference was a new concept for me and was made in the context of a misunderstanding. So my first reaction was a frown and a wrinkled nose.

After doing what I could to correct the misunderstanding, I looked at the term again, minus the filter of my negative emotional reaction.

The label does not fit because, at least so far, I haven't revealed any secrets here. Nor has my intention been to seek forgiveness.

The label does fit because I do seek here to see myself and be seen with as little disguise as courage will permit. My selfish reasons for doing this are a) a commitment to "coming out" to myself, over and over again, b) indulging my love of language and writing, and c) experimenting with another format for my lifelong fascination with autobiography.

Other reasons for blogging are a) to meet people and engage in "deeper" dialogue than is usually possible day-to-day, b) to provoke thought, c) to create and hold a space where people can explore personal issues in a fairly "safe" public forum.

There is so much I do not say here, so many days that something weighs heavily on my heart or mind and I want to blog it....but I don't. Because I'm not brave enough to let the world see that particular wound or imperfection or bias. Because I don't feel ready to deal with reader reaction. Because the issue is in process and we have limited capacity to be still while another is in process, to keep our hands and words off the precious unfolding. Process is a vulnerable time; premature exposure to critique and opinion and "fix" and sympathy can be disastrous.

In the last few weeks, I have begun allowing myself to say aloud--to myself and others--that I am lonely. Each time I speak the word in conversation, there is a feeling of confession. Loneliness when it has visited me, has always been a secret, an embarrassment (and we will count the mention here as my first disclosure of a secret in my blog).

I read somewhere that loneliness is a time for coming into closer relationship to the self, for refinement of self-identity and clarification of personal definition and boundaries. This is certainly true for me in the current episode of loneliness.

There is always the fear that my revelation of this secret will provoke feelings of pity in the listener--a possibility I find revolting. What I seek in sharing it is to see and be seen more wholly, to shatter one more layer of social pretense and "come clean." There is longing and pain and hard places inside the experience but it is not fatal; I am not sick or at risk; I don't need saving. I desire witness.

I've also read

As long as we are on a path, we will have a sense of direction. And all paths lead away from loneliness, for loneliness is stagnation, passivity, and inaction. So, you see, loneliness is nothing more than a call for action. When we heed that call, we move forward.

Although inexact, there is some truth here as well. In the process of self-definition and general reevaluation that loneliness often triggers, ideas for new directions and recommitment arise. Among the themes and issues on my work bench this time are family, life work, the importance of place, racial identity and aging, and insights are emerging with gentle boldness.

A blessing of loneliness and solitude is time away from the increasing clamor of the modern world. In the social realm, it seems sometimes that nearly everyone is in desperate need of something from me and I find myself swept up in a frantic rush of either fulfilling or resisting others' needs--or advocating my own.

In loneliness I rediscover my own feet and legs and know again where I stand and in which direction my life is moving. I hear again the essential song of my soul. My heart resumes its true rhythm; my breath returns to uncompromised fullness--inhaling and exhaling. I am delivered to the great plain of Being to press on, restored and watching the horizon for the arrival of my beloved tribe.

What I'll Give you Since You Asked

This weekend I facilitated a strategic planning workshop for a small nonprofit organization in Biloxi. Contemplating their collaboratively-produced vision statement, a participant took issue with the phrase "unconditionally committed," or, more specifically, the use of the word "unconditionally."

I could appreciate her perspective. Is "unconditional commitment" something that can be required, or demanded or even requested?

It's a huge concept; impossible to verify until we take our last breath. It is a survivor's observation at the bedside of the deceased: Yes, her [love, commitment, faith, generosity, etc] was unconditional. It never failed.

Unconditional is a vow we make in the privacy of our own hearts--to be unwavering, steadfast, reliable until the end.


Today I am thinking about all the people I have disappointed over my lifetime, particularly those who I love. Almost never has it been a situation in which my reneging on an agreement or consciously, intentionally betraying them provoked the disappointment.

Maybe I did or said something which I knew or suspected, from prior events in our shared history, they would not approve of. Maybe we'd never encountered or explored the issue in our relationship to date so I had no idea what their response might be.

Whatever it was, I felt strongly enough about it to say or do it.

In those cases where I knew the other's opinion beforehand, I often assumed there was sufficient love, tolerance and flexibility between us to allow a difference of opinion. Sometimes I knew I risked disappointment (which, with so many people, quickly evolves into a sense of personal injury) but with people I love unconditionally, I proceed with a mostly unconscious confidence that the situation will not devolve into estrangement of the relationship.

I believe we'll keep going. I believe we'll work it out.

But it doesn't always work that way. I am estranged from, what seems to me today, a staggering number of people who I love unconditionally.

