Tag Archives: solitude

Dear Diary

Posted on by under Secret Places

“Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year old school girl. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I feel like writing.” —Anne Frank, June 20, 1942

“She found that when she didn’t have a notebook it was hard for her to think. The thoughts came slowly, as though they had to squeeze through a tiny door to get to her, whereas when she wrote, they flowed out faster than she could put them down.” ―Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy

***

I am 14 years old, sitting cross-legged on my yellow bedspread behind the locked door of my bedroom. A college-ruled three-subject notebook is open in my lap, and I scribble away, thoughts coming to me faster than I can get them down on paper.

Excitement about the cute boy on the bus who actually said hello to me today. Anxiety about the oral report I’m expected to give in social studies class tomorrow morning. Heartache about being ignored in the cafeteria by a girl I used to consider my best friend.

***

I am 20 years old, a junior in college, tucked into a wood-scarred booth in the campus grill. Snow is piling up outside, and I am settled into my favorite study spot with a hot mug of tea and piles of manila envelopes full of submissions to the literary magazine, of which I am co-editor. I arrange a stack of blank index cards upon which I will record my impressions of the poems and stories.

But first, I open the hardcover black and white lab book that has served as my journal since last term’s poetry-writing class. Now that I am no longer expected to periodically turn it in for review, I feel a new-found freedom to write without editing myself, comforted that no one will read my private thoughts but me.

I write about my confusing romantic feelings for a male friend who happens to be dating someone else. I vent about my concerns for my father, who is weathering the downturn of the steel industry and seems to be aging at presidential speed between my visits home. I jot down prayers and snippets of Scripture to comfort and encourage myself.

***

journalI am 29 years old, working in a job that I love, in a city that I love, involved in a quirky inner-city church that I love. I am sharing a quaint townhouse with two other single women who have become good friends. And I am falling in love with a man I met seven years ago, but started dating only after we lived a couple hundred miles away from one another.

Every evening before I go to sleep, I pour my heart out on paper, into fabric-covered journals given to me as gifts and filled at a record pace. It isn’t decision time yet, but what if this is the man I am supposed to marry? What will this mean for the life I am building in this place, with these people?

Over the next several months, in the pages of several more journals, those questions are answered. I am even more deeply committed my job, my city, my friends, and my church. I write with excitement about buying a house and living alone for the first time in my life.

***

The day after I turn 40, my mother, diagnosed seven months earlier with pancreatic cancer, goes into hospice care. I open a Word document on my laptop and type my grief and fear and rage onto the screen. Tears stream down my face as I hit save and shut down.

***

I celebrated my 50th birthday last month. For a decade or more, my journal entries have become more and more sporadic, as I check in to write at least twice a year—on my birthday and on New Year’s Day. Email and blog posts and social media have replaced my hand-written diary as venues for self-expression. Almost everything I write has an audience.

As I wrote my annual birthday journal entry in the leather-bound diary that I only occasionally crack open these days, I made a resolution. I haven’t missed a day of writing in my journal since.

***

Amy bio YAH

My True Self Was Hidden in the Woods Long Ago

Posted on by under Time & Place

There’s no easy way to access the woods behind my grandparent’s former home in suburban Philadelphia. But before my grandmother sold the house, I took one last rambling trip into the woods with my fiancée, Julie. She needed to see this place with me before we lost our access to it forever.

The stone steps that I used to tramp down were covered with dirt and leaves;  no one had set foot on them in years. We wound our way through some overgrown bushes that had taken over the trail, and hit the old dirt bike track that a kid down the street used to zip around on all summer. In the winter that steep, narrow trail had been a kind of toboggan track. The steep starting point was made all the more exciting with the large bump toward the bottom that sent my plastic sled shooting into the air. The massive rocks that popped out here and there added to the excitement when we didn’t have enough snow.

We passed the massive tree that had fallen over and had served as the bench for countless teenagers who ventured into the woods at nighttime to make massive bonfires. In the morning I used to poke sticks around in the ashes they left behind.

2015-06-Life-of-Pix-free-stock-photos-trees-forest-light-jordanmcqueenLooking up from the fallen tree, we could see the ridge line where my friend had seen a deer for the first time. Those woods were jam packed with deer, and hardly a day passed without seeing a few. He was maybe nine or ten years old, and as a child of the suburban edge of Philadelphia’s city limits, could only shout, “It has a tail!!!”

But nothing in these woods compared to its real treasure: the stream. It wasn’t much of a stream. It was hardly wider than 8 feet at most points, and who knows what kinds of pollutants had run off into it. But this stream, had always served as my main destination.

