“Excuse me.”
At first, the woman’s voice cuts through the 3-table dining area of a local restaurant, and it’s easy to ignore.
My family and I are downing our veggie burgers, having a pleasant conversation about nothing, enjoying the treat of fries and sweet tea.
“Excuse me!” It comes again, louder and edgier. I am seated parallel to her, so have to turn my head to see her.
It’s not clear who she is speaking to, and I don’t want to take a risk of whatever she’s saying being something intrusive. There is a younger woman sitting across the small bistro table from her, bright red in the face. She looks to be about the same age as my daughter. The patrons at the other table are also strategically involved in looking at their phones. The third time, though, that she interrupts the room, it’s a question we can’t ignore.
“I just need to know: is anyone else here not able to keep it together? We just came from the No Kings protest, and I just can’t.”
The younger woman has become even pinker, eyes cast down at her plate.
“Is it just me?” The woman is the embodiment of the word “beseech.”
“Is it just me who can’t fill out the 12 page medicare form, show up at the protest, deal with my property taxes. I mean, it’s not Kate’s fault (she gesticulates to the woman across from her), but I just can’t.”
Her pain is palpable, and it hangs in the room.
“It’s not just you,” the African American man at the next table says gently.
A beat.
My partner speaks up, “You’re not alone.”
The edge goes out of the room.
“I’m so sorry,” she mumbles, and it’s clear she’s embarrassed about losing it in public.
I try to make eye contact with Kate as they pick up to leave, to let her know I see her, but her eyes are on the floor. She looks humiliated. The story I make up is “Why can’t my mom just play along, like everyone else?”
My daughter looks at me after they leave, questions in her eyes.
But I can’t remember ever seeing someone who looks together unravel like that publicly.
Another beat.
“She’s just saying what we are all feeling,” I say to my own child.
My partner nods.
“Yes, but her kid…”
I know she’s grateful it wasn’t me who broke the rules.
She feels compassion for the young woman.
I do too, but mine includes the older woman.
The man at the other table hasn’t spoken again; I want to to something, but he’s back in phone land, and what would I say that doesn’t land as insipid?
He met the pain of that white woman with humanity I could feel from across the room.
She stays with me for days.
I’m recently back from India, and struggling with the desensitization required to live an okay life in the US.
This means trading feeling, vulnerability, and authenticity for, well, having it look okay on the outside.
She named what many if not all of us are experiencing: disconnection from land, from lifeways woven of belonging, connection and celebration. We are disconnected the full cycle of our food. We are living under an oppressive regime and facing so much personal, familial, cultural, political and environmental devastation the word ‘polycrisis’ needed to be coined, the impact of which lives in our bodies.
I don’t dare speak these truths out loud, in public.
I can’t, because if I do, I won’t hold be holding it together.
I can’t be here in the US and cry every day about my loss of feeling, the disappearing of the sensitivity I feel in India to magick, to Spirit, to others intentions.
I also can’t name that, because as someone with intersecting privilege and oppression, my training has taught me to uphold the lie: pride on the outside.
See, I can do it.
I can hold it together and not lose my mind or my social graces under this kind of pressure, but I don’t like who I become and what I lose when I do.
There’s a passage early in Spell of the Sensuous where David Abram tracks what his body loses on reentry to the US after a year spent with shamans in Nepal and Southeast Asia. What started as a research journey becomes a deep dive into perception and animism.
Upon his return, he felt it physically, particularly in his chest and abdomen, as though he were being cut off from vital sources of nourishment. His senses that had become attuned to ravens and wind and the smell of yak-dung fires drying on stone walls went quiet on him.
There, the air was a thick and richly textured presence, filled with invisible but nonetheless tactile, olfactory, and audible influences. In the United States, however, the air seemed thin and void of substance or influence. It was not, here, a sensuous medium—the felt matrix of our breath and the breath of the other animals and plants and soils—but was merely an absence, and indeed was constantly referred to in everyday discourse as mere empty space.
(The full passage is too long to include, but I highly recommend you read the book’s introduction in full here for the sheer beauty.)
I keep returning to his contrast of breathing life to breathing… nothing, because it names something I recognize.
Until I lived in India, the absence of belonging, not feeling part of community, or of truly feeling woven in deep interdependence with others felt completely normal.
This absent experience is, for many North Americans, the air we breathe. Absence. We sense on some level that our life-ways are out of whack, but it’s hard to name it, except theoretically, because we’ve not lived differently.
In my heart, I think most of us feel this absence, but we feel powerless.
It’s hard to name something invisible, absence, as a presence.
A presence that fills our entire lives.
But.
That presence is loneliness.
Loneliness is an emotion, and also an architecture in your body.
Held low, an ache and a grief, a dull pressure that registers behind your sternum.
Your heartspace is hollow with want. You feel a pull of wanting connection and the deep ache of grief at not having it.
The skin, I feel it there too. The hunger for touch, the air cold. My breath gets shorter, my lungs feel leaden, less capacity for the deep inhale it takes to sustain joy. There is a bracing, a suspended animation, a waiting.
Time moves differently when we’re lonely and not distracting ourselves from it.
Dating apps, chocolate, wine, Grindr, Netflix, doomscrolling: we always seeking the feeling of connection, of being met and held in warm regard.
Warm regard.
None of those fixes can ever provide being held in warm regard.
Look, friend, we both need to matter, and know we matter.
We need to experience someone’s eyes lighting up when we enter a room. We need the check-ins, the thoughtful gestures.
We need to matter.
And in the presence of absence, we cannot matter.
We don’t matter to the systems and structures and organizations that hold us.
And we don’t quite know how to matter to each other anymore, in times where there is always another person to hook up with when you discard the last.
We don’t name it, the presence of absence, because we feel helpless and powerless to do anything about it.
Ironically, even though she broke the rules of white middle-class social interaction, her longing moved me.
“Please, tell me I’m not alone.”
“You are not alone,” my sweet partner answered.
You are not alone.
If this landed in your body, not just your mind, you might be ready for the kind of work we do together. I work with couples and individuals who are done performing ‘okay.’
Learn more about working with me: https://www.pavinimoray.com/workwithme.html
David Abram Spell of the Sensuous Excerpt:
https://www.pavinimoray.com/spellofsensuous.html
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