A Haven in Maine
It was my first road trip. I was driving with a friend and my brand-new license to celebrate the end of my French course. I kept expecting other drivers to call me out as an imposter - a child, who couldn't possibly be behind the wheel. (My inner voice has yet to catch up with my 36-year old body.) But, no-one blinked as we whizzed through Quebec, reminded along those winding, sunny roads how good driving is for conversation. It is easier to talk when your brain is not scanning another person's features and moderating accordingly. The discussion can meander into long monologues. Silence feels easier; It is punctuation to help the thoughts bubble slowly to the surface. Watching the horizon opens up the deeper parts of ourselves.
At the border, the strange stamps in my passport held us up; US officials couldn't find Rwanda on a map and thought Kenya and Thailand sounded "high risk." "There's a beach in Tanzania?" said one sceptically. "Have you been collaborating with foreign governments to commit terrorist acts against the US government?" demanded another - twice. They took the passwords for my phone and computer and squirrelled them away in a US government database. They searched my phone - twice. They took our car keys while we waited, four and a half hours, for them to process my dangerous British passport.
As we crossed the border the landscape changed. The chocolate box houses sagged. We saw more boarded up windows, churches with paint pealing off in long artistic strips and shining American flags.
We arrived in darkness, greeted by warm lights and hugs from my old professor and his wife. We ate local steaks by candlelight in their sweet wooden house in the woods. From the armchairs you looked right across the fields, down to a lake glistening between the trees. Grandchildren's pictures covered the sunroom walls -- fragments of rainy afternoons and an imaginary world woven into existence by a grandfather's gentle voice. It felt like the deep sigh of returning home at the end of an exhausting day. I felt as though my exhausting day had lasted years.
We slept among antiques from the original dairy farm. We did yoga watching the rain. We walked among the woods and the ticks. And most of all, we talked with our perfect hosts. We talked about our mothers and their influence on our fears about motherhood and relationships. We talked about letting go of the battles of our ancestors. We talked about feminism in the 1970's and how little has changed. We talked about the fragility of masculinity and the feeling that sympathy is a finite resource. We talked about Neo Nazis in small town America and a couple who fell in love despite class and religious differences - their romance and separation a symbol of the great ideologies of the 19th century. We talked about how relationships can build dreams and not just stifle them. We talked about how nobody will make you write; It is a task you must fight to do, or the next urgent thing will sweep you away. My professor talked about his own definition of love: not only loving who someone is now, but loving who they dream of becoming.
My friend and I sat with two of the sharpest, kindest minds I've ever met pouring out our dilemmas, questions and unshaped thoughts - hungry for their empathetic ears. I could have listened to them forever and yet I found their questions made me speak. I couldn't stop myself, even as I saw how my ideas were seedlings compared to their wisdom, founded in forty more years of living. When I was a child I longed for my parents' undivided attention. Sat in that sunroom in Maine I felt my inner child luxuriating in the security of people really listening. It was potent, seductive and healing. They saw me not only for who I was, but for who I hope I will become. They held up a mirror to my dreams and reflected them back to me as though they were already within my grasp. They demonstrated their own definition of what it means to love.
At this moment in particular, the planet need this kind of love, this deep listening that says: "I understand and accept you"; "sympathy doesn't run out if you scatter it too generously"; "I love who you are now and who you aspire to be." My professor and his wife have a rare and magic power - this thing we call empathy. I only wish the whole world could have a few days in their red cabin in the woods. When we left, my heart felt lighter than it has in years.
At the border, the strange stamps in my passport held us up; US officials couldn't find Rwanda on a map and thought Kenya and Thailand sounded "high risk." "There's a beach in Tanzania?" said one sceptically. "Have you been collaborating with foreign governments to commit terrorist acts against the US government?" demanded another - twice. They took the passwords for my phone and computer and squirrelled them away in a US government database. They searched my phone - twice. They took our car keys while we waited, four and a half hours, for them to process my dangerous British passport.
As we crossed the border the landscape changed. The chocolate box houses sagged. We saw more boarded up windows, churches with paint pealing off in long artistic strips and shining American flags.
We arrived in darkness, greeted by warm lights and hugs from my old professor and his wife. We ate local steaks by candlelight in their sweet wooden house in the woods. From the armchairs you looked right across the fields, down to a lake glistening between the trees. Grandchildren's pictures covered the sunroom walls -- fragments of rainy afternoons and an imaginary world woven into existence by a grandfather's gentle voice. It felt like the deep sigh of returning home at the end of an exhausting day. I felt as though my exhausting day had lasted years.
We slept among antiques from the original dairy farm. We did yoga watching the rain. We walked among the woods and the ticks. And most of all, we talked with our perfect hosts. We talked about our mothers and their influence on our fears about motherhood and relationships. We talked about letting go of the battles of our ancestors. We talked about feminism in the 1970's and how little has changed. We talked about the fragility of masculinity and the feeling that sympathy is a finite resource. We talked about Neo Nazis in small town America and a couple who fell in love despite class and religious differences - their romance and separation a symbol of the great ideologies of the 19th century. We talked about how relationships can build dreams and not just stifle them. We talked about how nobody will make you write; It is a task you must fight to do, or the next urgent thing will sweep you away. My professor talked about his own definition of love: not only loving who someone is now, but loving who they dream of becoming.
My friend and I sat with two of the sharpest, kindest minds I've ever met pouring out our dilemmas, questions and unshaped thoughts - hungry for their empathetic ears. I could have listened to them forever and yet I found their questions made me speak. I couldn't stop myself, even as I saw how my ideas were seedlings compared to their wisdom, founded in forty more years of living. When I was a child I longed for my parents' undivided attention. Sat in that sunroom in Maine I felt my inner child luxuriating in the security of people really listening. It was potent, seductive and healing. They saw me not only for who I was, but for who I hope I will become. They held up a mirror to my dreams and reflected them back to me as though they were already within my grasp. They demonstrated their own definition of what it means to love.
At this moment in particular, the planet need this kind of love, this deep listening that says: "I understand and accept you"; "sympathy doesn't run out if you scatter it too generously"; "I love who you are now and who you aspire to be." My professor and his wife have a rare and magic power - this thing we call empathy. I only wish the whole world could have a few days in their red cabin in the woods. When we left, my heart felt lighter than it has in years.
posted by beckita @ Thursday, June 13, 2019
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