Along the shallow points I built bridges out of carefully piled rocks. Along the deep parts I skimmed pebbles. In the winter I slipped around on its smooth, icy surface with my wooden ice hockey stick and a hard rubber puck. Some days I even carried my hockey net down so that I could practice elevating the puck.

I don’t remember thinking all that much about those woods as a kid. I just remember being drawn to them every day. I never had to weigh whether or not I “wanted” to go into the woods by myself. If the weather was clear and I had the time, I typically headed down without a second thought.

I wish I could remember when I stopped going down into the woods. Something changed in me. As I grew up and “matured,” I lost sight of the freedom I found in the woods. I started thinking about it more. Going off into the woods suddenly felt a little riskier, even though I was far larger and stronger than I had ever been as an elementary school child.

At a certain point I stopped wandering in the woods. I never came close to rediscovering that desire to roam in the woods until going away to college. Perhaps the weight of guilt to pray more prompted me to take more walks in the woods, but soon the tiny patch of woods became a sanctuary of solitude again. When Julie and I returned home for that last visit in the woods behind my grandparents’ home a few years after graduating, I was finally remembering that something significant and sacred had taken place in those woods.

But concurrent with this realization, the path to those memories was becoming obscured and uncertain–like steps covered in leaves and dirt.

These days I feel a tiny tug to get better at seeking solitude, to love it the way that little boy loved venturing into the woods. My days are crammed with screens, conversations, and tasks. Somewhere deep within myself, I can sense a part of myself trying to find his way back into the woods. Something craves that solitude, to make it automatic and natural and to feel completely safe and at home in my own company apart from the noise and worries of life.

Was my time in the woods was just the product of youthful leisure? Or was it the purest expression of myself, now overgrown? Did I just go through a phase that is now dead and gone, or did my young mind try to set something in motion that I have needed so desperately as I enter middle age?

I like to think it was a divine mercy that prompted me to take that final trip into the woods with my future wife, and to mark off that place, in our shared memory, as something significant and worth sharing. If I have any hope of finding my true self, I suspect that it can be found wandering in my grandparents’ woods.

Ed bio YAH

Riding in Cars With Myself

Posted on by under Reclaiming Place

Some people affectionately name their cars. I vow to drive my car into the ground.

I am not impressed with color or shine or seat warmers or the increasingly techy sound systems or those commercials where silver-tongued announcers say words like “driving experience” or “performance” or “driving modes.” These are all lost on me. I’ve always said as long as it gets me around I don’t care what it looks, feels or smells like.

When I was little, my parents drove my brothers and me around in a blue ‘86 Chevy Celebrity station wagon. The paint job couldn’t hold up, and it ended up peeling and curling in long strips down the hood. I was so embarrassed by it I asked my father over and over again not drop our family off in front of the church on Sunday mornings. “Please, can you just park in the back and then we can all walk in?” I begged. My dad would give me a quizzical look and kept right on dropping us off at the door.

When I was in high school instead of being embarrassed by a car, one embarrassed me. I was at a youth group picnic when one of the new youth leaders drove up in his car. It was small and black and so shiny it blinded me in one eye as I went up to greet him and the other kids. I leaned casually against the hood. He promptly turned white as did several of the boys.

“What? What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You’re leaning on my car.”

“So?” I got up and the group gave a little collective sigh of relief. One of the boys saw the shame and confusion on my face and explained to me that it was a Maserati 3200 GT, a special object costing over a year’s salary that was allowed outside for car shows only. I backed away and tried not to roll my eyes. I thanked heaven I was going away to college the next week where presumably no-one would drive a $90,000 car for me to smudge accidentally.

Without having the money to afford a nice car, I have always simply driven hand-me-down little four-doors. In college I drove two cars: one that had been abandoned so long a nest of mice had taken up residency in the engine (there was a small, unpleasant surprise for me when I had to replace the dome light), and a navy Celebrity wagon so like my parents’ car, I nicknamed it “The Blue Bastard”. Cars have alternately been a source of embarrassment and a source of indifference to me over the years.

classic-car-574864_1280

For the past ten years I have been driving a tiny Corolla. There’s nothing very special about it—but then there is something special about it to me. This was a car I bought at 22 and had a very long payment plan on, but I managed to pay it all myself in my twenties. It became a badge of adulthood for me. Responsibility, too.

For several years, I had a job where I would spend my lunch hour in my car. I sat in the parking lot reading books by Lauren Winner, Susan Howatch, and Rob Bell, thankful for a whole hour inside a quiet, familiar space with beloved authors.

Some of my coworkers would go to mid-day Mass, some would spend the hour shopping at the mall the next town over. But my spot was in my car. It was a place to pray in, to reflect, to take time out from hard or boring work situations. If I had a late night, I’d eat my sandwich, crank the seat down and take a nap.

