Roy’s Sunday Letter for March 23, 2025
If you want to hear a bird sing, don’t buy a cage…..Plant a tree
A Personal Share: An early Melanoma growth was identified and removed by our Dermatology surgeon. The infection from the surgery moved to my left eye, which became at first swollen, then 90% closed. On a return clinic visit, I was told the swelling was unusual but also normal. In the days to follow the swelling decreased and normal eyesight did return.
The point of my sharing is that in the midst of troubling and chaotic times daily life continues. Business and vacation flights landed along with marriage ceremonies and babies delivered. Basketballs and March Madness is underway. A coffee friend texted about being distraught about the elimination of systems of care that supported his development in a safe and good way. Elders where Beth volunteers each week have always had a nourishing breakfast so important to senior health. Today, seniors are instead given a bag of high salt and fat content snacks, no breakfast and no more meals on wheels for lunch.
We all have increased our capacity to filter, to balance daily news and decisions that shifts with our families and our friendships. We all know the importance of value-based behaviors that sustain us and give us the opportunity to laugh, look up and around, and find our smiles once again. These will be short term protections. We will refine and strengthen not only our filters and strategies but also our heart and our spirit.
How do you strengthen your heart? Each of you do good deed each day/week and in your deeds, you are responding to life. This in turn makes a difference. How do you strengthen your spirit? Love is reciprocal always has been and will always be the way.
Here are suggestions to strengthen your capacity to care, to share burdens without your little boat sinking in the waves and storms.
- Strengthen your participation and connections with others by experiencing Community. Enrolling in art lessons, writing practice group, or lessons learned in dog training may be helpful.
- If becoming discouraged or over-whelmed, know 2 or 3 trusted persons in your Circle, your Village you can talk with, connect with, whether near or far, and they with you. Again, practicing the importance of Community.
- Fully know you are not alone, isolated in your efforts to advocate for others.
- Find the strength in developing your caring Community with persons who look, speak, and have cultures, families, and worship styles different than your own.
Continue your daily life with smiles and joys in the wonder and awe surrounding and supporting you…….Roy
Every day is a challenge when I see others suffering because of decisions made that we cannot control. I can control how I react to things going on around me. At times I tend to turn inward and let my anxiety take over but I have great friends that remind me there is goodness and compassion in his world. Thank you Roy and Beth for lifting me up and pushing me to move forward as opposed to giving in.
We 3 hold hands with others of our supporting village of shoppers, worshipers, and remembering my grandmother’s biscuits.
Somehow we, together, make it our jigsaw puzzle of daily life.
You be special, all the parts of you.
Your weekly Comments help keep me on the common path, however crooked it may be at times.
RB
A poem quoted in today’s The Marginalian, a column written by Maria Popova. Feel good, Roy and Beth and Everyone.
ANY COMMON DESOLATION
by Ellen Bass
can be enough to make you look up
at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few
that survived the rains and frost, shot
with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep
orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird
would rip it like silk. You may have to break
your heart, but it isn’t nothing
to know even one moment alive. The sound
of an oar in an oarlock or a ruminant
animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger.
The ruby neon of the liquor store sign.
Warm socks. You remember your mother,
her precision a ceremony, as she gathered
the white cotton, slipped it over your toes,
drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breath
can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard,
the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything
you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves
and, like a needle slipped into your vein —
that sudden rush of the world.
Complement with Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living and Hermann Hesse on how to be more alive, then revisit Ellen’s magnificent poem “How to Apologize.” And if you are looking to break your poetry open, I couldn’t recommend her Living Room Craft Talks more heartily.
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donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nearly two decades, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount.Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7Need to cancel an existing donation? (It’s okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page.The Half Room of Living and Loving
When I can’t sleep, I read children’s books. One night, I discovered In the Half Room (public library) by Carson Ellis in my tsundoku — an impressionistic invitation into a world where only half of everything exists.
Leafing through this quietly delightful treasure, I had a flash memory of a passage from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (public library) — the 1985 classic in which Oliver Sacks staggered the modern mind with revelations of how the brain’s fragility renders reality itself fragile.
One of the cases he relays is that of a bright woman in her sixties called Mrs. S., whose right hemisphere was savaged by a massive stroke. Although it left her with “perfectly preserved intelligence — and humor,” it also left her living in only half the world:
She sometimes complains to the nurses that they have not put dessert or coffee on her tray. When they say, “But, Mrs. S., it is right there, on the left,” she seems not to understand what they say, and does not look to the left. If her head is gently turned, so that the dessert comes into sight, in the preserved right half of her visual field, she says, “Oh, there is it — it wasn’t there before.” She has totally lost the idea of “left,” with regard to both the world and her own body. Sometimes she complains that her portions are too small, but this is because she only eats from the right half of the plate — it does not occur to her that it has a left half as well. Sometimes, she will put on lipstick, and make up the right half of her face, leaving the left half completely neglected: it is almost impossible to treat these things, because her attention cannot be drawn to them and she has no conception that they are wrong. She knows it intellectually, and can understand, and laugh; but it is impossible for her to know it directly.