The familial estrangements provoke a distinctly dynamic emotional reaction in me. It is as though "unconditional love" comes in at least two varieties-- one denoting "til the end of time" and the other having no end; a "forever, everywhere...and nowhere as well if you go there" kind of unconditional love. An "I am with you and for you and of you always. Amen" kind of unconditional love.

Some would say it is a lot to give. I would respond that, when it comes, it is impossible not to give it. It is mysterious and insistent and gently profound--like air. There's no choice. It isn't even mine to give or withhold.

I'm saying that's the way Unconditional Love reveals itself to me. I can't say how it comes to other people.

I love my immediate blood family unconditionally. I have little to no contact with most of them. In some cases we simply haven't crossed each other's mind with enough vitality to inspire initiating contact. My youngest sister, and to some extent my only brother, fall into this category. I also have easily hundreds of cousins who fall into this category.

I've encountered and internalized some teachings on family and family love in poetry and wisdom traditions. I've also undergone a lot of psychological therapy and read substantially inside the practice. These biases shape my understanding and emotional experience of being estranged from blood relatives who I love unconditionally.

I Googled "quotations about family" and found:

Alex Haley:

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

Auguste Napier:

In each family a story is playing itself out, and each family's story embodies its hope and despair.

George Bernard Shaw:

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

Isaac Rosenfeld:

In every dispute between parent and child, both cannot be right, but they may be, and usually are, both wrong. It is this situation which gives family life its peculiar hysterical charm.

There are times when my estrangement from my mother and father provokes extreme self loathing--what kind of monster or miscreant am I? Normal people talk to their living parents. Don't they?!

Other times I see myself as just another little human whose life story happens to be unfolding this way. My story is not a lightening bolt ripping the fabric of the cosmos. It is one little strand in the tapestry of Life.

It is a small strand and it is not unique. It recurs. It is mostly through biographical literature that I discover the universality of my experience. Estrangement is a bleak plane that others have visited. And written about. Or painted or composed music or danced about.

Sometimes I attempt a therapeutic analysis. What do the "experts" say about estranged adult children? What do the wisdom traditions say is possible for an estranged being?

Perhaps three years ago, it was extremely painful to think of the gulf between my divorced parents and the individual gulfs between me and each of them. Very rarely do I feel that kind of pain anymore. And very rarely does an urge come to "fix" the situation. It is what it is. Tragic, sad, ridiculous, paradoxical. It is the way it is.
I love them. We do not talk.

Who is to blame? A dead-end, deadening question.

What did I do? I disappointed them. Deeply. Early in my life. They were hurt and disappointed because of something I was or said or did. And I experienced their wounded disappointment as a fatal wound to my heart. And, as soon as I could, I set about placing as much space and time between us as possible. I ran from the scene and the source of pain.

But I was young. I still needed them psychically. I loved them and needed them. And I felt wounded by their disappointment. For a few years I reached out through occasional letters written in raw, reaching language trying to reconnect to what felt like essential, life-sustaining relationship. My father never responded but his wife sent a friendly handwritten card saying thanks for writing and best of luck always. My mother never responded to letters but was full of smile and surface chat when I saw her at my son's wedding after at least 3 years of silence between us.

I learned that I could survive without an engaged relationship with my parents.

Perhaps my parents feel the same unconditional love for me and each other that I feel for each of them. What proof will exist as we each breath our last that "yes, our love was unconditional. It never failed"?

Time in the Sky

I am reading and hearing reports about airline travel

and last weekend I made a trip to Florida by air. There's a good chance it was the last time I'll travel by commercial airliner.

I'm not outraged, don't have a desire to bitch and moan or start a letter-writing campaign. It's "their" thing and they can do it however they want to. But it just doesn't work for me any longer.

I can still remember my first trip on a plane. It was December 1977 and I was returning to IN after a couple of years away living in Hollywood and hitch-hiking in the West. The flight took off from Denver just before sunset. Beautiful, beautiful beyond words the sky. I remember the exhilaration of mind and body as we left the ground...fascination to see the wings of the plane dipping as we made the curve toward the east while inside the plane all was upright and level...and what to make of all these lives brought together in one airborne room!

I'd never seen America from that vantage point and something like patriotism swelled in my heart. Looking at the fields and houses and highways and malls below, I was awed to consider the hundreds of thousands of lives playing out: even as we flew over unaware, down there, someone was dying, being born, falling in love, taking a pie out of the oven, making a big mistake, reuniting, typing the last page of their first novel, looking up at a plane flying by...

Flying! What an astounding technological feat! On that day, I thought I want to fly and fly!

A few years shy of three decades and so much has changed. The worst part of every trip now is the journey itself. No more. Private plane? I'm happy to try it. I still love flying and it's the fastest means available. But airports and being crammed into a steel box with people behaving badly? No more.