Eight months ago, my husband Dan and I drove my little car from Cape Cod to Denver. I was doubtful it would make it. It’s now fourteen years old and New England winters are tough on cars, with five months of gravel and salt under the wheels every year. But we decided to put our money into repairs, rather than buy a new car just yet.

You see, I’m really attached to it.

I’ve never cared for cars because of what they stand for. Wealth or poverty. You can tell by looking at someone’s car how they live, possibly guess at their monthly payment, and judge what they value. I value my four wheel fortress of solitude. The paint is peeling so that’s a little embarrassing—the old feelings of shame well up! But I’ve reclaimed my car and cars in general because of their potential as a quiet box, a room I can take anywhere with me. I’ll be sorry to say goodbye to my car because she and I have had a lot of good moments together. It’s a bit of home that’s with me still even as everything else has changed.

Elena bio YAH

Books and Barns: A Paean

Posted on by under Finding Place

The Book Barn is the place to be. Situated on the Connecticut shoreline, it is a store, hobby farm, and booming antiquarian book business all rolled into one cat fur-lined ball.

The Book Barn is, literally, a farmhouse with adjoining barns and book stalls all over the acre it sits on. There are cats lying, sitting, and walking around in every structure. During the summers pygmy goats laze in a pen next to the house. All year round about twenty barn cats roam from barn to barn. In the farmhouse there’s always free coffee and tiny powdered sugar donuts. It’s been a sanctuary for me for the past ten years. I have spent time there searching for books on my school reading lists and syllabi, for spirituality texts, for out-of-print fairy tale and folklore anthologies, for stuff to read on airplanes, for indie comics. I have sat for whole afternoons in the chilly attic, sharing a broken down couch with a barn cat, reading through books I’d never heard of like J.P. Donleavy’s The Unexpurgated Code, Kate Millett’s Sita, and Peter DeVries’ The Blood of the Lamb.

An education to be sure.

For the first few years, I brought my Milton professor from the University of Connecticut down with me. He was semi-retired and glad to get off campus and down to the shore. We visited the Barn for a couple hours, then sat in a Greek restaurant looking out over the Long Island Sound and talked about what we’d bought. Poetry and actors’ memoirs for him, and folklore for me. We’d go every six months or so. Later I went on my own more frequently, or brought friends with me. Sometimes I’d go twice a month–there’s an allure to the tiny place with it’s perfect situation near the ocean and the cute Scottish pub and the palm-reading shop next door.

-Jg6RSRBf_P-g6gvsl77Ls6r9ApbAbmMEKAqJDE8YjkOne of the best things about the Book Barn is that you can sell your books back to them. For every book I sold, they gave me either a little cash or store credit. There were flush seasons for me in which I’d buy thirty books at a time. There were other times when I had to move and couldn’t deal with the overwhelming library I’d amassed, so I performed a triage of sorts on my books and sold a box or two back. This worked so well that one summer about four years ago, I decided to sell my Baby-Sitters Club collection, all three hundred books.

I drove down to the shore and pulled the box out of my trunk and took my place in line. Many people came to sell on weekends and as was common, the line wound back in the parking lot. When it was my turn, I shoved my box onto the counter and stood back smiling at the owner, Randy. He knows me pretty well by now, I thought. He’ll probably give me fifty bucks for this! Randy frowned and called over one of his assistants. My heart sank. It was one of the savvy book-buyers, one I sometimes asked for recommendations. She peered into the box and shook her head.

“We have so much Baby Sitters Club already,” she said.

“But, everyone loves the Baby Sitters Club!” I said, winking. “I mean, who doesn’t love baby-sitting stories steeped in moral values from the eighties?”

She laughed. “I do. But we can’t even sell the ones we have.” She paused. “There’s a charity book drop at the children’s museum down the street. I don’t think there’s any resale value on these things.”

I sighed and turned away. But since I was there, and the day was sunny and warm, I threw the box in the back of my car and skipped back up the path to the house. Treacly baby-sitting fiction be damned, I was in my favorite place! Later that day I did throw the entire box into the charity book drop–there was no way I was bringing three hundred books back home.

I found a dog-eared first print copy of John Knowles’ A Separate Peace and a dollar paperback of The Light Princess and Other Tales.

“Score!” I said gleefully to a passing tabby. She stared at me for a moment as if to say, “Everyone scores here, it’s not that big of a deal,” and then she stalked away.

I went to another stall and skimmed through a Peanuts treasury. I squeezed past a father and son who were staring at a coffee table-sized golfing manual. Here’s a place, I thought—for the hundredth time, where anyone can find a book on anything that strikes their fancy.

