Breaking the Double-Binds of Our Times: A Conversation with George Ewald

What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the primrose to the orchid, and all of them to me, and me to you?
Gregory Bateson

“All my life, it’s been weird,” George Ewald says before taking us back in time.

He is twelve again, sitting in the backseat of his dad’s car, driving over the George Washington Bridge.

“What are those ships?” he points at the big, slow machines roving the Hudson River.

“Those are barges taking the garbage to be dumped into the ocean.”

“Don’t they know that the ocean is a big bathtub?” he thinks.

Later, George is at his uncle’s house. The garage door is closed when the car starts up. Fumes billowing out everywhere. His uncle fumbles to open up the garage door. As soon as it opens, and the smoke escapes into the open sky, his uncle breathes a sigh of relief. George is horrified.

“Don’t they realize the earth is one big garage?”

His observations lead to a final conclusion: Shit. The adults don’t know what they’re doing, and we are all in deep, deep trouble. What can we do? George Ewald decided to spend the rest of his life trying to answer this question.

The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.
Gregory Bateson

George graduated with a degree in history, attempting to understand the human condition. Instead, he was confronted with the human record of wars. In 1966, George spent a summer on the Tel Gezer archeological site at the foothill of the Judaean Mountains. Occupied by humans for over five thousand years, the walls of the excavation pits contained layers of ash, a testimony to when the city was burned to the ground. The violent history was folded into the land.

While he was there, the Arab-Israeli conflict was smoldering, to become the Six Day War the following year. What compels humans to destroy each other? What compels them to destroy what they’ve built? Why is this part of the human condition? Holding these questions close, George returned to the United States.

Facing the Vietnam War, and being opposed to it, George still felt he “had to serve” his country in some way. He wanted to learn more about the military mind, and the concept of nuclear deterrence, the idea that the United States could have such a powerful capacity to destroy, that no one would dare strike first. If this concept was truly effective in creating peace, he thought, then he would support it.

As a nuclear combat crew commander, he realized quickly that deterrence made no sense. The people on deck with him, he felt, were the ones keeping the whole world together. At the press of a button, the whole world could be destroyed. For what? For whom? How will this end?

From the time he questioned his father on the trash barges in the Hudson, George persisted in his concern for the environment. When he entered the military, he was worried about the environmental dangers of nuclear power. After four years, he left his position with an ever deepening concern for humanity. The environment would go on, in its own way. We are the ones who will suffer. “This is totally crazy,” he thought, “why do we keep screwing things up?”

George went on to experience these same paradoxical conundrums as a pediatric charge nurse, psychiatric nurse, computer technologist, berry-picker, a construction worker, salesperson, and family man. He had more than sixty addresses to his name, and many moments without an address at all. He believes that his soul is that of a tree, which is why human behavior is so confounding to him, and why, perhaps, he has to spend his whole life trying to unravel the absurdity of our human ways.

By the time I met him, he had resolved to immerse himself in the call of his inner tree-being: rooting in one place. He tentatively started living with Ruth and Derek Owen on their homestead farm in New Hampshire, becoming a farmer of sorts. It would be more accurate to say that he was a botanist, studying the intricate processes of plants, experimenting and observing their behaviors meticulously. Five summers ago, when he was seventy and I was twenty-two, we bent over the raspberries, pruning. He told me, under a four o’clock August sun, that all systems, ecological and social, operate on the interdependencies of all things. Humans can’t see those interdependencies. Without this understanding, we destroy everything we try to save.

George Teaching Me About Dirt; 8/10/2015

We live in a world that is only made of relationships.
Gregory Bateson

There is a traditional Zen Buddist story in which a Zen master presents his pupils with a “koan”— an unsolvable problem or riddle intended to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical thinking. The master holds out a stick and says: if you say this stick is real, I will beat you. If you say this stick is not real, I will beat you. If you say nothing, I will beat you. It’s hopeless. There’s no way out.

Welcome to the double-bind. Coined by anthropologist Gregory Bateson in the 1950’s, a double-bind is a dilemma in communication that comes from two or more conflicting messages. The problem isn’t only that we are presented with paradoxes. It is that we can’t actually define the nature of the paradox in which we are caught. It’s impossible to fulfill any demand because the broader context—be it an authority figure or an unspoken rule (the master)—does not allow it. No matter what you do, you get beaten with a stick. What’s more is that double-binds are often accompanied by a deep sense of distrust in oneself and in one’s surroundings.

Originally, Bateson articulated the double-bind in relation to defining schizophrenia not as an inherent mental illness but as a learned confusion in thinking and communication. Eighteen years before post-traumatic stress disorder was defined, he began studying the “schizophrenic” behaviors of WWII veterans who were hospitalized. He observed how the “nonsense” of patients’s behaviors made sense in the context of their war experiences. In addition to being traumatized in the field, the veterans were expected to live within the American delusion of the heroism of war while carrying a profound pain from their experience. What is the impact of not being able to comment or point out perceived discrepancies? Is it even possible to learn to trust part of your experience while denying another part of it? The internalized confusion itself, observed by Bateson and his team, became a pillar of the double-bind theory and modern therapy.

The double-bind then expanded to family therapy, being used to address the dynamics between couples, parental figures, and children as webs of miscommunication, and often manipulation. It spilled over into developmental psychology, interpersonal abuse recovery, substance abuse recovery.

Eventually, Bateson and his collaborators extended the concept of double-binds to the environment and the economy. We are confronted with our own existential threat: a bathtub full of trash and a garage full of smoke. We can also call this “climate change.” On one hand, we want to preserve the environment and maintain clean air and forests and save endangered species. On the other, everything we do to grow our economy and preserve our “standard of living” disrupts the natural environment and our relationship with it. It is an inevitable double-bind that haunts us and leaves us paralyzed. But the pressure is on. As comedian George Carlin puts it, “the planet isn’t going anywhere—we are!”

Bateson concluded that we need to get out of the double bind of linear thinking in order to conceive of the interconnectedness in things. Without that, we’re stuck. Our limited knowledge, our media, our systems leave us in double binds because we can’t actually define the situation we’re in. We have information coming at us from a million different sources saying different sources dictating what we must do to “protect” the environment, and then we also hear that it’s not a real phenomenon. We hear the planet will be uninhabitable in X years and then we hear that that statement isn’t true.

