A Gilbert O'Sullivan song from the 70's croons in the refrain, "Alone again, naturally." The song played over and over on the radio in my coming of age, teen years. It was the same epoch that spotlighted Otis Redding and the suggestion to feel sorry for self in this world of suffering. The "Alone again, naturally" song seemed to acknowledge truth; geez, even though the song itself questions what kinda God we got, the Bible tells us the truth shall set us free. Aloneness appeared as my ticket out of the house of suffering. At college in Kentucky. At sea on the ship. Flying high in the sky. Often gone to far flung places. In Afghanistan. Looking back now at life, I see how much I have emphasized my life alone, how much my mind refrained to that song. My beautiful friend, Norrie, pointed out when we were married how much I behaved so, in aloneness. She must have been right. Am trying to understand now. Perhaps it came to me as a survival method in my growing up. Perhaps I judged it the most efficient way to get through the day. Perhaps it made sense because I only really had a stab at knowing myself and could not guess, did not want to worry about, what was going on for others. And they need know nothing of me, the innerscape. Perhaps our culture teaches "stand alone...you're all you'll ever have...you are your own." Heck, my senior year high school picture, the opportunity for a graduating teen to have a voice in the noise, I chose the quote from Kahlil Gibran: "Alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the sun." Having flown across the sun alone, those words echo true, so very true. As if the words we choose have real power. Today, am alone. Or am I?
About a month ago, a female moved in with me. One late Saturday afternoon, the warm day cooling off, I was on my balcony reading my homework with my flowers and a cigar in that red chair you see to the right. I looked up and there she was, working away; her mission was what mattered, not minding me at all. The first voice to shout insistently at me was fear. The silhouette in the waning light appeared as a big butt black widow and the reactionary me wanted to kill that threat before it became a clear and present danger. What if I were reading, not paying attention, and she snuck up on me from above or below and bit me?!? Alone, I'd certainly be safer. But, tending towards the uncertain these days, the wondering voice in me asked. I took a deep breath to ponder, then looked more closely. Her industry, fast, elegant, intentional movement, attracted and gave pause to my male eye. She was building a web that reached from the transverse beam above the balcony down to the flower containers, a stretch of about 6 feet. And the pattern she created with her web as she danced and spun, descended and climbed: concentric, geometric, strong structural simplicity, a gossamer God's Eye, masterpiece of weaving that caused me to gaze in awe as if I were in the Prado, or Museum of Modern Art, or perhaps the Louvre (if ever I make it there). At the same time functional: deadly to the bugs she needed for life, her mission, and which, by the way, I didn't want flitting about me as I enjoyed my balcony. She was not a black widow but a beautiful light lime green with patterned amber spots. We formed a partnership, no words, just presence.
In the morning before I raced away to school, when I watered my flowers, I was careful not to disturb her vertical threads which she would sometimes re-use. Once or twice I did not see the thread and accidentally ran into it. She must have forgiven me for she came back and recreated a new and amazing masterpiece, evening after evening. Web done, she would station herself patiently at center, master and participant in the weave. But life was not done. She would strike with lightning speed within milliseconds of bug contact, wrap her quarry caringly as if her life, and those she would bear, depended on her every move. Robinson Jeffers writes, "...I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,/ The destruction that brings a [spider] from heaven is better than mercy." (Author's note, "spider" inserted for "eagle" from the original, Fire on the Hills.)
But wait! There's more! The evening moving breeze inspired spider drama as the web gave surface to a three dimensional undulating invisible fluid, air, her holding to center, like a lone sailor in an invisible boat on a wide ocean with big waves. Relative to her size, she moved back and forth wildly in the wind. It looked like fun but then I projected she might feel fear, which made me admire her courage. Do spiders feel fear? Can they have courage? No matter, she inspired me to recite a prayer I learned after divorce that made sense after having been to sea, "God, please help me. My boat is so small and the ocean is so vast." I never knew her name. She no longer appears, as life would have it. Alone again, naturally. Or...?
Beth, Love of my life, went to Paris for September. She far away, I felt alone and ran smack dab into myself. Although in high school I had told myself not to feel jealousy with a woman because if she were to find another guy better for her, c'est la vie, and what I wanted was for her to be happy. (As an aside, I think now that was but one mechanism for me to cling to aloneness.) Back to Beth in Paris, long story short, I experienced pure genuine jealousy. Of course, Beth did not necessarily give me cause to feel jealous (though we talked about how it can be interpreted to see an American woman alone in Paris for a month). Voices inside my head yelled the jealousy thing. The collision came about in acknowledging myself as jealous, recognizing it as a human emotion, among the many we can feel and engage as we deal with life. I calmly discussed with those voices why I was feeling jealous. I actually admitted to Beth what I felt. My God, how vulnerable! How weak! How not alone! Does feeling and sharing emotions tie us together with others?
Also during September, during my alone time with Beth in Paris (though skype and FaceTime are a great antidote), I was driving back from school. All of a sudden I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the scene before me. Reality shifted. As I drove across the bridge over the mighty Missouri River, two spacious fields on either side opened for a kilometer or so on either side, leading to forests with a variety of trees that showed flaming fall colors: gold waving grass with crimson, green, yellow, light brown, and light green patches below, pixelated leaves above, many still a rich green, some a lighter green in the trees of rust, red, maroon, oranging, even pinks, bright yellow, dull yellow, brown tree trunks reaching from the ground upward and off in the distance the hills lifted all these patterns into rolling multicolored texture under a bright shining crystalline blue sky in golden sunlight. And I felt as if I were in the middle of a masterpiece painting, absolutely stunningly rapturous, alive motion, waving smoothly together in the wind. Some voice inside my heart told me that I was an integral part, that my traveling through belonged in this very alive canvas at this very moment. I think the voice whispered so I could hear that I was vital to that scene, the beauty around me. Some kind of waking up, I yielded to the truth I was experiencing and my heart filled with something that felt like...no, wait, it was: gratitude. Who's there then? Who knows but next time I am want to feel sad sorry for self, will slip thru it quickly to get outside, take a walk in the woods or in the park or in the mountains or around the block, become a grateful part of the scene in which I happen to be. A prayer from Thomas Merton comes to mind, the end of which asserts, "...Therefore will I trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone."
Beth sent me a song when I was in Kandahar, at the nadir of being alone in recent life. The refrain of the song: "You're not alone." Over and over again, the Buddhist woman's voice sings in the kirtan, devotional chant, "You're not alone, you're not alone, you're not..." The message did not penetrate my tupid head, first reaction, "How strange. Perhaps that woman is a weirdo." (The singer, not Beth.)
Have spent a lot of my life emphasizing aloneness, exercising the illusion of being separate. From others. From surroundings. From true beauty. To say good bye for now to you this time, my heart turns to the greeting Beth taught me, which these Buddhists from time to time say at the usually no-talking monastery she visits in California. Looking to you in my mind's eye, my hands come together at my heart and I bow, "Gassho," which means, "Your heart and my heart are one." I take it to mean our hearts "are one in the One." Or as Red Green says in his Canadian matter of fact, humorous way, "We're all in this together." Peace and Love in the One,
Tim