I went to pay for my books and got in line at the register. I ate a powdered sugar donut and watched a family in line ahead of me. A preschool girl was showing her new (old) Lowly Worm book to her older sister. Both bent over it and grinned looking at the worm in the Tyrolean hat with his single boot on.

I smiled to myself. I was home. My tribe and my place, my coffee, cats, and books all around me.

 

*****

Elena bio YAH

Mama, Pause.

Posted on by under Alone in Place

“Go where they can’t find you,” she charged, and I fled to the cover of pine forest. Head down, heart pounding, I parted from the others and passed groups of children–the buzz of their giggling mixing with the light rain. I looked up briefly to scan faces. My own girls were not present, thank God. That would have been the end of this experiment in solitude. “Mama!” they would call. “Mama!!” more insistent if I did not answer the first time. “Mama!!!!” and I would once again be swept up into my routines of responding, all the constant demands, the pressure, the noise.

10415878565_3e40478198_oTwenty minutes. I just needed twenty minutes away.

I scanned the edges of the path and saw a row of faded red cabins stationed along the tree line. Here? Or should I keep going? These were unfamiliar woods and I didn’t know where everyone else was headed. But what if there were people staying in these cabins? No, they looked empty, alone like I longed to be. I just needed to decide quickly–already I could hear the crunch of gravel, moving in my direction. Just decide. Decide.

Slipping off the path, I  jogged to the backside of a particularly abandoned-looking structure and crouched on the porch behind a low wall. Voices swept down the path I had just left, and I wondered if someone would make a turn for the woods and see me there, hiding. I pressed myself into the corner, back against the wall, and felt dampness seep through my jeans. Darnit. I was sitting in wet pine needles, but there was nowhere else to go. I closed my eyes, wishing them all away.

* * * * *

We were in the woods for a church retreat, the first retreat my small urban church has taken in the ten years I’ve been there. I was surprised by how many people signed up–when retreats had been proposed in the past they were quickly shot down with protests:

Nuh huh, I do not do spiders.

Do you really want to get eaten by some bear?

And my personal favorite:

Don’t you know there are crazy people in those woods? And no one, I mean No One, will even hear you scream.

But by some miracle there were seventy of us gathered for this weekend away. Granted, the hotel-like lodge and cottages represented the near-opposite of roughing it. The buildings were clean and new with sparkling bathrooms and spacious common areas.

The problem (for me) was that they were also full of people, and because the dorms were single-sex, I had the girls on my own. On the drive to camp, I had tried to explain my unease to my husband.

“I don’t want to do this,” I said, and he looked at me, confused. “Do what?” I stared hard at the highway, groping for the right words. “People,” I tried, “I can’t take this many people right now. Meals in the dining hall. Sleeping in dorms. Large group gatherings. Small group discussions. I, I… I just don’t want to be here. I’m not sure I can do this.”

It was mid-May, and the month had been full of marathons, figurative and literal. The school year was almost over, and every moment away from the kids was filled with summer preparations and other responsibilities. I was on overload–a lot had taken place, but I hadn’t had time to process it all. This combination is difficult for anyone, but murder for an introvert like me.

It’s like this: imagine my introverted brain as a water pipe building up internal layers of calcification. Any kind of stimulus–people, events, emotions–are the calcium deposits. As long as I have time to deal with them as they come–silence, journaling, walking, prayer–they don’t build up. But if I don’t, if they just keep coming, then the pipe gets clogged.

And when the pipe gets clogged I can’t think anymore. Or make good decisions. Or live with seventy other people and my kids in dorms, and discuss God or church or each other’s lives or whatever it was we were going to talk about all weekend.

However.

When you’re driving to camp with a trunk packed full of sleeping bags and two excited children jabbering away in the back seat, what you think you can do is no longer terribly relevant.

* * * * *

When our speaker introduced the weekend’s theme I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. “This weekend,” she said, “we are going to talk about solitude.”

Pulling out a book by one of my favorite writers, Henri Nouwen, she defined solitude as being alone with God and hearing that you are loved. If we didn’t take this time, she warned, we would try to find affirmation in the shifting sands of human relationships. If we didn’t begin with solitude, we could never find authentic community because we would always be trying to find our identity in other people. You need to get away, she said, and listen to the voice that has been speaking to you all along.

“So go”, she said, “Twenty minutes of solitude. Go where they can’t find you.” And she released us into the woods.

There at my faded red cabin, back pressed up against the low wall, it took a long time for my heart to stop thump-thumping in my chest. It took longer for my breathing to slow, and it took longer still for my thoughts to settle. By now I was crying, all the emotion of the month pushing out of me slowly. My mind was churning, but I didn’t have the energy to fight it anymore. I just sat and stared into the woods.

