Autumn Soul

A stranger wrote me a fortnight ago and observed that my nonfiction is steeped in loneliness. This is true, for as many people with disabilities will acknowledge, the "formative years" are often solitary ones for disabled children. I spent the majority of my boyhood time in the attic of my grandmother’s house listening to a wind-up Victrola or else I walked by myself in the woods.

I have found that at fifty two I’m still lonely in spirit. I do not feel sorry for myself, nor do I need reassurance from family and friends–at least not overmuch. I am lonely on the inside. I can stand in a room and smile, tell a joke, sing a homemade song, but behind the tall grass of my familiar, inner life, there under the moon I am lonely.

I am in no way singular because of this. The man across the street who is picking the last tomatoes of the summer is lonely. The woman I met this morning who teaches linguistics at the university is lonely. My friends, my wife, all my relatives are quietly alone though we are trained to withhold this even from the psychiatrist or the priest.

The poet William Carlos Williams said in one of his poems "I am lonely. I am best so." I remember reading those words as a college sophomore and I felt the proper fit in my soul.

The feeling of estrangement is not a social matter as the boy or girl would imagine. The "difference" as Emily Dickinson wrote "is internal, where the meanings are."

The soul is needy as an empty pocket. It is thirsty as flesh itself but the soul cannot be quenched with drink or a good home in a nice neighborhood.

The soul senses that the full moon has risen and as the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca wrote: "the heart feels it is a little island in the infinite."

The soul is in the condition of static or pure loneliness. This is why Jesus said to his disciples: "My father’s house has many mansions. If it were not so, I would not tell you."

Of all the lines in the New Testament those are for me, the most comforting. This is according to my soul. My soul, that lonely intelligence that hugs my tissues and bones. This soul that cannot get used to life. This soul that insists on walking around so that we together can work out the geometry of being alone in our shared and threshed hours.

Have you ever harvested the last sunflowers because the frost is coming? I did this once with some friends. We brought the half wild and stately sunflowers into the old house and we propped them against the hearth. We sang some songs and drank a little wine. Unspoken? Every one of us had a thirsty soul and we could, it turned out, give our souls a true room and some bright companionship.

SK

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto