The loneliness of end times

and the healing promise of enduring wholeness

Good afternoon from rainy California y’all. The following piece has been written over the course of a year. I picked it up and put it down, I changed it a thousand times, I pulled out parts to focus on later, I updated it over the last two days… and as fair warning, it is lengthy. I wish I could make you a cup of tea as you find time to read this (and even if you don’t, I’d still love to have tea!). May my intention find its way to you even if I can’t physically offer a steaming mug to wrap your fingers around.

Thanks in advance for your time here. <3

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No matter what your feelings are about the Gregorian New Year or linear time generally, it is hard to deny the deeply imprinted global agreement that a new year beckons us toward promising possibilities, into optimism for what “2022” still so young, so innocent, could become. We all have a lot to say about a dying year. It can feel so good to be on the precipice of the unknown, the unnamed, the undetermined. The empty room. The fresh start.

And yet, in the swirl of Multiple Contradictory Co-Existing Feelings™, we can acknowledge that 2022 is already shrouded in agonizing trepidation, cautious optimism, immense fatigue, and downright hopelessness all at once. You only need to think of the word “Omicron” and the weary weight of a 3rd calendar year of pandemic collapses in on us. Our strategies of self-defense and resilience have grown haggard, our tricks and tools of self-preservation now dulled from months (years) of overuse in our new reality. Omicron is rattling the brittle scaffolding, intent to tear the whole thing down. Collective slowness and gentleness remain inadequate and insufficient to process the micro & macro transitions occurring all around us. How many of us are holding heavy burdens that we still can’t name? That we still can’t speak? How much grief has layered onto us that we still can't feel?

When Delta emerged, psychologist Amy Cuddy and writer JillEllyn Riley validated the mental health anguish and stress coursing through the collective by coining a new term: “pandemic flux syndrome”. They say “as a result of the pandemic’s waxing and waning, many of us have been experiencing feelings of whiplash, specifically after the sharp rise in cases after the Delta variant. There has also been a big increase in anxiety, depression, and feelings of numbness, as many of us are realizing that the pandemic may not ever go away.” We were also allied by the term “surge capacity” written about in one of the most popular, most impactful pandemic articles to date. Though the third wave now bears down on us, the familiar chorus on coping mechanisms (the psychologists, the therapists, etc) seems oddly quiet. The CDC memes, though, are prolific. And the gallows humor is both an amusing, ridiculous pressure release valve and an infuriating, disturbing display of dystopia. We are beyond the beyond.

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Like many of us, I began the pandemic in near-constant enclosure. If we were lucky and privileged, we had our own little cells of isolation - either totally alone or with chosen or biological family. I confronted the (un)fortunate irony of living alone for the first time in my entire life in February 2020. Once the landlord signed and sealed the paperwork, January was filled with dreams of all I could do with this new freedom. I'm obsessed with hosting, so dinner parties, writing salons, community organizing meetings, meditation sanghas, and on and on began to take shape in my mind – finally no roommates with whom to bargain for space and time and agency. But slowly, the cosmic significance of this decision crept into clarity. The man I was dating at the time helped move me in, then I broke his heart three weeks later. As relieved as I was to release that relationship, I had no idea it would mean the start of two+ interminable years of single life. The one and only gathering I hosted to celebrate my 31st birthday intended to be an actual party with overflow space on Lake Merritt, but dwindled to an intimate circle of my closest friends curled up on couches. So many were already nervous, already hunkering down. By late February, UC Berkeley – where I was completing the last semester of my Master's – flooded our campus with hand sanitizer stations. A week later, Berkeley's campus officially shut down.

By mid-March I started to feel loneliness wash over me, sometimes buzzing in my ear, sometimes tacking weight into my sinking heart, sometimes drifting like a fine mist. Lonely as another day blurred by and I scanned my psyche for another self-care strategy, as isolation and sensory deprivation blended together. This is not an example of the profundity of pandemic suffering, I know that. It is a snapshot of grating agitation specific to the nuances of this moment, gnawing in the background conditions of our lives that these days continue to drag heavy with grief, fear, and worry through the odd, constricting ways we must live in a badly-managed pandemic.

