Sean Reagan

In Christmas Time: The Authority of Love

I am feeling my way towards something here. Please be patient. You know what I’ve forgotten, and the trail is growing faint.

Lately I’ve been riding the insomnia train again. Do you know it? I mean insomnia like, it’s three a.m., you haven’t slept for twenty some odd hours and you have to get up at six and go to work.

Insomnia always sucks but at the margins it becomes toxic. It hinders judgment, upsets the mind/body connection, and fast-tracks descent into depression. I wish it on no one.

One of the tricks I play to try and sleep is, I become a hobo. I wander around the house with a blanket looking for any open surface. Sometimes it’s a rocking chair, sometimes the floor beneath the dining room table, sometimes the back porch.

Sometimes I just wander.

The other night – huddled on the living room couch, shivering and floating on nightmares through fitful sleep – a question occurred.

To what are you clinging, Sean?

Earlier this summer, I walked with Jesus to the river out back, knelt by a clump of Forget-Me-Nots, and begged him to heal me.

He trailed his fingers over the tiny blue flowers and didn’t answer right away. The sun was bright; the river a low hum to our left. In the distance, sheep bleated.

It reminded me of the time he intervened to save a woman accused of adultery. Do you remember? He knelt between the woman and those prepared to murder her with stones and traced circles in the dust with his finger. We talk about it now as if it were a neat and tidy wisdom lesson: Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

But it wasn’t that. In that moment he was angry. And when he spoke, it wasn’t the words that made folks put their stones down. It was the fire in his eyes and voice. His was the authority of Love. He could’ve said anything.

“Sean,” he said gently, there by the river. “Forgiveness is the end of suffering. No one who clings to even one illusion will remember himself as sinless because he still cherishes this one error. He calls it unforgivable and makes it a sin.”

We tossed stones in the river then, lost in our thoughts. The afternoon passed in silence. He always liked that. I do, too.

What, in the end, can you not let go?

Down in depths I cannot risk without the Holy Spirit (and even then, man, even then) the answer is: life itself.

I do not want to die. I want to live.

Beyond the drama and mundanity of my day-to-day existence, there is this drive to live. It eclipses everything.

Everything – what I eat, how I pray, who I love, who I will not in a million years love – is subsumed by – is forced to serve – the survival instinct.

And for which, in a nontrivial sense, God bless! I love this life. I love moonlight and grandmother stories. I love the sound of the river at night in summer. I love conversations that last lifetimes, and walking with you in the forest, and watching you turn towards me in certain shades of light. I love apple pie and fresh-baked bread. I love spider webs at dawn. I love kisses and Marianne Sawicki and hot coffee. I love being wordy and I love the silence that makes wordiness possible.

“And you would defend all of it to the death,” he says quietly, from the interior bower where he often rests.

Is that so bad? I ask at last. I hate disappointing him but like all good teachers he cherishes honesty. There is no helpful pedagogy without it.

“If you can cling to it it’s not love,” he says, and then goes silent for days, as if giving me time to get clear on – or remember maybe – a lesson he taught us lifetimes ago. Why am I so forgetful? What grief or loss do I insist on worshipping instead of Love?

Why is healing so fucking hard?

Here is the truth.

I was not one of the disciples. Nor was I one of the ones with stones. I was the one telling the ones with the stones they were right. I was the one saying, she deserves to die for what she did.

I was the one saying, throw the fucking stones.

Sister, I was the one he confronted. I was the one whose confusion he so brutally and perfectly corrected.

I couldn’t sleep that night. All I saw was the fire in his eyes; all I heard was his clear and fearless voice. His was the authority of Love. For days I did not sleep or eat. Demons came, and devils with swords and spears of fire. Gehenna opened its gaping maw and bid me enter.

And knowing I deserved nothing but Gehenna, I fell to my knees and cried out from the ashen ruins of my heart, please don’t let me die. Please let me live.

Sometimes when I am lost in the insomniac trials, you touch my shoulder and murmur, Sean, there is another way. Most times I don’t hear, but sometimes it echoes just so and I remember. You said it two thousand years ago as well.

“There is another way,” you said, and knowing exactly what you meant, I joined you and we followed it together. We gave up everything to follow him. And when we found him, a handful of villages down the road, I dropped into the dirt like a dog and begged him to forgive me.

And he laughed! Do you remember? He laughed. He laughed, lifted me to my feet, and kissed me on the mouth. “My brother,” he said. “Of course you are forgiven. Of course you are.”