Hate to be a quitter but I've had enough.
We can add "refuses to travel by commercial plane" to the list of my high-maintenance personality traits.

One can only try

One can only try to be normal.

Normal is indefinite, changeable, elusive. It can mean anything. It includes almost everything, depending on where one is and what time it is. Trout for breakfast, remaining silent, speaking up, a desire for acceptance, a fear of death, five fingers on each of two hands, choosing the green crayon for coloring leaves, having difficulty remembering names.

Normal. All normal.

A neighbor complains that another neighborhood resident is "not normal." Pressed for specific behaviors that support her impression, she says "She wants to know what everybody is doing. She leaves her laundry on the line all night. She has indoor furniture on her front porch. She drinks beer in the morning. Nobody's ever seen her husband."

I often refer to myself as "a freak" which translates variously at Thesaurus.com as weirdo, enthusiast and divine act. I use it to refer to a) the frequency with which my behavior is perceived by others to be curious, odd, inappropriate, quirky or inconsistent; b) the frequency with which I feel out of step with most of the people around me; and c) the absence of certain routines and the excess of other types of routines that define my life.

In my perfect dream of living, no one uses "normal" as a yardstick to measure anything or anyone else and just being is good enough and complaints or problems are discussed in specific enough terms to allow a meaningful conversation about possible correctives.

To say "normal" is to say very little. It is, too often, an unkind, ineffective shorthand. To a degree, it's unavoidable since even the most eloquent speech is incomplete and inaccurate. The limitations of language. But the possibilities between us expand in direct proportion to the integrity and care and intentionality we bring when we talk to each other. The difference between "Be nice!" and "Please don't interrupt or talk with your mouth full of food" is immense. The first statement may communicate your displeasure with me; the second statement offers me some options for remedy.

For some people--most notably and painfully, several members of my family--my ideas about language are troublesome and annoying. My request for clarification or confession that I don't understand are read as being too analytical or "playing dumb." Where do I go from there? It feels like a closed door that I've stood outside of my entire life.

In moments of desperation or wretched yearning, my mind frantically schemes, concocting scripts, lines to deliver that might give an impression of normalcy. I try to design a facade, paying attention to language and posture and facial expressions. How does one convince or prove...or delude others into the perception that one is normal?

Even if the disguise succeeds in the moment, there is the long history of being perceived as "not normal" to deal with. And given the slippery nature of "normal," maintaining the pretense long enough to overcome the preconceived notions and earn the other's trust is a daunting task.

I'm not sure it's possible.

One can only try.

Heaven on My Mind

There is so much suffering in the world.

There is joy too. And people who will say they have never known joy.

But everyone seems to know suffering.




Belief in Heaven begins to make sense. For some it becomes the only way to endure Life.




I used to say I didn't believe in Heaven. Gradually, of course--since I really meant the concept of a celestial city full of light and music, where a paternal divinity waits to meet me after I die IF I have earned entry, has no resonant meaning for me--I stopped saying I didn't believe in Heaven.

I decided I liked the word. I reclaimed it. I understood it as a state of being, experienced Now rather than Later--albeit not a state I experience with sustained regularity.

Thinking about it tonight, I wondered why.

It could be simply the constant flux inherent to being human. Nothing lasts forever. A lot of things don't last long. The fiery burst of autumn trees. The breathless enthrall of first love. The first bite of a new loaf right out of the oven.






Mark Twain said, "Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company. " That Twain....such a playful curmudgeon.






But what's the difference between believing there will be surcease of suffering at the end of life and perceiving intermittent surcease in life? What difference does it make in the lives we live now? Are we better or worse people? More or less generous, industrious or kind?


The last week has been rough for me and, apparently, also for a lot of friends and acquaintances. Driving home tonight I thought about our suffering. About particular moments so densely saturated with suffering that it is actually difficult to draw a breath. The death of a loved one. The end of a relationship. The loss of a home.

A belief in a heavenly afterlife can inspire the next breath for those who believe. The belief compels them forward, even into yet another encounter with suffering. They keep going because God is waiting for them.


My next breath comes upon remembering that Heaven is here Now for me. That God is here. This Now Is God. Again, Simone Weil''s words on affliction come to mind:

it is no punishment; it is God holding [my] hand and pressing rather hard. ... buried deep under the sound of [my] own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God.

I have perhaps shared with you in person, or here, the cherished notion that I touch for inspiration: that I sit always in the lap of God and can at any time lean back and feel the divine heartbeat against my shoulder blades, the breath of God bathing my head and neck. I am granted clear vision and an open heart...though I sometimes forget my endowment.

Heaven is when and where I remember my endowment. Sometimes remembering is triggered by beauty. Sometimes by suffering.

Death might be a final, ultimate remembering.