We create systems, like those that support nuclear deterrence, that become dangerous to themselves. We are unable to hold all of this information and make sense of it. It’s as if the rules of the game are impossible to understand, and yet we have to keep playing. But if we keep playing, it will lead to war and our own destruction. We end up becoming what George saw at Tel Gezer: layers of ash.

Our ability to conceive of alternatives is diminished by the acceptance and reinforcement of the “rules” and limits of the game which has no clear process. It is a paradox in which we aren’t only given opposing options, we are also confused about the terms. That is the double-bind.

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.
R.D. Laing

According to Bateson, the first step in tackling a double-bind is to recognize it as such. Similarly, the purpose of a koan in Zen Buddhism is to unravel the greater truths that exist beyond the double-binds which are figments of our logical reasoning. These “positive” double-binds, little riddles to chew on, force the pupils to move beyond perceived impossibilities and into enlightenment.

In the Zen story, one pupil walks up to the teacher, grabs the stick and breaks it, destroying the illusion of the double bind.

George was in his mid-thirties and ready for a new experience again. He shuffled off to North Carolina where he decided to live out in a primitive cabin without heat, stove, or bathroom. He didn’t have a lot of money and thought it would be fun (which it was, until it got cold). He found his way to a big maple tree, sitting by it, asking himself the age-old question, “what do we do?” when he heard an answer:

Fewer people, more forests.
The big maple tree

“I know it sounds crazy, but this is my experience,” George shared, as he bit into a Cortland apple. The answer the tree whispered to him was quite simple. All the younger trees around the big tree laughed saying “they can never do it, they can never do it!”

From that moment on, George wanted to see if those saplings were right. He changed his question from “what can we do?” to “can we do it?”

Fifty years, a deep dive into so-called sustainable agriculture, and many technologies later, George finds that there are no answers anymore. We are all facing this gloom, whether we like it or not. He notes the reality of our values:

“We value our own family before we value the community. We value our own community before we value other communities. We value our own nation before we value other nations and our own color before other colors. It’s not about the wider community in any way. In no way is it about the community. It’s about each individual and then the ring of associations beyond the individual.”

If we challenged those values, and placed the “community” or the “environment” above the individual, what would that look like? The moment we think we have clarity on the new, more evolved, direction, we will hit a wall with a new set of double-binds.

“Fewer people”—as the trees suggested to George—means decreasing the population. We either have to collectively agree to stop reproducing, or, more likely, it would have to be enforced. A mission like this could push humanity to the murderous ideology of ecofascism, which would require individuals to sacrifice their own interests for the sake of “nature”. Ecofascism leans on eugenics, nationalism, and violence to impose environmental protections.

The idea of ecofascism itself was synthesized by Nazism, convincing the nation to protect its mystical connection to the land. Reducing the population does not guarantee conservation in any meaningful way. The concept has been used, like many other dogmas and religions, as a way to justify ideological goals with a seemingly “simple” solution. Does the questionable outcome (conserving the environment) justify the means (brutal eugenic population control)?

The added challenge of having “more forests” means coming to a collective agreement to allow huge expanses of land to develop their life over two hundred years with no human contact.

Perhaps humans can try to find other ways to mitigate ecological disasters without population control or tanking the economy: new technologies and new policies. But these also come to a head with their own double-binds, their slow progressions, their resources, and their environmental and socioeconomic risks.

“Almost everything that makes us who we are is also part of the problem. We would have to change so much, and we would each have to sacrifice so much for the community’s sake. We’d have to sacrifice everything that we think and hold dear, which is to say the part about valuing family before someone who is not family. Even valuing the individual life that we think is so precious to save. It gets you totally crazy if you think about it. We are so used to valuing each individual.”

As George recounted his life as a series of double-binds to us in Derek Owen’s greenhouse in October, he gave me the gift of articulating my own confusion. Every day, we are confronted with realities that feel big: the pandemic, the climate crisis, the government, the caste system, violence, food. We are confronted with realities that are interpersonal: deciding to hug someone, wanting to feel a sense of belonging, seeking comfort, difficult conversations with family members, a creepy interaction at the grocery store.

Each of these realities is woven into another with such intricacy, that the moment we try to take one away from the whole, the whole quilt shrivels. And yet, we can’t look at the full mass because it’s too interconnected and complex. When there are a million conflicting messages milling about, it’s unclear what actions to take, what should be prioritized, what is “right”.

So, who is the master and what is the stick?

We, as a human society, are our own masters and we make our own sticks.

We, as a collective, need to approach this moment as an opportunity to think creatively, not about our material technology, but about our communication with each other.

The pathology of our times lies in the systems which we are all privy to, in which we recognize “wrong”, blame others, expect them to change, and think that that is enough. It’s also not enough for our own individual selves to change—this is a fallacy that has been weaved into our thinking. It has allowed us to be content with small changes that in reality perpetuate the greater confusion (recycling, for example).

The way we build communities, define them, communicate within them and beyond them, identify ourselves with them has all led to this moment. As Gregory Bateson has said, the way nature works is paradoxical to the way people think. We can’t get out of these double-binds with the same level of consciousness that made them. To break the stick, we have to break everything we think we know. We have to be willing to learn from each other, horizontally, in new ways.

The reality is that there are no simple solutions. If anyone claims a simple solution, it is most likely a gigantic oversight or a manipulation. At this juncture where we are most desperate for answers, it is important to recognize how intertwined our situation is, and to be observant and critical of what appears to be “simple.”

As the doom and gloom washed over our faces, George told us that he has “begun to have compassion for those things that are creating the catastrophe.” Maybe doom and gloom is where we have to be in order to really be pushed to revolutionize communication, to reprogram our thinking, to learn the interconnectedness that we can’t interpret in this moment.

“All we have control of is what we have control of, which is our spirit. I mean, we can be gloomy about what’s going to happen. But in the present time, why would we not want to share love?”

Clouds by George Ewald
Birds by George Ewald
Wind by George Ewald
Dance by George Ewald
Mountain by George Ewald

A mammoth thank you to George Ewald for your conversation, all the follow up emails, the beautiful photos, and openness to sharing your life experiences. Thank you to Jason Kimball for taking part in the interview and freezing your tush off while also being hungry when we went longer than expected. An excerpt of George’s interview will be present on Jason and my upcoming album “Old Growth”, which is set to come out in early 2021. Many of you have asked why I’ve stopped writing for a time during the pandemic. The truth is in the double-bind: I honestly couldn’t get anything out. I was so confused and sort of in limbic mode. I’m still there, but speaking with George got me thinking about why I felt so confused. I strongly recommend reading up on Gregory Bateson, as his thinking has helped me through the last month immensely. I would love to hear any/all feedback in the truest sense of the word: a two-sided, continuing conversation in which we both grow!