The personal existence passes. Life does not. The body and its stories pass. Creation does not. The earth will pass and the sun will collapse into itself and creation will go on.

We are creatures (critters, Donna Haraway says) of creation, inseparable from the cosmos which is our Creator and to which we bear witness in love, which is our creativity – our potential to be kind to one another, to feed and be fed by one another, to play together and walk together, to come in from the rain together, to laugh together and cry together.

To say to one another, Bill Thetford-like, there is another way.

“I don’t want to let all that go” arises from the mistaken idea that I am holding any of it in the first place. And that mistaken idea arises from the even more mistaken idea that I am something other than Creation.

I am a part of what I fear I am apart from. I can’t be let go. There is nothing to let go. Including – as you know – this personal existence.

This summer, when we turned to go home, I picked two Forget-Me-Nots and offered one to Jesus, who cradled it in his hands. The other I carried home to you. This is it.

In Christmas Time: Vast Rivers of Healing

I’ve spent a lot of time in this life with the cross, and somewhat less time with resurrection. The one makes the other necessary – a kind of grim cycle I wish on nobody. Yet recently, another way has shown itself. Late, but not too late, I am called back into the desert where it all began, and you are going too.

A big part of my “story” is that I have not always been a good guy. Today I am a good guy, or at least an okay guy committed to minimizing harm. But not always. And even so, things still go sideways sometimes.

I am the predictable result of a genetic predisposition to addiction and a culture that celebrates enduring suffering as a sign of strength, violence as the only valid means of conflict resolution, and shame as a religion.

Hell, not Heaven, is my mode, my location and my journey’s singular goal.

Nor am I alone. A long line of fathers, uncles and brothers stand behind me – ancestors who died in jail, died drunk on winter streets, died alone in hospitals in strange cities. When my great-grandfather was able to move his parents’ bodies to a private plot overlooking the Taunton River, he only moved his mother.

I understand why he did that.

And I understand that part of his heart – and mine – remains in that unmarked – that unforgiven and unforgiving – grave.

I have committed crimes. I have hurt people’s bodies and minds with my words and my fists. I have practiced a brutal indifference to all this – I have refused accountability – leaving me lonely, sad, and angrier at God than I can say.

And yet.

It’s the “and yet” that gets us, right? No matter how bad it gets – and it gets bad, it can get really really bad – there is always some undercurrent of light, some thread of hope, some interior glimmer of goodness and love that calls us away from the cross and the empty tomb.

Marianne Sawicki and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza are clear: Follow Jesus or don’t, but if you are going to follow him, then accept responsibility for creating anew and sustaining now his discipleship of equals.

The new kinship of the discipleship of equals . . . is sustained by the gracious goodness of God . . . The “father” God is invoked here not to justify patriarchal structures and relationships in the community of disciples but precisely to reject all such claims, powers and structures . . . The woman-identified man, Jesus, called forth a discipleship of equals that still needs to be discovered and realized by women and men today (Fiorenza In Memory of Her 150, 154).

No more going it alone, no more refusing to console or be consoled, no more willful embrace of physical and psychological pain, and no more indifference to the well-being of any brother or sister anywhere.

Now is the time of becoming familiar with Christ by becoming family to one another, but familial in a sense that transcends the limitations of both biology and culture. It’s new, right? Familiar but new.

Critically, this new family does not include a father. As Fiorenza makes clear, this is neither an accident nor an insult. It merely reflects the corrective impulse of Jesus. Patriarchal rigidity – man as the locus of power – is gently set aside. In its place is God, Who is Love, and the only locus of power anybody needs.

Are you ready for that? Am I? Is anyone, ever?

There was a terrible storm on the day I met her. I stood on the steps of the law school library, happier than I’d been in a long time, her phone number tucked in my pocket, and watched dark clouds sweep across the sky. Wind whipped and howled, driving leaves from the trees; rain fell in heavy sheets, drenching everything.

I don’t remember how long it lasted. Ten minutes? Twenty?

I stood there and watched. I stood there and witnessed.

My life had changed in a matter of minutes and I knew it. I don’t think I have ever felt with such clarity and precision the graceful movement of God. I had been brought into a relationship that refused the rubric of suffering, the pedagogy of hate and the ontology of fear. In it, seeking ended and creation began.

My heart was joined with another who would not forsake me but rather teach me – in time, in the world – how to not forsake others, including my own self.

