On Being Alone Together and Together Alone

Thomas Merton, The New Seeds of Contemplation:

Physical solitude has its dangers, but we must not exaggerate them. The great temptation of modern people is not physical solitude but immersion in the mass of other people, not escape to the mountains or the desert (would that more people were so tempted!) but escape into the great formless sea of irresponsibility which is the crowd. There is actually no more dangerous solitude than that of the person who is lost in the crowd, who does not know she is alone and who does not function as a person in a community either. She does not face the risks of true solitude or its responsibilities, and at the same time the multitude has take all other responsibilities off her shoulders. Yet she is by no means free of care; she is burdened by the diffuse, anonymous anxiety, the nameless fears, the petty itching lusts, and the all-pervading hostilities which fill mass society the way water fills the ocean.

Mere living in the midst of other people does not guarantee that we live in communion with them or even in communication with them. Who has less to communicate than the mass-man? Very often, it is the solitary who has the most to say; not that he uses many words, but what he says is new, substantial, unique. It is his own. Even though he says very little, he has something personal which he is able to share with others. He has something real to give because he himself is real.

Where people live huddled together without true communication, there seems to be sharing, and a more genuine communion. But this is not communion, only immersion in the general meaninglessness of countless slogans and clichés repeated over and over again so that in the end one listens without hearing and responds without thinking. The constant din of empty words and machine noises, the endless booming of loudspeakers end by making true communication and true communion almost impossible. Each individual in the mass is insulated by thick layers of insensibility. She doesn't care, she doesn't hear, she doesn't think. He does not act, he is pushed. She does not talk; she produces conventional sounds when stimulated by the appropriate noises. He does not think; he secretes clichés.

Mere living alone does not isolate a person; mere living together does not bring people into communion. The common life can either make one more of a person or less or a person, depending whether it is truly common life or merely life in a crowd. To live in the midst of others, sharing nothing with them but the common noise and the general distraction, isolates a person in the worst way, separates him from reality in a way that is almost painless. It divides him off from his true self. Here the sin is not the conviction that one is not like other people; it is in the belief that being like them is sufficient to cover every other sin. The complacency of the individual who admires her own excellence is bad enough, but it is more respectable than the complacency of the person who has no self-esteem because she has not even a superficial self which she can esteem. She is not a person, not an individual, only an atom. This atomized existence is sometimes praised as humility or as self-sacrifice, sometimes called obedience, sometimes devotion to the dialectic of class war. It produces a kind of peace that is not peace but only the escape from an immediately urgent sense of conflict. It is the peace not of love but of anesthesia. It is the peace not of self-realization and self-dedication but of flight into irresponsibility.

A Meditation

I find this both formidable and freeing.

If you keep listening to the love, if you keep receiving the love, trusting the love—even with all your limitations, with all your unworthiness, with all your limited intellect or whatever you feel holds you back—you start to experience within yourself a sense of possibility. Whatever life is inviting you into, you have this sense that it’s okay, and even better, that you can do it! That’s the joy of the saints. Now you don’t have to do it by the world’s criteria of success or performance. As Mother Teresa loved to say, “The only real success is faithfulness.” To be faithful to this inner love is in itself the greatest success. It is of itself the possibility. No outer successes are necessary to be happy.

This is what makes the mystics sort of dangerous. It’s not just possibility they experience—but permission. It’s permission to color outside the lines. It’s permission to be who you really are. It’s not just gay people who have to come out of their closets. We’re all in our closets. They’ve just given us a good metaphor for what we all have to do. We’re all afraid to come out of our various closets. It’s not the need to be outrageous or rebellious. It’s so much better than that. It’s just permission to be that image and likeness of God that you really are. You are unlike any other image or likeness. God is saying, “I’m expecting you to return to God simply but totally who you really are!”

—Richard Rohr, Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate

In This Moment

A cool, damp breeze is quietly but firmly sweeping the sleep from my mind, with the help of green tea, honey, and lemon.

I'm praying for inner peace today, certainty, faith, connection, pure love, and strength. I'm praying for the people in my heart, one by one.

I'm looking forward, so gratefully and humbled by the grace I enjoy, to a haircut.

I'm breathing and trying to be mindful.

I'm remembering where I was four years ago today, which truly was the happiest day of my life (to that point). I'm thinking of the green cymbdium orchids with which my dear husband surprised me at my office yesterday, for the occasion.

I'm sitting with this exhortation from Thomas Merton, with introspection, questioning myself and my motives.

True solitude is the home of the person, false solitude the refuge of the individualist. The person is constituted by a uniquely subsisting capacity to love—by a radical ability to care for all beings made by God and loved by him. Such a capacity is destroyed by the loss of perspective. Without a certain element of solitude there can be no compassion because when one is lost in the wheels of a social machine he is no longer aware of human needs as a matter of personal responsibility. One can escape from people by plunging into the midst of a crowd!
Go into the desert not to escape others but in order to find them in God.

