An Ode to Being Thin-Skinned

On evenings like these, the air is thick and heavy. It barely moves. The dinner party I’ve attended wraps up right when the wine is warming me up and I feel like a hive in full bloom. I envision everyone wandering home to curl up with their loved one, falling into the arms of their routine, their purpose and place. What awaits me is empty space, delicious and vibrating, and I long to feel my body hum with someone else’s. On nights like these I could fall in love with anyone. I pop on my car’s interior light, kick back and check my messages, and when they fail to excite, I picture myself pulling up outside a club, alone, with my messy pony tail and rolled up cargo pants, to lose myself in the beat and the darkness, and whoever finds me in between.

What I do is roll down all the windows, draw back the sun roof to receive the full moon, crank up the stereo, and hurtle across Portland’s bridges as fast as my bones will let me, wind whipping through my head and radio tunes of hopeful melancholy tearing through my throat. That is how I lose myself in jubilant loneliness, when the buzz of life in and around me strains to quit this skin and I find myself illuminated by the irony of being stuck in separate during this blissfully sensual human experience. Something in me knows that if I found the dance, if I found the lover, I would still long deeply for this moment of sitting solid in my mortality and face-to-face with the life force in its most primal. And it is these experiences of being in between, where I cannot hide from my raw emotion and vulnerability, that I have always found a most profound sense of connection.

It was the summer of 1999. I passing through Sarajevo on my journey home from a visit with the family of an old high school friend. The son of the woman who was hosting me for the evening put me in a cab to the airport at 4am and bid me farewell. The driver spoke no English and I spoke no Bosnian, so when we discovered that the airport was closed, I had no way to tell him I had nowhere to go and he had no way to tell me why he would not drop me off. He drove me into an empty field, parked the car, and opened the passenger’s side door to invite me to join him up front. The panic I felt at my utter helplessness and vulnerability faded into a numbed surrender. There was nothing I could do but hope this stranger had the best intentions for me. As I slipped into the front seat, he popped open the glove box, pulled out a warm Coke, and handed it to me. He pointed to his watch to indicate 7am. He pointed at me, at himself, and down at the car’s floor, and draped his coat over me. I was to rest while he waited with me until it was light.

Somehow during the night, in dreams or in waking shadows, I came to understand from him about the police patrols that would arrest anyone out alone on the streets after dark and he came to understand a bit about me and my journey. I don’t know if it was the handful of words I had learned in Bosnia, the eloquence of gestures under diress, or the power that an energetic bond can have to communicate beyond language when two people are determined to connect. What I know is that when he drove me to the bustling airport in the early morning light, and I tried to pay him for all the time he had spent with me, he refused my money. He put a finger to his lips, kissed it, and placed it on my forehead. I walked away from him with something precious that changed me: a sense of trust in the tenderness and generosity that can be found in even the most wounded people and places. What I didn’t yet realized was that this vital sense of faith had been gifted to me just in time, for less than two months later, my life began to unravel with my mother’s sudden death at the age of 55.

I wonder sometimes if I may have affected the life of that man as deeply as he did mine. I had seen the bombed out buildings, the Serbs living in dark, shabby tents along the roadside. I imagined that he may have lost a wife or a daughter to conflict or violence and wanted to reach out to them through me in the way he hoped strangers would care for them, or to send their spirits a message of love where ever they drifted. Many times as a young woman traveling alone, people rose to offer me friendship and protection, far more often than those who took advantage of me. And through their purely altruistic generosity, I saw a side of humanity I had never experienced before. I saw a world I wanted to live in, and that I could contribute to building. The more scientific path of my college studies shifted towards understanding culture and social justice, and ever since then I have found myself in both a line of thought and of work that focuses on how to support and heal our relationships with ourselves and each other. As a youth, I had to be my own protector in many ways and was quick to criticize and ostracize others who felt threatening. On that dark night in Sarajevo, I desperately needed someone to be there for me, and someone was, and I have never forgotten.

I look around the table at the dinner party, cluttered with smudged wine glasses and china plates stained with shadows of blueberry cobbler, and reflect on all the faces called from our liberal white middle- to upper-class routines of privilege to explore the psychology of the Republican / Democrat division that continues to cripple our country. Many here are struggling to understand how friends and family can believe so differently than them, believe things that seem so incomprehensible and dangerous, and how they can reason with them, connect with them. As my own urgent ideas and insights become slippery with fine Spanish wine and drift away, I notice the chihuahua relaxing drowsily in the hostess’s arms, the look of over-flowing tenderness on her face. I remember watching my good friend last night, kicked back with his feet up on a chair and his daughter drifting to sleep draped over the length of his legs, nestled in the crook of his elbow. He tickled her ear and she burst into giggles as his face flooded with the most brilliant light. I felt a part of me leave my body, rest in hers, and be healed and filled by the very best love there is.

We live in a time of great divisions and fear that sends us grasping for cover, narrowing and constricting our hearts and minds, and setting out armor and landmines in defense. Like many of us, I have felt desperate to understand what is happening and figure out what to do to fix everything that seems twisted and rough and cruel around me. But if I use that desire to act as a way to avoid the deeply painful, terrifying, humbling experience of my own rage, my helplessness, my grief, I will also lose my ability to recognize and feel this love – to give it and to receive it. And is it not an act of honorable rebellion to resist both the battle and the apathy by tending a place inside of me warm with hope and ready to hold whatever goodness remains? Is that gift to this world not as noble and vital as the warrior’s, who may find themselves hardened for the battle, but also against the very thing they are fighting for?

Tonight, as my righteous sense of self faded, as I shed the battle to justify and convince, I wanted nothing more than to love ardently every person at that table for every ounce of their messy humanity and in honor of that tribe of 800 individuals on the south African coast that birthed us all at the end of the last Ice Age. We face another crisis in the evolution of our species. That man in Sarajevo, despite all the pain and outrage and helplessness and violence he must have experienced, brought the full intensity of his generous compassion. I bring my thin skin, my loyal adoration, my giddy hope. What do you bring?

Nancy

“Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light.” – Groucho Marx