I remember later driving to the store to buy lunch. I wandered up and down the fruit and vegetable aisles, admiring the colors, amazed at how happy I was, how alive. Everything was full of light. Vast rivers of healing rose through the earth into my body and from there flowed out into the cosmos, filling it with the energy of creation.

I left without buying anything; of course I did. I needed nothing; I had been given everything.

And yes. That moment, like the storm before it, passed. But the gift did not. It remained in me as the potential for healing, and the possibility of joy. The relationship itself was beautiful and difficult, like crossing a desert. In it, an ancient prayer was answered yet again. An even more ancient love took form – yet again – in the world. What else did I expect?

Emily Dickinson knew. The Divine finds us in relationship, and in relationship we learn from one another how to be divine.

With thee, in the Desert —
With thee in the thirst —
With thee in the Tamarind wood —
Leopard breathes — at last!

In relationship, we realize that the only power is that of Love. Everything else is subsumed in it. Creation alone is. In the desert, we remember our fundamental poverty and thus reclaim our identity in Creation. We are dependent and relational. Grace is a matrix whose output is love and we are it.

There’s a reason I like writing that, that way, and a reason you like reading it. The leopard – my God this love – draws yet another breath.

Fiorenza again, same text: “Structures of domination should not be tolerated in the discipleship of equals” (148).

I hear you. I see you. I will not take another step without you.

In Christmas Time

And so the journey ends. So the Advent season – always an abstraction, always a projection – ends. The long night ends and a new day begins. The manger was always a symbol. Shall we be born again in our shared heart? Can we even begin to understand what that means? Do we need to?

In the church of my childhood, when Advent ends, the time of Christmas begins, which lasts until January 12, when “ordinary time” begins.

So we are in Christmas Time now. The sign has changed; our attention is called differently. It’s a feeling – do you feel it?

In Christmas Time, I will not make altars unto sadness and grief nor give assent to the works of injustice and fear. I will remember that God is not a God of guilt and retribution but of love and mercy, peace and joy. I will love God, Whose happiness in my happiness, and Whose will for creation I share.

And I will share. And share and share.

And, probably, I will fail. Sometimes I will fail. Some sorrow will catch me unaware; some memory of some difficult loss will come and I won’t have the heart to drive it away. It’s okay. We cannot be forsaken. Another secret to salvation, as hidden as the others, is that it’s not actually possible to make a mistake. There are no errors.

It takes a lot of faith to use reason in service of love. It takes a kind of wisdom one only finds in the collective. You have to want to let go of blame entirely.

The Advent writing was helpful. Mary’s presence was a surprise and a blessing – it took me to a new place in the story. It opened up new possibilities in the form of my life. Christmas is not the goal, it’s the effect. The important part was always Mary’s. Jesus isn’t special but holy. That distinction – between specialness and holiness – is the only one that still seems to matter.

I mentioned the broken furnace. By mid-day on the 23rd the house was in the low forties. We couldn’t get anybody to come fix it. We were frustrated and scared. So I prayed. I went upstairs, got on my knees and prayed. My prayer was: Jesus, help me figure out how to not make this worse and, if there are steps I can take to be helpful that I’m not seeing, could you help me see them? Please and thank you.

I sat quietly (shivering) to see if any answers or tips or intuitions came but nothing did.

So I went back downstairs cold and uncertain to find C sitting on a radiator with a puzzled look on her face. “The furnace just went on,” she said. And indeed it had.

Interpret that as you will.

In Christmas Time we are allowed to remember who the Adult is; we are allowed to remember the Child. We are allowed to receive God’s Gift (which, for me, was remembering that innocence is recollected in relationship). We are allowed to play and be happy together; we are MEANT to play and be happy. Together is what matters, everything else sugars out.

So for a little while, I’m taking off the Hat of the Seeker and putting on the Hat of the Celebrant. Setting aside the traveler’s lantern and turning on the householder’s mirror ball. It’s Christmas Time. Jesus is here, God is alive and together we are Christ. Alleluia alleluia alleluia.

Twenty-Three

Advent Travels: Out of Bethlehem and Into the Desert

In a dream last night, we reached Bethlehem. There were pilgrims everywhere. Do you know which Inn? Are we too late? Some of us had gifts, some of us were hoping to get a gift. The vibe was happy mostly, mostly festive. It was chaotic but in a family reunion kind of way. Everybody wanted the same thing.