After a long time I noticed the swamp cabbage lining the creek bed. The leaves looked over-sized, like a prehistoric display in a museum. Suddenly, a bird chittered ten feet above my head. I laughed with surprise. The smell of the wet pine needles lifted up on a small breeze, and I breathed in a deep draught of humid air.

1114159624_705676c9a9_oThe pipe was beginning to clear; there was room now to take it all in. There was room now to let some things go.

I remembered our speaker’s words: Solitude is being alone with God and hearing that you are loved. I grinned and spoke to the sky, “You have anything you want to say?”

There was no response, but that was okay. I already knew.

 

Photos by Ed Suominen and Sharon Mollerus

To see what I could see

Posted on by under Alone in Place

I had travelled more than a thousand miles to be surrounded by people, yet there I was, alone on a hard red-dirt trail in the Santa Fe National Forest.

To be clear, I was “alone on purpose,” as Nicole Morgan so deftly phrased it in her recent guest post. But following through on this intentional aloneness had taken great willpower. By choosing to set off solo on a hike that afternoon I was voluntarily leaving behind the potential of great conversations and new friendships—the very experiences I had in mind when I devoted a week of time and a sum of money to attend a Glen West writing workshop.

Many people at the Glen arrive in search of space and time to think and write, but as a full-time solitary writer who longs throughout the year for “colleagues,” I went to the Glen to fill that space and time with people. I needed a break from being alone with my thoughts and words, and during my first three days there I had accomplished just that. The mornings’ inspiring conversations in my non-fiction writing workshop transitioned into lunch hours sitting with authors I’ve long admired. Afternoons spent around courtyard tables, hearing about writing projects others were working on, gave way to more conversations over dinner, followed by engaging author and artist talks. Each night found me fighting the need for sleep as the extroverts and night owls gathered for more talk and laughter over whisky or wine, late into the night.

By that Thursday afternoon I had reached a state of “satisfyingly full” and knew some solitude (beyond the fast-asleep kind) would be good for me. It was one of those moments of awareness that separates childhood from adulthood: when you know that something—maybe eating those greens or getting up early to exercise—is important for your wellbeing, so you do it even though you don’t really want to.

I didn’t really want to be alone, but I knew it would be good for me, so I set out on the nearby Atalaya Trail to see what gift Aloneness might have for me in the midst of so much togetherness.

photo (9)The hard-packed ground was dry and gravelly, a shade of burnt, orangey-red that might as well be called New Mexico Red. I passed by Juniper and piñon, cacti, yuccas, and sagebrush, breathing in a heavenly-yet-foreign blend of scents that added a new layer to my aloneness: I was alone in an unfamiliar land.

As I continued walking, I began to wonder what range of unfamiliar creatures might call this arid region home (rattlesnakes? scorpions?). Then I recalled the coyotes whose sparring the night before had awoken me in my narrow dorm room bed, the windows open to the cool night air. Suddenly, alone took on multiple layers of meaning: I was not only by myself, far from others, but I was 7,000 feet above sea level in a foreign land, surrounded by potential dangers. The cell phone in my pocket didn’t even have service. I began anxiously singing, for company:

The bear went over the mountain,
the bear went over the mountain,
the bear went over the mountain—
to see what it could see.

I couldn’t remember what the bear saw, so I stopped singing and walking to just breathe—to calm the tinge of fear I felt and focus my mind on the quiet and the beauty that was all around me.

After walking a bit further, I reached a trio of wooden plank steps that carried the trail up and over a gravel road. Turning around, I lowered myself onto one of the steps, opening my water bottle and taking in the view below, the path I had just walked. The college campus, where all of those conversations and friendships had taken root the days before, looked small, but there it was, waiting.

I pulled my journal out of my backpack, turning to a page where I had taken a few notes while the poet Scott Cairns had read to us an evening or two before. A line from his poem “Draw Near” had especially captivated me:

For near is where you’ll meet what you have wandered far to find.

I had traveled all the way to New Mexico to be with other writers and artists—I needed new conversations and different perspectives to help reframe the story within me. Then I had traveled up this mountain for time and space alone, in a land so different from the one I know that I couldn’t help but be aware, notice, and respond—not intellectually but viscerally. And all of those miles, all of that wandering both with others and alone, had helped me meet what is very near, in my heart.

photo (8)

Alone in an Unlikely Place

Posted on by under Alone in Place, Guest

Driving would be faster. It will be a long walk from the Metro station to the coffee shop in the post-snowstorm cold. But I jump at any chance to take public transportation into a city – alone.