Termed hemi-inattention in the 1950s when it was first clinically described, this condition is now better known as hemispheric neglect or unilateral neglect. A year after The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was published, the physician M. Marsel Mesulam captured its startling semireality in his book Principles of Behavioral Neurology:
When the neglect is severe, the patient may behave almost as if one half of the universe had abruptly ceased to exist in any meaningful form… Patients with unilateral neglect behave not only as if nothing were actually happening in the left hemispace, but also as if nothing of any importance could be expected to occur there.
What makes neurological disorders so fascinating is that their abnormal physiology is often a microcosm of the psychological pitfalls of the healthy brain. Who hasn’t shuddered with a flash of aphasia, suddenly unable to retrieve the right word or formulate a thought into a coherent sentence when in shock or in awe or tired to the bone? Hemispheric neglect menaces our sense of reality with the intimation that we too may be missing entire regions of reality because our attention simply cannot be drawn to them.
Perhaps we too are living in the half room.
And how can it be otherwise, given we are creatures of emotional incompleteness capable of extraordinary willful blindness, going through our days half-aware of our own interior, the other half relegated to an unconscious which our dreams, if we remember them, and our therapy, if it is any good, hint at but which remains largely subterranean. How, then, can we expect to have a complete picture of anything or anyone else?
There is no half room more extreme than infatuation. In those delirious early stages of falling in love, we magnify the positive qualities of the beloved to a point of crystalline perfection, turning a willfully blind eye to their shortcomings, only to watch the shiny crystals slowly melt to reveal the rugged reality of the actual person — imperfect and half-available, for they too are half-opaque to themselves.
To come to love someone after being in love with them is to be willing to walk the full room from corner to corner across every diagonal, to run your fingers over the floorboards and love every splinter, to run your gaze over the ceiling and love every crack — not because you love the pain and the leakage, but because you love the totality of the person, that incalculable sum we call a soul.
Mrs. S., intelligent and determined, refused to let her condition shape her experience of reality and developed a simple, brilliant compensatory strategy: Each time she knew something was there but she could not find it, unable to look left and therefore to turn left, she would turn right and rotate 180 degrees until it came into view. Suddenly, the hospital food portions she felt were too small doubled to their full size and she felt sated.
The trick, of course, is to be intelligent enough and humble enough to recognize that you might be missing half of reality.
SHARE THIS WITH SOMEONE YOU LOVE/Read Online
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nearly two decades, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount.Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7Need to cancel an existing donation? (It’s okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page.How to Meet Your Mystery: Thomas Merton on Solitude and the Soul
“Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen,” Hermann Hesse wrote in his reckoning with how to find your destiny. “Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.” On the one hand, destiny is a ramshackle concept, trembling with reverberations of determinism and self-recusal from responsibility — we shape the path of our lives with our choices, often not knowing or not wanting to know that we are choosing with every action at every turn, then look back on the trail and call it destiny. On the other, some things in life seem indeed to choose us and not we them: our birth, to begin with; our talents; great love. Solitude may be one of those things — a life of solitude, whether it lasts a lifetime or a season of being, chooses the solitary as much as the solitary chooses it.
The theologian and Trappist monk Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915–December 10, 1968) takes up the choice of solitude, its preconditions and its consequences, in a thirty-page essay titled “Notes for a Philosophy of a Solitude,” found in his 1960 collection Disputed Questions (public library) — a fine addition to the canon of great artists, writers, and scientists who have reaped and extolled the creative and spiritual rewards of solitude.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as a greeting card.
Merton defines the solitary as a person who undertakes “the lonely, barely comprehensible, incommunicable task of working his way through the darkness of his own mystery.” (A necessary note on the universal pronoun before you proceed.) To choose solitude or be chosen by it is “an arid, rugged purification of the heart,” “a quiet and humble refusal to accept the myths and fictions with which social life cannot help but be full,” a form of resistance to the “diversion” and “systematic distraction” our culture has designed to keep us from facing our mystery and our mortality. An epoch before social media, he observes:
The function of diversion is simply to anesthetize the individual as individual, and to plunge him in the warm, apathetic stupor of a collectivity which, like himself, wishes to remain amused.
[…]
The solitary is one who is called to make one of the most terrible decisions possible to man: the decision to disagree completely with those who imagine that the call to diversion and self-deception is the voice of truth and who can summon the full authority of their own prejudice to prove it.