In the dream, I lead us up and down the busy roads. I am focused and intent; I refuse to be distracted. We will find Him – we will! But then – suddenly – I realize I’ve lost you. Somewhere in the flocking streams I lost you.

I begin to call your name. I shove through hordes of seekers to find you. Nothing else matters. For the first time since we began this journey, I am scared. What if you are gone?

I realize that finding Jesus means nothing if you are not there with me.

A minute later, I realize what this means for my search for Jesus. It wasn’t about him at all. It was about connecting with you. It was always about you. Always.

And you are gone.

The last post of a sustained writing project is always the hardest. The temptation to conclude is strong in us. We want to stick the landing, resolve the plot, put a big red bow on it.

But at the end of Advent, I can’t do that. Neither my psyche nor my writing are prone to finishing. They thrive on stories that are bigger than they are. They love disappearing in gospel mythologies, telling and retelling familiar tales at the fire.

Every relationship in which I share is an aspect of the One Relationship, which is that of God with Creation. I can’t compass that relationship in ways that resolve neatly, like a finely-made clock or O’Henry’s Gift of the Magi. There has to be something on the other side of language. Silence isn’t just the absence of sound.

I’m not the maker of our relationship, much less the One Relationship. When I consent to enter either fully, both enter me. I’m not “I” then, I’m “us,” with you. It’s open and open-ended, this thing of ours. It’s outside the bounds of “right/wrong,” “either/or” and even “both/and.”

It’s beyond “/”. It’s even beyond ” “.

Our relationship is a glittering star in the vast firmanent of God’s Delight. This was the light we followed; this is the light we always follow. It’s us. We’re the love.

In the dream, I am defeated. I cannot find you. I sink to my knees in the dirt; nobody notices. Nobody cares. It’s over. Loss and lack are all I know.

But then somebody kicks me, and then kicks me again, and when I turn to see who it is, it’s you. It was always you.

“Get off your knees,” you say, extending a hand. I want to say you’re luminous – I want to say you couldn’t be more Christ – but I don’t. I’m just happy you found me. And there has to be something on the other side of words. I take your hand. Of course I take it. What else were my own hands made for but this?

When I was a little boy, I fell in love a lot, and everything I loved was killed or sold or abandoned. Dogs, cats, cows, sheep, chickens, ducks, deer, trout, pheasants, grouse, bears. My best friend and first girlfriend moved to Kentucky. Shit happens.

Shit happens but also, life goes on. I learned that lesson early too. Everything died but life went on. No matter how much pain there was in this moment, in another would be joy. I didn’t like it but I couldn’t deny it.

So I kept coming back. You know what I mean? My heart would break, I’d mourn, and then . . . find somebody or something else to love again. Even a dandelion in sunlight, just so, was sufficient. I was always falling to my knees; I was always being offered a hand.

In childhood, among other things, I learned how to hope. I learned that hope was justified.

And look. I agree with Krishnamurti: hope is just the flip side of despair. It’s “/” all over again. We fear hell so we hope for Heaven. It’s a cycle, a trick of ego, and its only function is to keep us from ever seeing that we are doing this to ourselves, and that there is another way.

But also, hope was how I survived a difficult part of the journey. And it’s hard to let something go that served so well for so long.

Of course I’m scared. What did I think was going to happen here? What did you think was going to happen?

When I was a child I had a recurring dream of Mary. She was standing on the Charles M. Braga bridge in light rain, staring sadly at the city of Fall River, the ancestral city of both sides of my family. The mist was a shroud hiding every other body but ours. Mary’s grief was enormous; her vulnerability obvious. Somebody had to help her. I had to help her. But something invisible separated us and I was only allowed to observe. Eventually the dream stopped being a dream and became a memory. But of what exactly? And why am I telling you? You were there.

In the dream you take my hand and lead me – against the flowing crowd entering Bethelehem – out of Bethlehem and into the desert where it all began so long ago. I’m scared still but differently. Where are we going, I ask. But you only smile and say trust me. I will, I say. And I do. I do.

Twenty-Two / Twenty-Four

Advent Travels: When in Doubt

The furnace broke last night, coldest night of the year. We were up after midnight for hours seeing if we could jump-start it, and ended up just giving everybody extra blankets.

The house is very cold today. My fingers are numb typing. I stop every few sentences, grab the coffee mug with both hands, and shiver warming just enough to write another couple paragraphs.