Maybe it is because I grew up in suburban Ohio, where light rails and city buses were a rare sight.  Maybe it is because I have never lived in a city.  But there is something irresistible about being transported to the urban hustle in a train full of…everyone.

And that’s exactly what it is:  everyone.  Light rails, city buses and trains don’t filter out the haves and the have nots, they don’t care if your collar is white or blue or nonexistent, they don’t turn away the underprivileged or celebrate the accomplished.

On the train, we are all the same.  We are all trying to leave something behind.  We are all going somewhere.  We are all looking for the next stop.

It is in this convergence of everyone that I feel free to be alone.  And it is not a lonely, dark alone, but a healthy, inspiring alone.

Steven Pressfield writes, “We know what the clan is; we know how to fit in the band and the tribe.  What we don’t know is how to be alone.  We don’t know how to be free individuals.”

Perhaps it is this tribal wiring that, paradoxically, nurtures healthy solitude in such an unlikely place: a crowded train of strangers.

You Are HereIn the train’s tribe, it is how I am the same that propels me into aloneness, not how I am different. Titles are irrelevant, responsibilities suspended, control of the steering wheel surrendered, and upholding of images put on hold.  I am, simply, going somewhere.  And I am not in control.

Off the train, I try so hard to stand out.   I craft the Facebook posts, go for the promotion, bow down to the gods of children’s sports, and buy the stuff in hopes of attention and achievement.  On the train, I don’t want or need to stand out.  Closer to humanity’s equality, I can stop trying so hard.  There is space to find the things that lie deep within me, the ones that are trying so hard to get my attention and that make me the free individual I was intended to be:  my uncensored dreams and true desires.

It is in the rare moments of glimpsing the equality of humanity that I can learn how to be a “free individual.”

Comforted by our sameness and my anonymity, I look out the windows of the train and see space for my dreams.  I listen to the engine’s hum and to the voice that grants permission for desire.  On the train, I respond, although incompletely and imperfectly, to the question “Who are we?”  And it helps me move on to “Who am I?”

I get off at the Columbia Heights station.  Lifted by the escalator into the morning light, I emerge humbled by who we are, inspired by who I can become.

I see business suits walking swiftly with purpose.  I see faded jeans meandering slowly with regret.   And I see snow hiding in the sidewalk’s shadows, too stubborn to melt.

I see me.

* * * * *

H1Holly Pennington is a writer in the other Washington, but she loves to visit family and friends in D.C.  At home in the Seattle area, she jumps at the chance to take the ferry.  She blogs about vulnerability, faith and freedom at www.dreadlocksandgoldilocks.com and would love to connect with you on Instagram, Facebookand Twitter.

Refuge

Posted on by under Alone in Place, Guest

As a nine-year old recent refugee I often felt lonely. The kids at school, taking their queue from ubiquitous images of famine-stricken Ethiopian children with protruding stomachs and flies milling around their eyes, referred to me as Starving Ethy—Ethy being short for Ethiopian. The school often isolated me, with other aliens, in a special class they called English as a Second Language. When not at school, I spent most of my time alone, roaming the neighborhood, scavenging for odds and ends, finding the occasional Garbage Pail Kids trading card or a broken Transformers figurine.

Yet my family and I were not alone. Like many other refugees before them, Eritreans in the U.S. had begun to conform to an old pattern. The first group arrived in a specific city by design. They resettled there as part of a grand scheme cooked up in the mind of civil servants sitting in a conference room somewhere. These special refugee programs preselected some location in the U.S. that they thought made sense for the refugees. And these displaced people didn’t know any better. Des Moines is San Diego. San Diego is Des Moines. It’s all the same to those simply trying to escape calamity.

But once the trauma of transition abates and with the gift of time, these immigrants grow familiar with their new homeland. They also grow restless. They long to be with people like them. They are drawn to DC by an old friend from the refugee camps in Sudan, to Seattle by a neighbor from the village back home, to San Diego by a former fellow rebel-fighter. Mostly though, they are simply glad to cluster their lives around other Eritreans. These people, in their search for more than refuge, shift and move; drawn to each other to dull the bite of loneliness.

It is through this familiar road that a growing number of Eritreans made their way to Atlanta. It is why a room full of Eritreans greeted my mom and me during one of our routine visits to one of these Eritrean families on one sunny and beautiful afternoon. The home, a unit at one of the local public housing properties, was overflowing with strangers, old friends, and cousins of cousins.

After the customary cheek-to-cheek greetings, my mom joined the other adults who were dutifully occupied by a coffee tradition that must date back to the beginning of time. All the guests sat together outside on the porch in a semi-circle with the hostess at the juncture and a brazier at her side.