Diversions, he notes, may be plainly absurd, such as the compulsion for status and the obsession with money, or they “may assume a hypocritical air of intense seriousness, for instance in a mass movement.” In a passage of extraordinary relevance today, he writes:
The break with the big group is compensated by enrollment in the little group. It is a flight not into solitude but into a protesting minority. Such a flight may be more or less honest, more or less honorable. Certainly it inspires the anger of those who believe themselves to be the “right thinking majority” and it necessarily comes in for its fair share of mockery on that account… [There is a] process of falsification and corruption which these groups almost always undergo. They abandon one illusion which is forced on everyone and substitute for it another, more esoteric illusion, of their own making. They have the satisfaction of making a choice, but not the fulfilment of having chosen reality.
The true solitary is not called to an illusion, to the contemplation of himself as solitary. He is called to the nakedness and hunger of a more primitive and honest condition.
Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach, 1931 — one of Hasui Kawase’s stunning vintage Japanese woodblocks. (Available as a print.)
There is a high price to pay for such renunciation of illusion:
[There are] sordid difficulties and uncertainties which attend the life of interior solitude… The disconcerting task of facing and accepting one’s own absurdity. The anguish of realizing that underneath the apparently logical pattern of a more or less “well organized” and rational life, there lies an abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, and indeed of apparent chaos… It cannot be otherwise: for in renouncing diversion, [the solitary] renounces the seemingly harmless pleasure of building a tight, self-contained illusion about himself and about his little world. He accepts the difficulty of facing the million things in his life which are incomprehensible, instead of simply ignoring them. Incidentally it is only when the apparent absurdity of life is faced in all truth that faith really becomes possible. Otherwise, faith tends to be a kind of diversion, a spiritual amusement, in which one gathers up accepted, conventional formulas and arranges them in the approved mental patterns, without bothering to investigate their meaning, or asking if they have any practical consequences in one’s life.
Merton distills the reward on the other side of the renunciation:
Interior solitude… is the actualization of a faith in which a man takes responsibility for his own inner life.
It is interesting to read Merton — a deep thinker, but also a deeply religious thinker — as someone who believes that chance, not God, is the supreme creative agent of the universe; that the laws of nature, written in its native language of mathematics, are more sacred than any scripture; that we bless our own lives by being awake to the sheer wonder of existence. It is always salutary to engage with worldviews profoundly different from your own — it both expands and anneals your own sense of reality (reality being the thing that persists whether or not you believe in it) — until they open into something larger. In Merton’s faith, I find an invitation to self-transcendence that need not be religious, I find a poetics of the possible. And, as the teenage Sylvia Plath told her mother, “once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.”
Solitude by Maria Popova. Available as a print.
Merton considers the meaning of self-transcendence:
The true solitary is not one who simply withdraws from society. Mere withdrawal, regression, leads to a sick solitude, without meaning and without fruit. The solitary of whom I speak is called not to leave society but to transcend it.
[…]
If every society were ideal, then every society would help its members only to a fruitful and productive self-transcendence. But in fact societies tend to lift a man above himself only far enough to make him a useful and submissive instrument in whom the aspirations, lusts and needs of the group can function unhindered by too delicate a personal conscience. Social life tends to form and educate a man, but generally at the price of a simultaneous deformation and perversion. This is because civil society is never ideal, always a mixture of good and evil, and always tending to present the evil in itself as a form of good.
Such self-transcendence can be found only by quieting the din of social conditioning to hear one’s inner silence — that empty and receptive place where true solitude is found, a place so remote from the surface of being that even those determined to reach it are regularly derailed:
Often the lonely and the empty have found their way into this pure silence only after many false starts. They have taken many wrong roads, even roads that were totally alien to their character and vocation. They have repeatedly contradicted themselves and their own inmost truth.
[…]
One has to be born into solitude carefully, patiently and after long delay, out of the womb of society.
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss
Merton admonishes against approaching solitude as another point of achievement to be worn as a badge on the lapel of the self in a society that fetishizes individualism. True solitude, rather — like love, like art — is an instrument of unselfing. He writes:
The price of fidelity in such a task is a completely dedicated humility — an emptiness of heart in which self-assertion has no place. For if he is not empty and undivided in his own inmost soul, the solitary will be nothing more than an individualist. And in that case, his non-conformity is nothing but an act of rebellion: the substitution of idols and illusions of his own choosing for those chosen by society. And this, of course, is the greatest of dangers… For to forget oneself, at least to the extent of preferring a social myth with a certain limited productiveness, is a lesser evil than clinging to a private myth which is only a sterile dream.
Noting that most people “cannot live fruitfully without a large proportion of fiction in their thinking,” he adds:
It is a vocation to become fully awake, even more than the common somnolence permits one to be, with its arbitrary selection of approved dreams, mixed with a few really valid and fruitful conceptions.