Posted on November 6, 2020November 10, 2020 by awindowinside 0

“Life is One Big Improvisation”: A Conversation with Saxophonist, Music Educator, and Master Improviser Tom Hall

One of the beautiful paradoxes of improvisation is that every individual choice is simultaneously of the greatest importance and not important at all. At every moment you must be both completely committed to what you are playing, and completely willing to let go of it if the music demands it.
Tom Hall, Free Improvisation: A Practical Guide, Chapter 5

When I first interviewed Tom Hall for this post in early January, the coronavirus was still hushed and hooded. Since then, and at quite a viral pace, our understanding of reality has become ectopic. Our routines are hardly recognizable, our plans left waiting and uncertain, our relationships expanding and contracting. It feels like macro-scale gory re-birth.

I’ve been sitting on this interview for months, trying to find the right moment to grapple with the weight of the gift that Tom teaches: the art of improvisation. Improvisation is traditionally associated with music and theater. At its root, the word improvise comes from the Latin improviso, meaning “unforeseen” or “unexpected” or “not prepared beforehand.” In this historical moment, we are encountering a gaping “unforeseen” future. There was something almost prophetic about meeting with Tom right before the coronavirus crisis.

“Sometimes, we need to reject the dominant structures of how we’re supposed to be together,” Tom explained before we knew what would hit us, “right now, we are at a crisis point in our history where we need to figure out ways for people to improvise together.”

Replaying his words in my head over and over this week soothes me. At its core, improvisation is the exploration of right-now’s infinite possibilities. It sounds so simple, and yet so overwhelming. How can we learn to carve out new spaces both alone and with each other? Even more, what can we discover when we open ourselves to the unforeseen?

First, we make sounds with our bodies. We stand clapping in a circle.

In February, when students were still scurrying to class and eating Einstein’s bagels by library windows, I asked Tom if my friend-bandmate Jason and I could observe “Improv Collective”, one of the most cherished courses at Brandeis. “No need to bring anything, just yourself, if you are comfortable using your voice to do stuff…” Tom encouraged. We’ve never done any “formal” improv before, if that is a thing to ever be formal about. On the drive to campus, Jason and I munched on apples, taking turns asking each other what if we sound like bumbling idiots? We didn’t know what to expect. When we shyly settled in with the twelve other students in the classroom, Tom opened the evening’s class with lively hand gestures, riding the inflections in his voice:

“If you’re on a train, and you hear a rhythm, what makes you identify it as rhythm?”

Patterns! Motion! the students call out from their chairs.

“If you’re in the bathtub and you hear the drip-drop-drip-drop, why do you hear that as rhythm?”

Repetition! Beats over time! Assumptions! the students call.

“Right, right! But also, when you hear things as rhythm, you are constructing a reality based on what your senses experience,” Tom offers, “no two people experience things the same way. And no two places or moments have the same sound. Every beach has a different sound, every city, every conversation. Everything has its own sonic signature.”

And so, we stood clapping in a circle and made sounds with our bodies. Each student would have a turn in the middle of the circle, releasing sound and movement from their mouth or skin or shoe or pencil, and the blob of the circle would mimic it. This went on for a half hour or so. Perhaps we did all look like bumbling idiots with quite distinct sonic signatures. With each passing minute, my self-consciousness began to dissolve. Not fully- but enough that my old friend Judgment was thrown to the backburner for an hour. I let myself laugh and play. Before even interacting with our instruments, we had to become human to each other. We had to connect. This is one way that Tom Hall teaches improvisation: listening to the sonic signature of who you are and who you’re with.

The more intimate a relationship is, the more important it is to have more improvisation and less structure because that’s when you get to offer and accept who you are.
Tom Hall

Just like we tend to construct rhythm in the even rumble of trains and the drip-drop of the bath, we also tend to slip into patterns in our relationships. We slip into what we expect of them and what they expect of us, often automatically. The rhythm of relationships is essential for society and civilization. Structure is how we have codified right and wrong and how we measure value and how we agree upon what behaviors are acceptable. These predetermined rhythms come at us from all sides: our family, our media, our work, our education, our friends. The structure is what allows you to know how to interact with a random person in the cheese aisle of the grocery store without freaking them out. It allows you to recognize that it’s not okay to pick your nose and wipe it on your co-worker’s desk. And you expect that no one will wipe their boogers on your desk either. Seems reasonable. It allows you to believe, perhaps, that your career must be the most important thing in your life. These same structures could have also told your grandmother that she must dedicate herself to cooking for her husband, having five babies, and being buried under a gravestone that says “WIFE, MOTHER”.

You may notice some of these structures breaking down in quarantine and new ones being built all the time. The deconstruction of established structures is just as important for keeping our relationships strong and sensical. What if we didn’t live in those structures, if even for a moment? How would we engage with our partner? How would we engage our bodies? How would we engage with the person in the cheese aisle? What if we gave ourselves the freedom to play?

We’re not the only ones who have asked ourselves this question. If we look at the history of music or art or literature, the drive to challenge the status quo is obvious. When we challenge what is said to be “valuable,” when we move toward the unexpected, and give ourselves permission to believe in that movement, we open up a space for freedom. Improvisation is the seed of creation, the moment where something connects and transforms, Tom says. This creative human impulse is at the root of social movements as well.

At crisis moments in history, people begin to question the structures that have governed their decisions and identities. Free improvisation itself is said to be a direct outgrowth of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. The free jazz experiments emerging in the 1960s were a purposeful rebellion of pre-established jazz conventions. This was the time of Rosa Parks and Little Rock Nine and the Freedom Riders. This was when man walked on the moon. By the 1970s, it was all about freedom.

Free improvisation, unbound from even the few pre-established, ambiguous musical elements of free jazz, can be anything at all. It can be about digging into or out of the womb of unconscious history and bringing it to light with no commitment to style or sound. It can be about rejecting the elite, flattening the hierarchies. It can be about creating music together outside the confines of tradition. It can be about feeling a groove in your body. Whatever it may be, and whatever it may sound like, each player brings both their identity and their liberation from identity to the table.