5543145597_017e65feb6_zLike the old priests and their censers, the hostess filled the air with the scent of roasting coffee, giving each guest the occasion to waft and savor the aroma rising from the roasting pan. She ground the beans and carefully poured them into the jebena, a special kettle made of clay. After adding a cup or so of water, she placed the jebena on the brazier to work its heat as the ancient taste brewed with slow serenity. When it was time, she slowly filled each finjal, small ceramic drinking cups decorated with beautiful patterns in different colors, moving continuously from cup to cup until the circle was complete.

It was a well-choreographed ritual wrapped in a thick blanket of gossip, debate and gloating, each adult trying to outflank the other with their better tales and more exciting news. They moved from topic to topic, sometimes with rambunctious energy and sometimes with solemn prayer depending on the mood of each issue — all of this they consumed with wide open hearts, as they sipped their scrupulously prepared coffee. While the adults sat on the porch consumed by their disputations, I joined the kids playing out in the field an earshot away.

In many ways these interactions are perfectly symbolic of the solitude we all felt in that place. A white American friend once described a moment she’d experienced in Shanghai, China. After living there for years, she ran into a black man, the first speckle of diversity she’d seen in a long time, while strolling along at some shopping district. As soon as she spotted him, she ran over and asked if she could give him a hug, explaining that he reminded her of home. The stranger obliged.

*   *   *   *   *

Biniam“Refuge” was written by Biniam Gebre. Biniam is a former refugee from Eritrea, a beautiful and young country in East Africa. He is also the former acting Commissioner of the the Federal Housing Administration. Both in his professional life and personal struggles, he is in constant search to understand the meaning of place. He currently lives in Washington D.C. Biniam blogs at Choices and Values and can be found on Twitter @biniamgebre.

Photo of the jebena, above, is by Canned Muffins.

Crib Cubby

Posted on by under Alone in Place, Guest

We used to play in the nursery at church several years after we were too old to be in the nursery. I don’t remember who “we” were, precisely. “Those kids at church,” I’m sure I called the others. The nursery had one wall devoted to crib cubbies – three rows of big cubby holes, each equipped with a thin mattress and a railed panel that slid like an overhead garage door down a curved track. With the door down, a baby could sleep safely during the service or after church a six-year-old and his unnamed playmates could feel like jailbirds or crewmembers of a pirate ship or puppies in kennels or ninjas hiding in the shadows from unsuspecting parents.

I remember the stillness of lying in my cubby with the door down, eyes closed, feeling cramped but cozy. Sometimes I snuck out of my cubby and stood for far longer than necessary in the nursery’s tiny one-stall bathroom, listening to the muffled sounds of my friends and pondering the distant hum of the air system. Even at that age I treasured the idea of layered privacy. I savored the chance in both the cubby and the bathroom to command my own small realm, my own enclosed space hidden inside the nursery, which was one of many rooms on the first floor of my three-floor church, which was one of many buildings on Meridian Street, which was one of many streets in Anderson, Indiana, in the United States, in North America, on Earth. My conception of the planet at the time derived from the globe my parents gave me in first grade (that globe stands on the filing cabinet behind me as I type this in my office). There are no lines on that globe for Indiana’s borders, no dot for Anderson. I knew I lived somewhere in that green patch south of Lake Michigan where nothing is labelled. And so I knew as sure as a six-year-old can that in the nursery cubby or the nursery bathroom I was layers and layers and layers away from visible to anyone anywhere.

They have long since remodeled that nursery and removed the wall of crib cubbies. The room now serves as a Sunday school classroom and is, from what I hear, devoid of small enclosed spaces. I presume the bathroom is still there, though I haven’t been in that room since my son outgrew the nursery years ago. But I have discovered in many other places the sensation I first photo-1429709535771-15665442d6b1found in that nursery. I feel that same coziness in my walk-in closet in the master bathroom in my house in Anderson; I’ve felt it in the upstairs half-bath of an apartment my wife and I once occupied in Grand Cayman, in several single-bed hotel rooms in London, in my windowless office (which I love) at Taylor University. I have relished the layers of architectural and conventional strata that encased me in those spaces, and more so as my daughter has become adept at operating door knobs. I have come to embrace, too, the lovely notions that our omnipresent God inhabits those spaces and shares them with me, and that at least part of the reason Christ instructed His followers to find a private space for prayer was that solitude is healthy and sacred.

My job as a professor and my standing as a husband and father require me to be in frequent contact with others. These are the roles and the people for which I’ve been made, and for which I am endlessly grateful. But I’m also learning to treasure as gifts my rare moments of seclusion and to accept that I need them. I cherish and protect those nested spaces where, for a few exquisite moments every now and then, I can lie in my crib cubby and lower the door.