At the last minute – around 4 a.m. – I pulled this morning’s substack post, realizing that I’d adopted the Advent posting style for it, and not feeling confident that tone works for that setting.

I’m also executing a familiar self-con in that post – venting poetically for attention, without sufficiently accounting for a solution. “Look at me,” is pretty much all the ego needs to say. I can get lost for days in that pleading.

“Nobody likes a whiner” – I heard this or some variation of it growing it up all the time but kids don’t just invent behavior: they learn it.

I’m not a tough guy; I’m not a stoic. I believe in looking at what’s not working – inside and out – and trying to find solutions with folks around you. Healing is honorable and obligates us to be humble and communal.

Here then, as the Advent writing wind down, let me try to find not so much the right voice (voice is easy and also the fun part) but the honesty that by necessity precedes healing.

I’m frustrated with my study and practice of A Course in Miracles. I’m scared I made a mistake by following its peculiar star. In the alternative, I’m scared that I made a wrong turn with the course many years ago, somewhere in the way I decided to approach Tara Singh’s work.

(Note to self: those are different fears – don’t conflate them).

I think the course is wrong in the way it relies on mind/body dualism. I think the material is wrong and I also think that the way Ken Wapnick taught and promulgated the material was wrong (but easier to understand – Ken’s fears and mine are entangled – but what we needed was to talk as equals, not write as teacher and student – we needed a dialogue that was less beholden to the interests of hierarchy).

(Note to self: remember Sawicki’s and Fiorenza’s emphasis on Jesus’s “discipleship of equals”).

I have a handful of folks I really care about who studied closely with Ken, and I’m sorry, but I think the gnostic fantasy he so rigorously developed arises not in love but fear and specialness.

I think the course makes it really easy to indulge magical thinking – Jesus wrote the course, there are ascended masters awaiting all of us, check out my light episode, et cetera.

I think that kind of thinking is inevitable when you frame mind/body dualism the way ACIM |does, but it also prevents a meaningful relationship with our capacity to heal and be healed.

The course is a cry for help framed as a solution to a nonexistent problem, and a lot of us who respond are doing so because we recognize the cry and it’s our cry.

But the course in that light is not designed to help us; it’s designed to keep us from looking at the actual problem. It subtly – so subtly it’s easy to miss – keeps us in conflict with one another through the material.

That is, our emphasis on the material keeps us separate from one another.

That’s my sense of it. And fine, right? Everybody’s got an opinion. If it’s time to move on to the next town or practice or manger, then do it. We’re free spirits, whose travels are circumscribed only by desire.

And yet.

There is also in me the sense that I am still not seeing something in the material. “Seeing” here refers to the matrix created by understanding, acceptance and application.

And that something is not hidden in understanding (I don’t think I’m wrong about the mind/body dualism, the magical thinking, the problem-not-solution thing) but rather in acceptance and application.

I am scared to accept some healing the course offers because fear exaggerates the potential negatives effects of application.

I am projecting a future I fear and thus frantically trying to control the present to avoid just that outcome.

And yet understanding teaches me that it’s precisely that outcome that will finally and fully heal me.

Say yes to God. Let it be done according to God’s Will. Be Mary. That’s been a big theme this season: Mary, Mary’s yes, and what happens to Mary next.

That means for me some accountability for my decision to give to much attention to A Course in Miracles. It means clarifying without personalizing or poeticizing a desired (but feared) practice.

It means entering into relationship with a way of being that I actively fear and am thus unable to enact as relationship.

I’m still playing the separation game. After all these years, and all this study, and all this writing and sharing . . .

I’m still locked into separation. And it’s way past time to pretend I don’t want it this way. At some level, I do want it this way.

So on second thought, I’m going to publish that Substack post, and this Advent post. So they’re messy, so I don’t feel fully in control of them, so what? I’m tired of being scared and I’m tired of the not-trusting that fuels the fear. Not trusting God, which means not trusting you, which really really means not trusting myself.

Ah well . . .

I remember years ago in a church basement an older man saying to me gently, “when in doubt, don’t.” But I learned another way, which is, when in doubt, do you best to minimize harm but then do. Don’t be afraid of fear, yours or anybody else’s.

Twenty-One / Twenty-Three

Advent Travels: Admitting the Wound

Yesterday it snowed a little as the sun set: prismatic flurries tracing faded planes of light down western hills slowly darkening.

I stood shivering on the front porch, breathless and grateful, now and then remembering to take a sip of coffee. I cannot bear the loveliness sometimes; I cannot compass the love the loveliness reflects.