At its conception, a dominant idea was that improvisation cannot be taught. It had to be felt and done. Any parameters or restrictions or definitions would ruin its creative essence. Forty years ago, during his education at New England Conservatory, Tom recognized that engagement in music and theater and relationships and life were all parallel experiences. “What’s the stuff that is the same?” he wondered.

“On stage, what happens is what’s true.” The expectation of what is supposed to happen becomes less important than what is already happening. In his early life, Tom remembers how high stakes human interactions felt. There were all these social codes of conduct, all these structures, that didn’t make natural sense to him. “I’m a terrible improviser,” he easily admits, even today, “maybe it’s a neurodiversity thing, but I just have a difficult time improvising with people”.

Off stage, he would get in his head, torture himself with judgments. How do you know the “right thing” to say? How do you know what is worth saying? How can you say the most true thing? But on stage, improvising, the most true thing was happening already. In these moments of presence, Tom, the young saxophonist, gave himself permission to play. He could be whoever he wanted to be. Play allows for freedom, even within limits. “It’s the improvising,” he realized, and then he recognized that everything is improvisation.

When you’re actually creating an interaction rather than mimicking one, or riffing off the one you think you should have, that’s when you actually discover things about yourself and the other person. The only way you can freely improvise with someone is if you’re showing yourself and being yourself. Anytime that’s happening, you’re going to be in a more intimate kind of relationship.
Tom Hall

Everything Tom knows about improvisation off-stage, he learned from April, his wife of twenty-five years. She can walk into a room and know instinctively what little dramas were playing out: how people felt, how to communicate, how to make people feel at ease. For him, social improvisation felt impossible. In the bloom of their young relationship, she would help him notice useful social cues. They would practice having candid conversations. They would work on his fear of judgment. If you’re not comfortable, she would tell him, you don’t have to say anything about yourself. Just ask people about themselves and listen!

Music and relationships expanded upon each other as he learned to apply improvisation everywhere. When he and April had a child, the time he spent practicing saxophone got smaller, “but my ability to make music got bigger,” he says. Before then, he had convinced himself to be dedicated tooth and nail to the saxophone, to be the best saxophonist in the universe. “I was never that person and I will never be that person,” Tom smiles, “I’ve learned that I’m something else.” He owes much of his vitality in life to the creative nature of his relationship with April. “We compliment each other as a dyad,” he said matter-of-factly, “we are really good, really powerful. We are able to do a lot of stuff together that we can’t do alone because of how we intersect.”

In the classroom, Tom teaches exactly this: how to connect. Six students volunteer to try the next exercise. Tom Hall dashes to the front of the room and kills the lights. Less light, less noise. There is an eeriness to the silence now because we notice it’s really not so silent at all. The exercise begins with listening.

The “silence” is broken with the smooth, deep tone of electric bass. Within seconds, the bass finds a tentative groove with itself.

Tom Hall interjects, waving his long arms up in the air.

Free yourself from rhythmic structure!

The bass stops with a clank.

Last class we focused on rhythm. This exercise is for finding yourself outside of any rhythm.

The silence starts again. Inside this nighttime veil, everything is one thing. Contours of faces and instruments and legs and tables. We grow uneasy with our confused senses.

First, there is a shuffling of feet upon carpet. Always an electromagnetic buzz from the amp. Then, a soft “shhh” comes from a body standing in front of the window. One by one, new textures come. A resonant flick of a tuba, some sharp shimmers from where we know the drums are, something like nails on wood near the piano, a deep voice from the bass amplifier, maybe. Within half a minute, the landscape of the air vibrates. The sonic landscape of this moment.

Something shifts in the room that none of us can name.

Let it come to a natural end, you’ll know when it’s time. And it does.

“You can’t improvise and not show who you are,” he says, “and when you do it with other people, you can’t do it without accepting who everyone is. That’s what makes it work.” He teaches improvisation as a philosophy, a meditation, and a way of life. The “stuff that is the same” that Tom was searching for since his younger years intersects at intimacy.

A friend staying with her partner’s parents complains they only eat meat and potatoes. Her stomach hurts all the time. Another friend accidentally joined a digital “love yourself” cult. It’s expensive, she says, but it’s helping. Friends who never post shirtless pictures take up kettle bells and post shirtless pictures. In the cheese aisle of the supermarket, we no longer mess around. Everything is grab and go. Friends quarantine with men they met four months ago. My mom texts me “I read that divorce rates are so high now!” She sends statistics from different cities. Back from his father’s for the weekend, a five year old boy is forced to strip in the driveway before entering his mother’s house. A grandmother sews a cloth mask for her only grandchild. It is sky blue with yellow dragonflies. My dad and I translate our family stories from Russian to English. His Zoom background, since Passover, has been the Great Pyramids of Giza. On the rim of the Housatonic, a friend and I watch an eagle hack a fish open. A small crowd of five people gather in masks, transfixed.

Life under quarantine is the epitome of limitation. Intimacy must be re-imagined. “Like playing a tune,” Tom says, “improvisation occurs between limitations.” The old rhythms of our days are different now. The expectations of our attachments have shifted. If we boil it down, we have two choices: to upkeep old dynamics or break free from them. Sometimes in the hardest moments, it’s time to play. It’s time to stand in a circle together, make sounds with our bodies, and listen.

Check out Tom’s amazing book!
Cover designed Lennie Peterson

~~~

A huge thank you to Tom Hall for being who you are and letting Jason and I sit in on some of the classes you teach at Brandeis. Thanks to the amazing students in the class who made us feel so welcome! Thank you to Moira Applebaum, one of Tom’s former students, for sharing your memories of Tom’s class. Shout out to Jason, Sam, and Ethan who shared their thoughts and feelings with me and listened to my incessant processing of this subject. And thank you thank you to Sam, Ethan, and Clay, my quarantine roommates, for making each day an improvisation in these strange times! I would love to hear about your quarantine experience and how improvisation plays a role in your every day life now!

Posted on May 18, 2020May 18, 2020 by awindowinside 0

Opening the Portal: The Secret World of Imaginary Friends

We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.
Ursula Le Guin

Lights off and windows shut, a tear rolls down my cheek as I tell my dear friend Rachel I think it’s time that we part ways.

For years we whispered into each others ears. We laughed together in the bathroom at some juicy middle-school drama. We hugged on icy nights when the gas heat wasn’t on, and falling asleep was hard. We asked each other questions about the day’s happenings: what was your favorite part of that song you just heard on the radio? Did you see grandma get tense when the bank teller couldn’t understand her accent? What if Shane never loves me back?

I would get upset at my dad and she would offer a different perspective, “maybe he was just stressed today because of work; tomorrow will be better,” she would posit. And it always was better.

Rachel was my compass. I trusted her with all my heart, especially in the moment of saying our goodbyes. I was in high school and feeling ready to take it on alone. Keeping up our friendship would make us emotionally dependent each other, I realized. She would become an appendage, a vestige of a relationship that we could no longer learn from. We assured each other that night that we would both be safe; she would go on to love another human being and I would go on living and building new, meaningful friendships.

As great scientists have said, and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
Ursula Le Guin

Rachel didn’t have a face, nor a body. She floated as an invisible, twin-soul above me. I understood that she was my invention, yet she would still come and go as she pleased, independent in body and mind.

A surprising 37% of children develop imaginary friends at some point (1). In my younger years, I thought people would judge me if they knew about Rachel. In contemplating imaginary friends, I asked my in-the-flesh friends about their childhood experiences. It’s a whole different sensation to dive into the intricate, varied, and wildly imaginative worlds of friends’ invisible, sometimes secret relationships.

Considering how common imaginary friends are, it’s poignant that as adults we often forget about them or feel shame about them. It’s easy to make fun of ourselves for having made-up beings to talk to. We may even wince at the thought. But for some of us, these imaginary friends have guided us.

Imaginary friends have helped us make sense of our world. These inventions can help certain humans find comfort in times of loneliness or boredom, difficult transitions, and moments of low self-esteem.

*The Eastern eyed click beetle (Alaus oculatus), Silver Springs, Maryland by Jason Kimball*

Some of the most well-known fiction writers, such as Ursula Le Guin, converse with their characters in vast, fantastic worlds steeped in deep history. What better way to practice relationships and storytelling than with a universe that you invented yourself?

In contemplating imaginary friends, I asked my in-the-flesh friends about their childhood experiences. It’s a whole different sensation to dive into the intricate, varied, and wildly imaginative worlds of people’s invisible, sometimes secret relationships. I heard about an invented family of a hundred cats, a best friend twin-soul (similar to my own), fairy adventures, little beings living in the walls, superheroes, and the list goes on and on.

Reflecting on the experience of having imaginary friends also reveals something deeper — an intimate window into someone’s inner world. By tapping into memories of our forgotten imaginary friends, we can learn a lot about our own and each other’s journeys through life.

In this post, we will meet some of the characters that became companions and platforms for experimentation for real humans. We will explore reflections from two different A Window In readers!

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, [s]he would grow up to be an eggplant.
Ursula Le Guin

First, we meet Sarah and her two high-school aged (invisible) brothers, Dave and Charles. In juxtaposition to their mischievous company, Sarah was “the only level-headed one”. In reality, she was an only child of an aerospace engineer and a stay-at-home mom living in the hustle and bustle of LA. Sarah didn’t keep her brothers a secret from the adults in her life. She would go on and on about them to her parents, and they played along, shaking their heads, oh those boys!

When it came to the kids on the block, however, Sarah kept it secret. She felt like the odd one out, the solitary girl with no siblings.

“When I was growing up, a lot of people had siblings and I was like, “what’s wrong with my parents that they can’t have another kid? Why did they give me this weird lifestyle of being alone by myself?”’

She felt “weird” and isolated, and was afraid that kids her age would think she was “pathetic for wanting siblings so badly”.

As Sarah started socializing more and being involved in dance at age seven, she started interacting with humans outside her own head. She suddenly stopped talking about Dave and Charles. Her mom asked once what happened to them and Sarah, a clever little chap, explained, “they went away to college”.

She doesn’t think about her big brothers now that she’s in her mid-twenties. She reflects:

“It set me up for creating a reality in my head for what I could consider as normal, comfortable, and protected.”

Now, she uses listening to music and dancing as portals to fantastical worlds where she can explore, be comfortable, and be free.

There’s people all over these parts, and maybe beyond, who think, as you said, that nobody can be wise alone. So these people try to hold to each other.
Ursula Le Guin

After initiating this topic with another friend, Liam, our discussion flowed in a totally different direction.

Exposed to Irish folklore as a child, Liam and his (real life) siblings fashioned miniature homes, completing them with waterproof roofs, little plants in little gardens, including windows, making the designs stylish and complex. Despite never befriending a fairy in real life, he wanted to make make sure they had a place to sojourn.

The imaginative story became a family affair. His sister, Grace, joined him in the construction. His mom would put marzipan potatoes in the huts as gifts from the leprechauns on St. Patrick’s Day.

“It felt good and right making them homes, even when we didn’t get to hang out together”.

Though he never met these fairies, they left coins, bits of thread, and acorns for him to enjoy and cherish.

We dove deep into memories of how we learned lessons in generosity from roots of tradition. Listening to Liam remember the magic of giving homes to silent creatures, sparked my own forgotten moments of cradling a butterfly with a broken wing.

Nowadays, you can find Liam hopping around Indiana, working on land restoration projects, identifying plants, creating seed libraries, and building communities that prioritize sustainable agriculture.

*Silver Springs, Maryland by Jason Kimball*

There’s a point, around age twenty,” Bedap said, “when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
Ursula Le Guin

How can we use our powerful experiences with imaginary friends to summon such magic now?

Yesterday (November 23, 2019), at my friend Eva’s memorial service, her twenty three year old brother stood bravely in front of an overflowing church of grievers and began to deliver a eulogy about none other than their beanie baby collection, the political dramas in the beanie universe, and how much this play had helped them bond and understand the world beyond their own.

This moment of intimacy that he shared with the rest of us, who didn’t know Eva’s earliest creations, lands in a tender place in my heart. Her brother summoned this magic by honoring and integrating these stories into our memory of Eva.

What if we asked each other, “Did you have imaginary friends growing up? What were some worlds that you invented?” The people I thought I knew so well sometimes bare unexpected sagas of adventure, longing, loneliness, and kinship.

It is such a joy to remember these invisible beings who got some of us through lonely and experiential moments in our lives. These conversations elicit surprising intimacy that we can tap into by calling on our childhood imaginations. Our invisible companions not only cradled and shaped some of us, but still do in how we reflect and connect over their existence.

Having a relationship with ourselves means not trying to confine the galaxies inside our bodies that are too vast to map out and predict. Instead, it could be about finding ways to connect, to make our own diverse realities intersect, to learn, and witness, and listen, and imagine the world beyond what we perceive to be true. After all, the most magical forces are the invisible ones.

Thank you all for reading and sharing your heartwarming stories! Special thanks to Sarah Estrada and Liam Kelly for letting me interview you for this post! Thank you to Jason Kimball for contributing beautiful photographs to color this post! If you have any thoughts or memories, I’d love love love to discuss! ❤

Sources:

(1) https://www.journalofplay.org/sites/www.journalofplay.org/files/pdf-articles/1-1-article-taylor-imaginary-companions.pdf (this is actually a really cool paper, if you’re interested!)

Posted on November 24, 2019November 24, 2019 by awindowinside 0

A Place Where Lost Souls Gather

“Songs build little rooms in time
And housed within the song’s design
Is the ghost the host has left behind
To greet and sweep the guest inside
Stoke the fire and sing his lines.”

David Berman, excerpt from “Snow Is Falling In Manhattan”

When a song is born, where does it live?

Music is ephemeral and fluid in its nature. We can’t hold it, we can’t see it, we can’t possess it.

But when a certain song touches us, we witness its power: we can see the strings vibrate, we can feel the bass in our chest, we can absorb the lyrics in our mind, we can press “repeat” on Spotify twenty times.

We can memorize it, record it, sing it, dance with it, forget it.

Songs can move us through time and space, deeper inside our true body – the one that extends beyond our skin. And still, we can never possess a song.

Connecting to life through songwriting and music, I often find myself wondering what it is about some songs that sweeps me into a place of safety and surrender.

After all, music is just sound and organized time. I’ve often thought of songs as friends or family – companions to cry and sway with.

One of David Berman’s obituaries described a song as “a place where lost souls might gather” (1). When I read that, I had this Aha! moment: what if a song is a place! A place where we may find connection and warmth. A place where memories hang on the walls.

What if we can return to songs like returning to lost homes, or rest in songs like resting in a cabin in the woods. What if we think of songs as a place to experience community? A place where many of us can go all at once and feel what we feel privately and together.

Imagine going to a concert for your favorite band and seeing hundreds of strangers in the audience singing the same words and melody together. How many times had each person listened to this song to commit it to memory? What about this song called to all these individuals who otherwise would not connect? It’s magical that songs can bring bodies together in such a resonant way.

Sometimes, we don’t even notice the way atmospheres change as a result of music. Think of that smooth jazz band creating a mood in a loud bar, elevator music when you’re anxiously getting all your luggage to your hotel room, or pump-up music when you’re jogging.

If music doesn’t quite do it for you, that’s okay too! Everyone has their own way of connecting to people through space-time. Because most of us are either consciously or subconsciously immersed in music daily, it is an important aspect of the human experience to consider.

In this entry, we meet Mariam Dahbi, an incredible singer and songwriter whose songs have made my heart weep with relief. The first time I listened to her at an open mic in Cambridge, the air in the room shifted.

Her song “Solace” (featured in this post) lulled me into her inner universe, a rare moment to share with a stranger. In our conversation, she gives us a window into her journey and reflections as a singer, songwriter, and educator.

Some songs come all at once, when my heart wants to empty something.

Mariam Dahbi

Mariam knew she wanted to be a singer since middle school. “I don’t remember myself not singing,” she reflects.

“I would go to school, come home, go to my room, and sing my heart out. I would sing in English, and I didn’t even know English! I couldn’t understand the lyrics but I could understand the emotion behind them.”

As a middle schooler, she soaked in every second of the French version of “America’s Got Talent” and then ran to her room, bawling her eyes out afterward, desperately longing for a future she knew was out of reach.

Growing up in an academically-focused environment in Morocco, Mariam often felt torn between her intrinsic dream of being a singer and the “practical”, safe approach to life (i.e. education, work, marriage, kids, die). And she knew which road she would have to take – the practical one. This flavor of compromise tastes familiar to many of us, I’m sure.

She went on her academic track in education, abandoning singing as she entered into a deep relationship with a man who said music was “not a serious” form of “entertainment”. He may have felt threatened by the possibility that Mariam’s passion for music may eventually outweigh her love for him.

Upon uprooting from Morocco and plopping down in Boston to pursue her PhD in education, Mariam’s relationship crumbled and the loneliness started to tease her tongue. She realized she had been forfeiting her true self in order to keep her relationship afloat.

Feeling worlds away from her cheerful, sociable, singing self, Mariam returned to her consolations, the songwriters she listened to in high school: Norah Jones, Sarah Bareilles, Damien Rice.

She bought a guitar.

She swam with the shame of it all, the loss and the relearning of the self. In the process, after years of invisible gestation, she wrote her first song, “Solace” at age twenty-five (which is featured below).

She briefly (and heartbrokenly) had a “fling” with an artist who “saw the artist” in her. With an encouraging witness for her creative spirit, she pushed herself into the public eye by attending her first open mic.

When you write a song, you learn to hear yourself.
Mariam Dahbi

Mariam’s songwriting process often involves solitude, repetition, and lots of “crying through stuff”.

After the song is born, it is a whole different process to expose it to the public eye where it can live in a new way. Almost every day, Mariam finds herself fighting mental blocks about sharing her songs.

Her family members have expressed confusion about her desire to perform. Do you just want people clapping for you? Isn’t that narcissistic?, they ask her.

“They just don’t want me to be an entertainer,” she considers. But the main motivation for her has little to do with validation or approval. It has more to do with authenticity.

“It feels like getting naked. Performing was a way for me to get out of the zone of hiding from the world, hiding from myself, and joining a community that I knew I was meant to be part of.”

Mariam wades through the nerves and shakes on stage until she comes to a place of peace inside the song. She keeps her eyes closed and tries not to worry about the people listening.

