“When do I begin to mend?” Wilderado’s song, “Surefire”, asks in my ears.
In a case of unintentional Bibliomancy, my eyes look down at the book in my lap:
“Begin Here”, May Sarton answers on the first page of Journal of a Solitude.
Her voice called out to me from my bookshelf, as a long-ago friend might. Her words are the lips and breath that speak to my experience. She could be speaking for me at this time: “Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe” (141).
I feel this tremendously. Perhaps all do who work full-time or have family obligations that don’t allow for their true thoughts to enter and be worked over into clarity. Life lately has been an unraveled yarn ball which has collected several knots. However, time to undo the knots has been eclipsed in having to knit on. Or like something having been torn and not having time to stitch it back together.
The unknotting of knots, the stitching back together, is happening now: in cleaning my dishes, doing my laundry. In writing my blog posts, in writing to friends. In reading my collection of New York Times Newspapers, even if they are from May or June or even March of 2025. (The information—the reality of the Arts, Styles and Marriages— still happened after all, though I missed their inauguration.)
May Sarton describes in Journal of a Solitude of getting ecstatic over finally having a time to herself to catch up with herself for a bit: “a whole empty day to try to use well, to get out of the clutter of these last ‘catching-up’ days and what feels like thickets of undigested experience.” She elaborates upon this oft felt yet little described experience:
“all I long for is to have twenty-four hours in which to sort out what has happened to me” (129).
Perhaps it is dramatic, but sometimes being in the world feels like selling oneself like a prostitute to an organization or relationship, even those we admire or accept. I suppose I am caught, perpetually between this longing to be “in the world” but dying inside for abandoning myself. I see it as physically putting my body in halls and within walls not of my soul’s selection. Of sitting or lying in spaces that do not align for the sake of money, convenience or someone else’s version of meaning.
Even the most beautiful location to live in or work at can feel like a hellscape. Am I so privileged and proud that I cannot even condone Paradise? I do not live in a city or work in a fluorescent lit office, as others do. Their hellscape is visible. I carry mine with me wherever I go, perhaps.
I viscerally feel the lyrics of the Phoebe Bridges song, “Motion Sickness”. There is a sort of “emotional motion sickness” experienced now. I never knew words were ever strung together to describe such an experience, but it has already been written and sung. I nod my head in accord.
I want to get back to mending. To mend: to fix, to heal, to reconstruct. According to the Cambridge Dictionary online it means: “to repair something that is damaged or broken.” What am I repairing that’s damaged I wonder to myself. (My connection to myself, I half answer.)
Zooming out, on a larger scale, Emerson’s poetic prose proves insightful. I wrote in my journal three quotes of his in succession:
“The way to mend the world, is to create the right world.”
“You are made capable of independent action, and you are called to it.”
“The only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.”
Zooming back into personal experience, I flip through May Sarton’s book again. She speaks for me as my eyes alight on words she wrote, “I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there.”
Perhaps it is my Moon in Libra in the 12th house. My emotional nature (moon) seeks/requires being physically hidden away from the world (12th house) to really feel and understand my own nature and moods.
May Sarton lived alone in Nelson, New Hampshire, keeping for company her cat, her houseplants, and her garden. Her self-made solitude she acknowledged was a hard choice; but one which she reminded herself the benefits of when she imagined the opposite:
“What if I were not alone? What if I had ten children to get off to school every morning and a massive wash to do before they got home? What if two of them were in bed with flu, cross and at a loose end?’ That is enough to send me back to solitude as it were—as it truly is—fabulous gift from the gods” (109).
Earlier in the journal entry she acknowledged, albeit reluctantly, the importance of others in one’s life which keep one’s soul fire alive: “Every relation challenges; every relation asks me to be something, to do something, respond. Close off response and what is left? Bearing…enduring…waiting” (108).
She is weighing in her mind the checks and balances of Solitude vs having others in her sphere.
I think back on all the times I longed for companionship, a person to alleviate my solitude, as if the sole purpose of a partner was that of Coast Guard. I had this idea of them throwing a line into my aloneness to pull me out of my darkness. Of them being a sort of Life Raft. But then the harsh-light reality set in. They are not actually Coast Guard trained. The irony is this other person needed and needs “saving” too. The result is just two floundering, drowning souls, using each other to stay afloat. It is Jack and Rose if they were both scrambling for that piece of wood, and neither getting on.
This could be a whole book in itself. You are just two flawed humans out at sea trying to “save” each other with little to no training and slim chance of success. Sometimes I think we use one another as a crutch against the pain of solitude, the Death Valley we alone must cross.
We try to carefully select the companion who will make the trek more bearable. We are blessed with friends or children perhaps—to walk with through this valley. But perhaps, at some point, we realize that they have their own Death Valley to walk, and so it is never truly an escape from our own. With a family, you then have 3 or 4 Death Valleys instead of one. And perhaps 3 or 4 Death Valleys are more desirable for some; a sort of collective, bundled hellscape to manage together.
As May Sarton wrote earlier, “When it comes to the important things one is always alone, and it may be that the virtue or possible insight I get from being so obviously alone much of the time, is a way into the universal state of man. The way in which one handles this absolute aloneness is the way in which one grows up, is the great psychic journey of everyman.”
Deep down, we know only We ourselves save ourselves. The other person, whoever they are, are just mere Witness and Company. Perhaps it’s nice having a Witness and Company if they are actually such. When the selection is wrong, it just feels like having a critical audience member jeering at your character or where the play is going. Selection is key.
“When do I begin to mend?” asks the World, asks my Heart.
“Begin Here”, answers my Solitude.
A stunning piece, Danika, that speaks to me especially at this time. Yes, I crave time to write, but also to just be alone, in myself. I've learned that healing is a lifetime process in which I cannot engage by working, volunteering, etc so much that I have no time to feel the pain. Now, the mending, the self-care, take many forms and I welcome, embrace them all. This piece should be published someplace with a much wider audience :-)
Beautifully written! I will ask a simple question in answer to your original question:
"When will I make use of the tools already available for mending?" Speaking for experience, so often we think we need to come up with "our own" answers, as if our problems are somehow unique. That's just our ego talking, because all our pain and fears keep it in the driver's seat.
It turns out, "we" may be unique, but our problems rarely (if ever) are. And following that discovery: It also turns out that there are already so many effective "tools' to help us mend. Deciding to start is literally the hardest part...