In lieu of the bounty of human guests I hoped to host, loneliness became my new roommate. Loneliness loved the sprawling spaciousness of my one bedroom apartment, my gigantic, cozy sectional sofa. It grew huge and spread into every nook and cranny, every crack and crevice. It made me question everything. Loneliness felt a lot like my grandmother Carolyn who would come over and move the furniture around in my mom's house when she wasn't home -- bossy, entitled, undermining, inescapable (I mean, love to my grandma, but that woman was a live wire to put it lightly). I was ruthlessly taunted. Why so many plates and mugs and utensils just to live alone? Why two couches? Why a table with three permanently empty chairs? Why an entire murphy bed tucked in the closet? Why do you need all this space? These questions plagued me particularly as someone who works (as in, my job(s)) to play my part in abolishing homelessness as a concept and restoring housing as a human right. Loneliness had free rein over my domain. Then, loneliness opened the door for another guest, and I sunk in to the darkest depression I've ever confronted.

blockprint by Filippa Edghill

I eventually moved out of that apartment to rescue myself from the brink, and moved into a series of tiny studios. I thankfully left the haunting grips of depression, but loneliness lingers with me still, much more softly now. Its bigness began to feel less like my overbearing grandmother and more like the Big Friendly Giant - my favorite childhood book. Though terrified at first, I began to find my loneliness BFG to be tender, sweet, endearing, and yearning for a more authentic relationship than an outright rejection. As I pulled apart the threads of my loneliness, I began to distinguish many fractals in its web. I found three key distinctions: I was lonely in ways I absolutely needed to be to heal my spirit, lonely in ways I wanted to close the gap on, and not at all lonely, just alone, delighting in my solitude.

My favorite writers are united by a devotion to loneliness and solitude, by articulating the dimensionality of these layered emotions with exquisite poignance.

“Loneliness is the doorway to unspoken and as yet unspecified desire. ...Loneliness can be a prison, a place from which we look out at a world we cannot inhabit; loneliness can be a bodily ache and a penance, but loneliness fully inhabited also becomes the voice that asks and calls for that great, unknown someone or something else we want to call our own. Loneliness is the very state that births the courage to continue calling, and when fully lived can undergo its own beautiful reversal, becoming in its consummation, the far horizon that answers back.” - David Whyte, Consolations

“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.” - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“…the radical letting-alone of yourself in the world. Letting the world speak in its own voice and letting this deeper sense of yourself speak out.” - John O'Donohue

“And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance. Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it …" - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

The loneliness I needed for my healing has offered the most intriguing, most potent wisdom I’ve encountered so far. I have learned to watch the raging storm of tormenting loneliness settle into the soft sanctuary of aloneness. I have learned that loneliness asks for the most courageous version of me to come forward and claim my life as I know it could be. I have learned to trust loneliness as a necessary difficulty, of which Rilke reminds us.

The reality is: there are times in life when no other being can possibly touch the nameless place where the seed of our soul is being shaken through an unfathomable depth of transformation. Loneliness arrives when no other entity can truly accompany us. We are shepherded to the places where we must lose ourselves beyond recognition to cross the threshold of our greatest evolutions and be reknown through change. It is this kind of harrowing emergence, this rebirth of self – the one that will surely shatter you – where loneliness is actually the guardian of a divine homecoming to the essentialness of you, the teacher of the tremendous loyalty we must commit to ourselves. I have not yet had children, but I know many mothers feel the holy terror of what it means to bring new life here through their bodies, to die as one and become two. It is loneliness that says “you will survive this if you do not abandon yourself.” Every single one of us faces this in our own ways through the journey of our lives. Those soul-defining moments are how we learn the devastatingly gorgeous, bittersweet truth that this self, this solitude, is inescapable. Wherever we go there we are. We are the ones that will see ourselves us through. Thus, the most important relationship of our lives is the one with ourselves, no matter how many ways there are to delude ourselves, to cling to others through co-dependency, to live our lives as far from ourselves as possible, etc.... When we can see this as magic, not terror, we see we must wrap ourselves into the dark vessel of the cocoon to evolve, we must choose to retreat entirely alone into the chrysalis and dissolve to become.