Life has a way of bringing you to what you were meant to do.
Mariam Dahbi

The irony of Mariam’s story is that she thought she had to forgo singing in order to have security in an academic track. But she has found herself writing her PhD dissertation on the potential links between songwriting and learning in the classroom.

“Songwriting is a literacy activity,” Mariam describes. Songwriting with children in school settings helps with language, communication, and memory retention.

She conducts research on how to integrate songwriting into curricula to give voices to students who come from different cultures, speak a different language at home, or who have different learning styles.

“What you really want out of a student,” Mariam notes passionately, “is to connect, interact, and co-construct knowledge. Not just passively memorize.”

If you’re complaining about being lonely, in a way you’re seeking help. If you’re ready to not be lonely, then you have to put some kind of work in. That work isn’t songwriting for everybody. That work is vulnerability.
Mariam Dahbi

When I met Mariam, I was bopping around open mic nights because I was in a transition phase in my life. I was feeling lonely and isolated, fresh out of college and lost in a job search.

Attending intimate musical nights exposed me to communities of people who valued sharing and openness. If you’re feeling any kind of tug like that, I strongly recommend hanging out at an open mic night. It can be a space where it is socially acceptable for people to get up in front of you and tell their story through music and poetry. Here is an environment where people cry, laugh, and support each other.

Let’s transform the question of where does a song live? into where do we live inside a song?

Thank you so much to Mariam who spoke so openly about her experiences and her intimate songwriting process. A humongous thank you to Jason Kimball for filming and editing Mariam’s beautiful original song “Solace” with such grace and love. Thank you to my living room (featured in the video) for embracing 13 intimate house concerts hosting over seventy singers/songwriters/bands over the last 4 years. And thank you to Kayla Popik and Marc Yaffee for sharing David Berman’s influential obituary from Jewish Currents with me.

1- https://jewishcurrents.org/kaddish-for-david-berman/

Posted on September 8, 2019 by awindowinside 0

Beyond the Nucleus: Reflections from a Child Caretaker

…Today I see it is there to be learned from you:
to love what I do not own.
Sharon Olds, excerpt from “Exclusive (for my daughter)”

There was a babysitter with jetblack curly hair who spoke Italian. We made a homemade pizza once. Once, she opened the freezer, the light of the window highlighting her fly-away frizzles.

There was another babysitter who carried around a ziplock bag of carrots in a fo-leather purse. She stood by the white steps of Temple Ner Tamid on a baby-blue skied day in white pants.

A few years ago, my dad pointed out her obituary in the newspaper. I had long forgotten her name – I could only recall the half-bitten carrots and a feeling of warm safety.

Trying to access the amorphic consciousness of our childhood mind is a tender experience. These women, who were in no way blood-related to me, who were paid by my blood-related parents to make sure my little human needs were met, kept me safe and clean. The fact that I seriously can’t remember any other shared moments makes me wonder about the energy that truly did pass between our beings during this time of care.

I’m curious about which influences of theirs stuck to me; which securities did they provided to make me develop into who I am now? I’m curious about their emotional and spiritual landscape at the time when they pledged under the role of my “babysitter” or “nanny”. What were they looking for in life? What did they observe from the outside about my family? What were their fears, their dreams? What small wisdoms did we exchange with each other?

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

Oscar Wilde

The role of a non-blood related caretaker becomes quite a nuanced one in the context of the nuclear family.

A nuclear family is defined as a family structure containing a pair of adults and their socially recognized children. Much of the way we perceive family has to do with our experience within the paradigm of the nuclear model. Historically, many individuals in the West have spent the majority of their lives immersed in two nuclear families: the one they were born into, and the one they created upon marriage.

We’ve all heard the statistics: that family structures in the US have started to shift. Divorce rates are high, reproduction rates are low, people are prioritizing different kinds of lifestyles. Though the change may be representative of a slow social revolution, many of us still judge ourselves and our values based on traditional roles that we play in our (often fragmented) nuclear families. Many of us experience a heavy sense of failure, loss, and isolation when the nuclear families we recognize cease to function, and cease to foster safety and fulfillment. I think that part of this is due to the isolation of the nuclear structure. And so, I think it’s really important to open the tight fist of the nuclear family to the open arms of more people we love. In other words: expanding our definition of family, we would be able to integrate more creativity and fluidity into our “inner circles”.

The “nanny” must be a creative artist. She often finds herself on foreign nuclear turf, facing the temporary joys and struggles of parenthood. In the midst of gauging alien family dynamics, values, and childcare, she also has her own expectations and triggers to engage with. And then, at the end of the day, she goes home to her bed, knowing she is paid for her time. In this entry, we meet Amanda*, who fell into nannying by accident but the impact of the experience left its mark on her.

When they were nine months old, one wanted a toy the other had. She grabbed her sister by the shirt, threw her to the floor, and took the toy! Humans are shit. From the beginning.
Amanda

Amanda grew up in New Hampshire, surrounded by a vast landscape of pines, winding roads, and silence. Her parents got divorced when she was fourteen and chose to live on the same street. With a sweet-but-quick-tempered father, and tough-but-socially-isolated mother, Amanda found herself straddling two very intense worlds – walking from one’s house to the other daily.

After studying English and Composition in college, and then working in a “horrible food service job”, Amanda was itching to get out of there and jump into something new, something that made her feel less alone, used, and exhausted. Amanda’s acquaintance Stephanie* announced that she had given birth to twin girls and invited her to come play. Eventually, she offered her a job as a nanny despite her fearful inexperience. And so Amanda’s journey began. Over the next two and a half years, she became “like a third parent. Or a third child. It was a weird in-between thing.”

When asked about her experience of bonding with the children and getting a window into the family dynamics, Amanda reflected:

“I was just alone with the girls for nine hours a day and sometimes they cried the whole time. I carried them up and down the hallway and sang. Sometimes I cried while singing, because I swear – the sound of crying babies makes you nuts. The mom would come home and see us all crying. I’d think “please don’t fire me”, and she’d say “please don’t quit”. I’d see her argue with her husband. I saw the inside of their marriage.”

The strenuousness of the childcare brought out Amanda’s inner anger – her anger that “humans are shit”. That humans take things without asking, and throw things, and hurt people – even when they grow up to be adults. As a result, she recognized her need to change her attitude toward both the baby girls, and toward life. She started going to therapy and meditating – which she continues to do now to help with everyday life stressors! She remarks “with the girls I had to be an even better self”.

If intimacy is sharing all the dirty little bits of life, then it isn’t all about love.
Amanda

