Whoever You are, No Matter how Lonely
Whoever You are, No Matter how Lonely
Elizabeth Richards
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
— Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
I bought last minute tickets to a concert last February. Hundreds of us stood packed together in a little venue outside Greensboro, thinking at the time about how inconvenient such close human contact was. I stood on my toes to see over groups of interlocked friends and couples swaying to the music. The air was hazy and tasted like beer and french fries. I remember jumping away from spilling drinks and loose elbows. The artist was an Irish songwriter with a cup of tea balanced on his guitar between songs. The music was transformative, in the way seeing the sunrise over mountains can change you completely. It was the sort of experience that makes you want to chase a sunset down rain-wet streets holding someone’s hand. I was swept up, brimming over with the beauty, reveling in the humanity.
Months later in November, I stood in a parking lot and watched the wild geese fly south. There were thousands flying in formation and I had a distinct feeling that it might have felt similar watching the Luftwaffe fly over London. It was raining and the colors of the trees bled together. Perfect reflections of miniature geese flew across speckled puddles. It was an old rhythm in motion. It reminded me of the concert. Both experiences left me more connected to the ground I stood on.
As a child, I learned to harbor an evangelical suspicion of being too much for myself. How could anything good come from the feelings of a desperately wicked heart? I was caught with one foot in a sea of magic, reveling in a rich breathing world and one on the shore of American Evangelical practicality. In school, I was an English major, interested in everything. My peers would laughingly ask, “How does a girl become so interested in theology?” In my experience of the Church a woman and her thoughts are only legitimized when she stands behind her husband. And apparently married women don’t need to read Shakespeare or Thoreau or Chesterton. In a sea of theologically confident men, my voice was young and feminine and lost. I found myself contending with a distortion of Christianity that seemed to view the world as something to be subjugated. I began to wonder what my place as a woman in that world might be.
I have watched the Western Church become increasingly disconnected from the world around it. The Church is largely oblivious to the responsibility human beings have towards creation and what role we play within it. Children are growing up with no experience of forests or rivers or what it’s like to milk a cow. Instead they are bequeathed a world isolated into bubbles of thought and idealism predetermined by age, upbringing, education, and politics. Separated from death and sickness, mourning is reserved for sterile hospital rooms and dingy funeral parlors. The elderly die alone in nursing homes, while we slowly become the most isolated generation in history. Village halls, libraries, concert venues, and playgrounds, once vehicles for communal well-being, are becoming obsolete and will find their equivalents in malls and chat rooms.
Removing ourselves from the nearness of death, or the intensity of nature, or the crowded joy of a concert is easier, in the same way that pacifying ourselves with a life separated from reality is easier. It may protect our hands from getting dirty or our hearts from getting hurt, but this type of evasion excludes us from truly living. Humanity—all of it—the connected, lonely, inconvenient, transformative reality, brings us into to fullness of life.
Finding my place in the world can feel like an overwhelming task. I am caught between a desire to be legitimized as a woman and the discovery that the easy world of my childhood is lost to me forever. In the quiet of the car before the engine turns over. In the rattling of keys as I unlock my door. In the misting of rain on the bricks of the walkway, my aloneness becomes a person. Breathing in the dark beside me. Like the slow shock of frost in the early morning, I realize what losing childhood means. Would that I could go back to days when I was more awake. More noticing. When the earth felt richer and brighter. Yet I can only push forward into the day, and fight against the soft freezing power of life on my heart, knowing that the world still offers itself to my imagination. It teaches me how to place myself in a greater narrative and experience heavy emotions in relation to others. It teaches me to rejoice in geese reflected in puddles, and the watercolor trees of Autumn.
I find myself clinging to those experiences that transformed and overwhelmed me and gave me that sunset-chasing-feeling. Jazz concerts and dinner parties and baking with my grandmother are all shared and messy hallmarks of the human experience– antidotes to both ego and boredom. I’d pay double to go back to that venue in February—elbows, alcohol, and all. The magic of the living, breathing world is its ability to ground me and shape my mind and imagination. Finding a place in it comes through trust and intimacy, through an open heart, and through fully embracing what it means to live and breathe and have our being.
Elizabeth Richards
Writer & Creative
Photography by Esther Choi