Meditations I by Mike Willcox

Yet, it is important to balance this out by the crucial reminder that we have also never been this alone. Throughout human history prior to modernity, we lived in villages where the most gruesome and gorgeous moments of our embodiment were held in safety, in protection, in community. Birth and death were shared rituals. The village had our backs literally and figuratively. The collapse of culture has transformed some of the most sacred acts of incarnation into traumatizing moments we attempt to avoid at all costs.

In one of my favorite essays from this time to date, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee confronts us with a razor sharp inquiry and analysis of these converging themes:

“How have many people become so alienated from any real sense of community or belonging that their only home is in conspiracy theories? ...I feel I am living in a world that is becoming radically separated from any ground of being, inner and outer air made toxic. I watch these stories swirl around and wonder if they are just the nightmares of a civilization that has lost its way, soon to be forgotten as the dawn comes. Do they have any relationship to the real stories of this moment in time, or are they just patterns of denial to distract us from the failures of our culture, with its increasing divisiveness, racial injustice, and the primal tragedy of our dying ecosystem? ... Even the pandemic, which began by bringing people together, helping each other, caring, has constellated more fissures in our culture, more tribalism, more discordant voices, even over the simple protection of wearing a mask. What does this say of our future, where we are meeting a global climate crisis?”

Llewellyn concludes this essay by rooting us in the medicine of ordinary awareness and Earth consciousness to remember wholeness as the antidote to toxic levels of separation and polarization, and I want to add another layer. We are all unified by this experience. We are all together, even though we are also alone. Turning toward separation to cope is the path to destruction precisely because it is an illusion, it is a trap. Complexity coupled with big undigested, unheld feelings coupled with the loss of the village pose immense challenges for us as a species. We are called to recognize that the stakes of this pandemic - like the other compounding crises we are confronting right now (climate change, racism, capitalism) - are so high because they are so individuated and so collective.

Will this kill you? Will you barely notice it? Will you be left with a lifelong disability? We can’t know until we know. It is the alchemy of our diversity that answers this question – a product of race, class, gender, background, age, income/wealth, habits, preferences, geographical location, housing security, living situation, family dynamics, biology, genetics, food access, air quality… – which are each also outcomes of social formation (hierarchy, segregation, apartheid, scarcity, hoarding, colonization, exile, genocide, etc.) How can we hold the magnitude of individuality and interdependence at the same time? I think the pandemic is living us into this question, is teaching us how to survive (and prevent) crisis by remembering that we are fractal and whole, not fractured and separate. That we are entirely singular and inextricable from the entirety of humanity. Each of us is experiencing this pandemic differently, the same way we must endure the depth of our lonelinesses in these body vessels with the preciousness of intimate solitude. And each of us is moving through collective loneliness that asks the village to have our backs, to leave us to the difficulty of our initiations and to greet us on the other side with food and storyshares by the fire.

This is the power of the soul’s timelessness on some level, as well. When I read Rilke, for example, I feel my heart crack into pieces when I think of the eternal relevance of his words. Here is a man who died nearly 100 years ago, but his pages are where I find the everlasting comfort of being seen in this human experience that can sometimes feel so isolating. I think this is part of how we find oneness without spiritual bypassing -- by connecting to common humanity in the truth of shared experience of life on Earth, of the mysterious transience of incarnation. All of us, here, with bodies, surviving, existing, breathing, living, dying. All of us, utterly distinct and yet profoundly linked. What we are moving through is also moving through us. What we are experiencing is also experiencing us. What we are breathing is also breathing us. What we are healing is also healing us. What we are observing is also observing us. What we are birthing is also birthing us.

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Thank you for making it through this lengthy piece. I am grateful for every moment of your presence. I would love to hear what your heart says in response in the comments below. And one day, I look forward to serving you that cup of tea.

With love,

Rachel

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