I'm clinging to the knowledge that everything is going to be okay.

What a Day

I woke up at 12:30 and 1:30 and 2 and 3 and 3:30 and 4 and 4:30. I gave up, got out of bed, showered, and sat with myself quietly until 7. Then I left for Goshen.

In Goshen at 8, I met with a wonderful Anusara teacher to talk to her about my chronic (and infuriating!) back and hip pain. She was so helpful and uplifting. It turns out that I have an injured first chakra, which dissociates me from my body (which I already sensed), causing all manner of unpleasantness in all areas of my life. Healing my first chakra should go a long way toward healing the rest of me. I learned, among other things, that hot baths, hugs from friends, foot massages, yoga, organic apples, lovemaking, and the fragrance of trees are not just happy additions to life; they're crucial elements of my spiritual formation and personal actualization. I'll take it!

I went from that appointment to another appointment, with a local spiritual director to talk about that possibility for me. The meeting ended with a resounding "yes, please!" and an exciting homework assignment. It feels so right to invite a wise and objective someone into my life who can help me to discern my path and my blind spots in a gentle, kind way.

I came home and thought and read for a few hours. Then I went to the woods by myself and climbed through the brambles for a few more hours. And supper is scrambled eggs with gruyere cheese, roasted sweet potatoes, and green salad.

I am encouraged, friends. Today, I felt myself emerging from loneliness and woundedness into connection with the earth and her people, with God and her people, with my own life and her people. I am encouraged that healing for me is taking the form of feeling my body, caring for my self, reaching out to people I love for help and support when I need it, and living an integrated life. I've always thought it has to hurt if it's to heal, and that has been true of late, but it's also been true that healing has come in the form of resting my head on the shoulder of a friend and breathing there, sitting alone with my back to a tree and digging my toes into the mud, eating when I need to, playing with blocks and a teddy bear like I should have done when I was 5, standing on my hands.

And speaking of eating when I need to, I think the sweet potatoes are ready. Time to make the eggs.

What a day.

Hey, Strangers

I know, I know. It's been a while. Do you ever have times when you fold into yourself and just don't want to talk? I do. I haven't wanted to talk much lately, at least not the kind of talking that fizzles through the ether and flashes, sterile, soundless, scentless, and abstract, across my laptop screen. The internet has been making me lonely. Crazy lonely. I've been craving company. I want to sit with a person, walk side by side, arm in arm. I want to hear a voice. Smell someone's body. Part with a hug, knowing it'll only be a day or two until the next time.

Opportunities for that are so rare and precious. They're becoming rarer and more precious all the time. I'm not okay with that. I don't think I can be. And I don't know what to do about it.

I'm grateful for the sun today. I needed the sun so badly. I've been so cold for the last few weeks. You know what I love most about the sun? There's only one, and we all share it. You and I, no matter who or where you are, share that one sun. Look up at the sun tomorrow, if you can. I will too. It'll be the same one. Have you ever seen An American Tail? Remember that song the two mice sing, when they're far apart and longing to be together? It helps me too, a little, to think of everyone who is not here, whom I can't see or smell or hear or touch, sleeping underneath the very same big sky as I do. God. I hope heaven really is the place where we're all together forever.

Title of the Post

This, friends, is why I can't stand pop music.

Sunday Morning

Heh. Heh heh. Hehhehhehhehheh. Hmph. Hm.

The Message

I've been hearing this message lately, everywhere. From friends. From teachers. From incidental people I encounter as I live. From God.

Follow your heart. The answer is already in you. You are doing everything right. Lean into yourself. Be.

Tonight, I want to stop fighting it, because everything I see is beautiful and pure, holy and free and so, so right. But I don't know what it means to stop fighting it. I don't know how to trust myself.

I want a tree. A thick, reaching, towering, ancient tree. A kind, soft, fragrant, whispering tree. A tree that will nurse me, shelter me, let me nest in her arms. I want to build a house in her, and hang a swing from her, and play with her like I've never been able to play before. I want her roots to be my roots. I want a tree that will never go anywhere as long as I live, never stop holding me as long as I live, never stop being my home as long as I live.

And it's okay. I'm okay. I'm really really really really really okay. It may be unusual, and it may not be what everyone wants. But it's okay. Even if I want a tree more than anyone else has ever wanted a tree or does or ever will again, even if a tree means more to me than it means to a single other person on earth. Even if I devote all my life and everything I have to the tree. It's holy and good and okay. I know it is.

Maybe she's out there somewhere, my tree. If I never find her, grace of the Lord be with me, I will never stop looking for her.