Last summer I was putting the lawn mower away when a neighbor I'd yet to talk to stepped into the doorway and invited me to stop over, two doors down, no matter when, saying "I know how it is." I must have known she was talking about social isolation; I think to be exact she may have meant marital strain at the same time since she stays home or visits nearby while her husband works in construction 180 miles away in the Twin Cities, being gone for at least a week at a time.
I eased my problem of isolation by finding a guy my own age to love but it's a situation similar to hers as he, a carpenter, has to locate near a customer base and a clinic, at least for now. So as I work from home weekdays I confront weekends right along with my own aging process, recoiling from new episodes of being all alone. It's this fear, or distaste, that I have to try and take apart. For a week at a time in northern Ontario I have coped and enjoyed my days alone, free to my own choices, with loneliness surfacing, then ebbing away, often in reaction to a sudden wild animal that made me suddenly feel I had company. This state of being is possible. I embraced it before, during and after. But didn't I know I'd be coming back where I could pick up the phone and visit, if not actually see family and friends?
Remembering that book, Women Who Love Too Much, by Robin Norwood and its advocacy for women who endure an emotional bond, marriage or whatever, with a man who isolates and wears them down invariably body and soul, I recognize the behavior pattern in myself. Seeking to improve upon my own troubled history in the child-rearing years, too often, in bouts, I fret because of the distance in miles between the man and me and our differences in temperament. I'm given to this sort of convoluted mental suffering, time and again. Causes for it have to be taken on, dismantled all that I can dismantle them, even if the requirement imposes itself for years and years as a daily internal therapy. That whole situation recommends a person's comfort in aloneness.
I see myself suddenly as a clear stream in rocky-hilly country, high in oxygen and rippling free, inviting, involving and frank, sensitive to disturbance. My origins make me how I am. Loneliness will make me ache with cold and I'll seek solace and a functional re-integration of all my inner currents. The sun may sparkle pleasingly, which I can reflect for all to see. But does embroilment in aloneness come easier the more it's practiced?--so many conditions lessen by dint of disciplined exposure to them. Over months and years, conditioning. I would learn a new serenity and long-term contentment, maintain myself against heart soreness and shriveling and even, who knows, cancer?, this way if able to master inevitable, especially longer and longer stints of aloneness. The lonely feelings all by themselves might just fade the way youth fades.
So many survivors learn this or already know it.
Books, lately a masterpiece by Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves. The bog, its roads with the tamaracks and spruces shouldering close alongside, its moss hummocks helping to hide animals which may, some of them, endure heart-ache that would shock an imagined human inquirer who won a chance to resonate somehow with exactly how that creature feels, for want of its own kind or anyone. Experiments--for me, with fishing bait and technique, with bread recipes or new foods. Music. Conversations that collapse time. Chores, plants cultivated or wild, errands to town, conversations. Then another foray with the paints and pencils and pens, rag and paper and brushes, to where the eye sees and the mind's eye harmonizes, the hours pool into my own best efforts to make a realm of beings on the paper, a community in balance for the sake of wonder, magnificence and surprises. The loneliness by then would appear to be a medium for everything that matters. Day by day this will have been lived out.