As a woman in her late-thirties, Amanda herself had considered if she wanted children. Her mother would “pester” her, even when she wasn’t in a romantic partnership. But monogamous structures seldom appealed to Amanda. She dreamed of developing her own family with friends – it would be like having an non-blood related extended family with some couples, some children, some caretakers. The pressure of care and money would be distributed across a group of people who could focus on both their individual desires, and their children’s needs. But as she and her friends who daydreamed of this grew into their thirties, they started moving in with partners, bought houses with a couple-signed mortgage, and slipped into isolation. She is still craving the community of a non-nuclear family to grow with. When asked about how she felt nannying had impacted her perspective of parenting and relationships, she reflected on how much like “family” this experience felt to her:

“The kids would eat bites off of my lunch. I would eat what they dropped on the floor. If we are sick we’ll be sick together. And we were! All five of us had this horrible cold for like all of December in 2016 and got pneumonia and everything.”

To Amanda, the confusing dance of attachment came harshly when the girls had to start pre-school. When I asked her about her how it felt to leave, she exclaimed:

“Oh my gosh. The day they told me it was going to end I thought someone had ripped out my ovaries and hit me with them. I thought to myself, “you moron, they’re not your babies.’”

Talking to Amanda, I felt the complexity of the dance of her nannydom. The process of being responsible for the children in a family for a time that isn’t technically considered to be “your own” is outside any experience I’ve had. Amanda “took a million pictures of them that last summer” intending to make a huge photo collage of their faces “but is that weird to do with someone else’s babies?”. She visited them every few weeks after it ended and asked them about pre-school.

“At first they did ask for me. They would say “I don’t wanna go to school! I wanna go to the playground with ‘Manda!”. But I think if I asked them now if they remembered going to the playground with me all the time, they wouldn’t remember.”

This post is sort of an ode to and contemplation of people who cared for us when we were children who we may not remember much about. It’s a reminder (to myself at least) that the human family is much larger than it seems, and our circles of love are complex and integrated.

Thank you for reading, friends! ❤

*Changed the names to keep some semblance of privacy!

Posted on May 5, 2019 by awindowinside 1

A Window In: An Exploration of Intimacy, Loneliness, and All Our Faces

No person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.
Adrienne Rich

I’m a person on Earth today. My first experience with intimacy, probably like yours, started when I was born – when I was unconditionally dependent on my mother for life. She carried me in her body as a hungry, banging, painful blob of matter. She strolled through the autumn landscape of Peabody, Massachusetts chewing on her owns fears, hungers, regrets, anticipations. And as I grew in the womb, closer to becoming separate from my life source, she held a radio playing Beethoven up to her belly, hoping I would one day love music as much as she does.

The question of intimacy and its noted scarcity in our society has been on my mind since I was young. Why do people give weird looks if I embrace my dad in public? Why can’t I tell my boss I have to stay home from work because of menstrual cramps? Why is it “uncomfortable” to have platonic (or maybe a wee bit sexual) physical intimacy with a close friend? Why are first dates on tinder so mind-numbingly interview-like and judgmental? Why do I feel lonely when there are 25 other people on the bus, all going to the same place?

I do not claim to know anything about intimacy except for what my own experience has illuminated. Like everyone else, I make assumptions about society because I have a brain the size of two fists and limited peripheral vision. I am aware that this blog cannot and may not cover your experience of love or intimacy (but please talk to me about it so we can explore new dimensions!!). The main purpose of this blog is really to dive into what intimacy means to people, how it drives us, and how to improve our relationship to it.

By Jason Kimball (Vondelpark, Amsterdam)

When we hear the word “intimacy”, we think of gazing into the eyes of someone we adore under a candlelight glow, a wanting of the skin, a memory of warm whispers passed between lovers. In short, we think of romantic or sexual intimacy. As a society, we are committing a colossal disservice to the gift of closeness by enclosing it in the sexual realm.

Intimacy can be between a grandmother and her grandchild eating breakfast, a nurse and a patient’s family during a difficult diagnosis, strangers at foreign bus stop getting lost, a two people on a high school soccer team, a group of friends sharing experiences of their past, a church group praying, someone texting you “good night” no matter where in the world you are. Intimacy can be sharing a piece of art with an audience, paying for “professional cuddling” on a rough afternoon, or hiring a professional mourner (aka moirologist, China).

As humans of the modern world, we are incredibly lonely. And though loneliness may be part of our human condition (according to existentialist thinkers), it has never before been thrust into our faces at such speeds and quantities. Technology may be used as a tool to foster intimacy (such as allowing long-distance conversation), but it also ramps up the pace of our lives. At our fingertips, there is always something to do, somewhere to be, someone to plan something with. When we sit in our rooms staring out the window, we wonder at the seemingly myriad possibilities beyond us that could make us happier, more productive, more worthy of love.

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
Adrienne Rich

Many of us are still caught in the mindset that intimacy must first and foremost come from sexual relationships. If we find ourselves single, in a committed relationship that we are not “certain” about committing to, or in the midst of a breakup, we feel utterly groundless and lonely. The loneliness is born from thousands of factors. But we don’t help ourselves as a society by demanding intimacy from basically one person. First, that person will never be able to meet all our needs (physically, emotionally, spiritually, etc) and second, that person is not guaranteed to be around forever. As Anton Chekhov, the Russian playwright, comically remarked, “If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.” Because of our paradigm of thought, marriage often isolates us from pursuing other kinds of intimacy outside the partnership.

By Kayla Popik (Death Valley, California)

We have become stingy with our “love” and intimacy, fearing that if we are vulnerable we will be hurt, will inflict hurt, or will be perceived as obtuse. As a result, we limit the reach of our ability to give and receive love. This creates a scarcity complex around love and intimacy – a feeling that we can never have enough, that relationships are competition, and they are most desirable products on the market. We reserve our love for sexual/romantic/marital partnerships and leave the remaining relationships distant and dark. And we wonder why we are so often thoroughly dependent on romantic relationships for fulfillment, and why we feel a loneliness creep in desperately like a spider every time that relationship is on the rocks.

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.
Viktor Frankl

In this blog, we will hold conversations about intimacy and all the unexpected places we can develop it. We will discuss loneliness and how cultural expectations for various ages, sexualities, occupations, and social structures can make us feel isolated and/or empowered. We will be interviewing people of different stages of life as a window into their experience of intimacy and loneliness. The hope is that these conversations will empower us to be empathetic and vulnerable, maybe shifting our own habits to interact with love more freely.

Posted on April 14, 2019 by awindowinside 2