[…]
One who seeks to enter into this kind of solitude by affirming himself, and separating himself from others, and intensifying his awareness of his own individual being, is only travelling further and further away from it. But the one who has been found by solitude, and invited to enter it, and has entered freely, falls into the desert the way a ripe fruit falls out of a tree. It does not matter what kind of a desert it may be: in the midst of men or far from them. It is the one vast desert of emptiness which belongs to no one and to everyone.
In a sentiment evocative of Pablo Neruda’s magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Merton observes:
True solitude is not mere separateness. It tends only to unity. The true solitary does not renounce anything that is basic and human about his relationship to other men. He is deeply united to them — all the more deeply because he is no longer entranced by marginal concerns. What he renounces is the superficial imagery and the trite symbolism that pretend to make the relationship more genuine and more fruitful.
[…]
One who is called to solitude is not called merely to imagine himself solitary, to live as if he were solitary, to cultivate the illusion that he is different, withdrawn and elevated. He is called to emptiness. And in this emptiness he does not find points upon which to base a contrast between himself and others. On the contrary, he realizes, though perhaps confusedly, that he has entered into a solitude that is really shared by everyone. It is not that he is solitary while everybody else is social: but that everyone is solitary, in a solitude masked by that symbolism which they use to cheat and counteract their solitariness.
What the solitary renounces is not connection, not community, but “the deceptive fictions and inadequate symbols which tend to take the place of genuine social unity.” Merton writes:
The solitary is one who is aware of solitude in himself as a basic and inevitable human reality, not just as something which affects him as an isolated individual. Hence his solitude is the foundation of a deep, pure and gentle sympathy with all other men, whether or not they are capable of realizing the tragedy of their plight.
Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse
Complement with Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor on solitude as contemplative and creative practice and poet May Sarton on the art of living alone, then revisit Merton’s magnificent letter to Rachel Carson (which is how I first became acquainted with his mind)
Wow friend Marcia
Your ‘bursting forth” by stringing writings and thoughts works with you well.
Reading a children’s book will appear in a future Sunday Letter.
I have books of Merton or about Merton, each one read and treasured,
Merton complained and sought solitude all of adult life
And then brought in guests, wrote letters and article sharing with many around the world.
So, he was conflicted with the same push-pull as all of us.
I will read again your sending,,,,there are good parts still to stumble over. RB
Lifting you in prayer following your surgery and eye infection. I, too, look to all things that are “normal” in the mists of the chaos. We have just returned from the much anticipated wedding of youngest son. What joy!
What joy and forward leaning motivation of “the good stuff” still available to us all.
My encouragement is to somehow find the balancing of the destructive and evil with your son’s wedding, our friend who is a 100+ calling Beth “just to visit,” and one of my guy friends talking over coffee of declining economy and declining health….and then laughing with humor at just how little we really control.
So, I will close with laughter and smiles…..RB
So glad to hear the eye is better.. onward thru the fog Roy, one day at at time.. thanks for the positive and caring thoughts & suggestions. Face timed this am early with two of my grandsons, they are in San Diego.. I’ll see them in two weeks for flag football and volleyball.. exciting.. keep our eye on all the good we are blessed with.
Happy Sunday
I can go with happy Sunday easily.
I would ask that you also allow in the careless destruction “caring networks” with real people, siblings, elders, and children/babies.
Too much wind for 4 days….too many memories of Amarillo.
TCU women bball playing again Sunday afternoon. 2nd yr coach. He built a “new team” by aggressive transfers.
You have good family time ahead…..enjoy it all!
RB
Excellent!
Blessings from Richard and Jan
And a dual Excellent to two of the good ones in my world. RB
Thank you Roy for another thought provoking great read.
Glad you are better today and hope it is even better tomorrow! Keep on keeping on!!
The incision and healing defines the phrase “day by day.”
But all good.
Glad the SL this week brought meaning to you
Tis something my editor and I talk about often.
What works, what does not.
We all kkep at it…..Best to you both.RB
Very sorry to hear you are going through a physical trial. I trust that there will not be permanent deficits; full recovery in the offing. Blessings from me and Gail.
Friend always Owen….
I be well, We be well. Stitches out Friday (yea!).
My beliefs keep me engaged and hopeful in our troubled world
My crayon may be broken but still colors inall the colors, shapes, and genders of our world.
Continue your own hopeful voice and kindness, tis the only true path. RB
Darling Roy, You have always colored outside the lines. I think that’s why we recognized each other oh so many years ago. Love to you and Beth always. And blessings on your good health and return to wellness. X/O
OK yes, I do resist lines, limits, being told, more.
Given the listing of sins somehow is grace even for me.
And you in the middle of all thst is good.
Still figuring it out…..RB
So thoughtful as always!
Health is always something to be grateful for and not taken for granted!
Stitches out Friday AM…..relief, tomorrows ahead all goodness.
‘Writing about trees this Sunday…..