*   *   *   *   *

Walking with the kids - #2 - cropped“Crib Cubby” was written by Aaron J. Housholder. Aaron teaches writing and literature at Taylor University in Upland, IN. He lives in Anderson, IN with his wife Suahil and his kids Scottie and Alivia. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Relief Journal, Ruminate, Wyvern Lit, freeze frame fiction, River Teeth, and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @ProfAJH.

 

Table for One

Posted on by under Alone in Place, Guest

Looking back, that empty booth across the table from me was just the next in a long line of red flags and warning signs I rationalized away. This time, the reason for his absence was said to be a co-worker who needed someone to bail him out of jail. He wouldn’t be back in town until late, after dinner. It seems an outlandish story when I think about it today, one of many outlandish stories. Now I know some of these stories were lies.

I have no real frame of reference to know which ones were true, but to call them all lies seems the task of an uncharitable, bitter woman.

Regardless. That spring day I believed, or at least accepted, the story. Over the many years we were together, we always had a long distance relationship. That dinner date was no different. I drove two hours through central, rural, Georgia to get there. So, given the hour and my growling stomach, the best option seemed to be to just go ahead to dinner. Alone.

“Just one,” I said to the hostess. I settled into the booth and perused the menu. After I had ordered I took the ever-present novel out of my purse and began to read, stopping often to check to see if he had called. I was somewhat self-conscious about sitting at a table in a sit-down restaurant alone, but no one seemed to care at all. It dawned on me that my aloneness was awkward and uncomfortable only to me.

Inside my head I was fighting off the doubts and questions about my three-year-old relationship. I didn’t want to be alone, so it had been relatively easy to accept the cancelled plans and the strange stories. As I sat there alone at a restaurant table and no one looked at me in pity or shame, I began to wonder if perhaps alone on purpose would be a better option than alone again one more time because he failed to come through.

4869866579_2e5565c27c_zIn retrospect I can see that, somehow, that dinner made me stronger. It was not the first time that our plans had not worked. It was not the first time he had changed things at the last minute, disappointing me. It was the first time I kept the plans anyway. The first time I still showed up, lived the moment, and went forward instead of letting my world stop. I could have grabbed a quick dinner in a drive-thru, eaten the fries as I navigated the road back home. But, I didn’t. I sat in the restaurant I had planned to go to and had the dinner I had planned to have that evening. I wasn’t trying to “still live life” or “embrace the moment” that night.  It was simple, really: I was hungry and the restaurant was there.

So, I sat at a table alone and ate dinner.

* * * * *

A few months later, I broke up with that boyfriend. Or, at least I tried to. The words “the end” were there but for reasons that exceed the time and space I have here, I cycled back into him in a destructive pattern over and over again. We were never “officially” together again – but the energies of my day and my mind and my heart were frequently still wrapped up in that toxic relationship.

A couple years later, still caught in the cycle of trying to really end that relationship, I moved to a town near Chicago, alone, for a job. I would often walk or take the L train  to the movie theatre one evening a week and then to dinner afterwards. I’d sit in the dark theatre, no one on either side of me, and enjoy the show. Afterwards, I’d use the side exit that led out right by the door to a restaurant where I would walk in and say, “Just one.”

I usually had a book, but not always. Sometimes I would just eat my dinner with only my thoughts to keep me company. Sometimes I lingered: ordering an appetizer or a dessert or a drink. Sometimes I ate quickly before heading home. But I often thought of that first dinner alone and reminded myself it was good to know how to do to this.

Those years of dinner and movie dates with myself were part of the process of trying to get out of the cycle. I would sit there and remind myself:  I can do this. I can eat alone. I can sit at this table and have dinner and have a life and I can be fine. I can move forward.

Eventually the cycle back into the toxic relationship stopped and I was free.  Looking back I can only recall a handful of times in the past few years where I’ve eaten alone at a restaurant. It wasn’t an intentional choice to stop, but I guess that inner part of my soul knew I didn’t need those dates with myself as much anymore.

I rarely have to eat alone, but I know I can. And that has given me strength.

* * * * *

red stripeNicole says her love language is “eat the food that I cook” and is never happier than when there is a crowd gathered around a table eating food that she had fun preparing. She is thankful for all the friends, neighbors, family members, co-workers, and casual acquaintances who have filled the tables of her life. Nicole works as a freelance editor specializing in theology and social ethics and writes about bodies, theology, and community at jnicolemorgan.com. She tweets away @jnicolemorgan

Restaurant photo by Bart Heird