Elizabeth Fiorenza invites us to set free “the emancipatory power of the Christian community which is theologically rooted neither in spiritual-sexual dimorphism nor in patriarchal ecclesial dominance, but in an egalitarian vision and in altruistic social relationships that may not be ‘genderized'” (In Memory of Her 92).

Everyone gets a seat at the table; everyone takes turns cooking, serving and eating. All power belongs to God; everything else is shared.

All day – coffee and writing, driving with C. to buy grain for the horses, dinner with friends and family – I kept coming back to that sentence of Fiorenza’s. It called and called but apparently I am still learning how to respond.

Yet later, laying in bed, on the horizon of sleep, something softened in the neural matrix, and I got it.

Fiorenza is clear about something I hadn’t noticed in Sawicki, but which is there, and which I cannot now unsee: those women are not interested in Jesus so much as they are interested in the wisdom movement that birthed and then resurrected him.

They’re not opposed to Jesus – not at all. They’re just not buying the whole “special guy who saved the world” schtick. That’s the order that he helps undo. It’s not about him; it never was.

They want to get to what it’s about – healing, comforting, feeding, sheltering, nursing.

Their work decenters Jesus by shifting focus to his program, his mission, and being clear that it’s meant to be lived now, in whatever context is given to us. It’s meant to be enacted here. Peace, happiness, fulfillment, love – all that follows the interior “yes” which activates our cooperation with God in and through Creation.

(Tara Singh often wrote how Helen Schucman told him the course was meant to be lived, and pointed at Mother Teresa as the premier example).

So Fiorenza is “ecclesial” – it takes a village, a community, a collective. Call it a church or whatever you like; it takes at least two to manifest the Lord. And as Lynice Pinkard says, it’s okay to be messy in community. It’s okay to be beginners when it comes to holy relationship.

There are no blueprints. And there is no space of purity from which to act. We must begin imperfectly from within the messiness, in ways that respond to and engage with our concrete and particular contexts and circumstances (Revolutionary Suicide).

I got distracted for a long time by oneness. I got distracted by my own personal “special guy who saved the world” schtick. I objectified myself as a spiritual hero in at least two religious traditions and resisted anything that suggested I was not.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been holding apart – a fantasy of spiritual accomplishment and the reality of how hurt I am and how needful of spiritual help.

But Sawicki and Fiorenza (and Pinkard, too) would say, you’re still keeping the focus on yourself, Sean. You’re still indulging the fantasy of going it alone, being a saint, a monk, whatever. Self-improvement is always an ego project. You’re making it personal. That’s the problem, they’d say. That’s what keeps you separate from the help you need and want.

Earlier this year, I wrote a post called Christ is a Collective, a kind of homage to Helen Beeth, whose writing and teaching feel so liberating to me. It felt like a deep interior cleansing, writing that post. It felt like coming to coherence. But also, I was concerned. Is this my reality or is it a fantasy? Am I hiding behind writing?

But now I see those questions aren’t real. Sometimes what we write isn’t our reality now, but can still function as a light making clear the next step or two. Just keep swimming. Don’t stop sharing.

So at last, I am beginning to piece together a practice – one that harmonizes with my eclectic study and innate wordiness, and liberates me from the confusion wrought by obedience unto men and orders of men who are often sincere but nearly always deeply confused. There is indeed another way and it is being revealed. Nor can I find it without you.

Yesterday Susan asked how am I keeping the Christ-embodied Mary outside of my heart, and my own heart briefly caught fire. Yes! That is the inquiry. But then everything slipped back into its familiar groove with one tiny exception: I knew I was not alone. And I thought then of Emily Dickinson, who wasn’t alone either, and yet still managed a vast and fertile solitude. She wrote these lines in I think 1870, after the “white heat” had passed and she was ordinary again.

A not admitting of the wound
Until it grew so wide
That all my Life had entered it
And there were troughs beside –

How I wish I could have heard her read her own work! Can you imagine it? In the quiet seclusion of her bedroom after dark – moonlight and a lantern – and the world at her window leaning in?

Healing and attention are intimately connected. Admitting the wound is the way the wound heals, because the admission beckons the healers, in the same way a light calls weary travelers off the road.

I cry out and you are here, as if you always were. You lift me and ask am I ready – not to travel but to be home. Or am I lifting you? And does the distinction matter?

We begin again, again, companionate.

Twenty / Twenty-Two