Little Phobias

 The pandemic is abating, the world is slowly opening up, and for almost everyone this is great news. But for hermits, introverts, highly sensitive persons, and molluscoid types like me, the news is mixed. Yes, it's good to be able to buy a loaf of bread at the store without putting my life at risk. And it's good to know that I could, if I wanted to, have a professional cut the hair that, in the words of the musical, has grown "down to here, down to there, down to where it stops by itself."

But for those who identify at least in part with oysters, clams, and mussels, the quarantine brought definite advantages. As everything became forbidden, a delicious freedom invaded our lives. It was lovely to wake up day after day, month after month, without commitments to clutter our mental horizon. It was a relief to be spared the responsibility of making decisions about social obligations. Pascal said, "All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone." Now we had permission to do just that.

But not everything was rosy in my pandemic retreat. After a while, the shell inside which I huddled began to feel constricting. I was brought up to believe that intelligent people are never bored ("Think!" my father would advise whenever I complained that there was nothing to do). Nevertheless, there was a limit to the amount of entertainment available within the walls of my cranium. What Jung called "the circumambulation of the self" was starting to make me queasy. 

Even more distressing, I noticed that, during the rare in-person conversations in which I engaged, I was losing the ability to respond quickly to what was coming out of other people's mouths. Words escaped me at hitherto unseen rates. I would get tangled in the thickets of a relative clause and be unable to find my way out again. 

I needed outside stimulation. I longed to feel the wayward breezes of other people's ideas. My mental gears groaned for the oil of human contact. Inside my clamshell, my legs were cramping; my chest was tightening; I was stifling. I had all the symptoms of claustrophobia.

Of course, my shell was not a prison cell. Within reason, I was allowed a certain amount of freedom. Well-masked and distanced, I could walk the icy roads with a friend. I could make brief excursions to the grocery store. I could even get in the car and head for the wide open spaces. But as the pandemic wore on, I became reluctant to do any of these things. Rather than fetch that loaf of bread, I would make do with the ancient tortilla discovered at the bottom of the freezer. It was too much effort to make myself heard and understood from behind my double masks, so I took fewer walks with friends. And I avoided car trips except when compelled by an urgent need that Amazon could not fulfill.

Along with claustrophobia, I also had agoraphobia.

So now, as gates fly open and the peoples rejoice, all I feel is conflict. Caught between the desire to burst out of my clamshell, and fear of the outside world, I am an apprehensive, undecided, spineless mollusc.

I know what you're supposed to do about phobias: you desensitize yourself gradually. If you're scared of spiders, you start by looking at pictures of them. Then you observe a live one at a distance. Gradually you get closer and closer, until you turn into one of those people who trap spiders under a glass and deposit them outdoors, murmuring endearments. Following that model, and now that the weather is easing, I should lengthen my walks, take longer drives, maybe actually go somewhere I want to go (but where?).

It will take time and effort to get rid of my fears, but it will be worth it, I tell myself--that is, unless the dreaded variants take off and I have to scuttle back into my clamshell. My emotional life is starting to resemble the game of whack-a-mole: claustrophobia, agoraphobia, and now, the mother of all phobias: the fear of uncertainty. But I'll probably just have to learn to live with that one.

Hermits

The hermit thrush alone is a good reason to live in Vermont.  All by himself, this little brown bird with the speckled breast makes up for the cold, dark winters, the messy mud seasons, and the spotty wi-fi coverage.

He comes by his name honestly. He declines to visit feeders, but stays hidden in the woods where, during the nesting season, he decants a pure, cool, silvery rill of sound. I live too much in my head to notice a lot of what Nature, like a street vendor setting out her wares, puts out for my delight. I can pass a lilac in full splendor with barely a glance, but the song of the hermit thrush stops me in my tracks. When he sings, I have to stand and hear him to the end, or I would feel like I was walking out in the middle of a recital.

Although he shies from applause, there is nothing timid or self deprecating about his performance: he sings with the aplomb of a seasoned performer. I wonder what a young hermit’s first song is like--is the timing off, are there false notes, or does it emerge from him as faultless and elegant as that of his father in his prime? As I have never heard a thrush miss a note, I suspect that they are all born musical prodigies.

This has been a good summer for hermits. The thrushes sing late into the morning, take a short break, and resume well before the sun goes down. The virus-imposed stillness in my life has made it easier for me to pay attention. At sunrise and sunset I come out of my own hermitage and listen to the invisible singer pour out his melody from the shelter of the woods.

Whenever I hear the thrush, my grasping, non-Zen self immediately pleads “don’t stop. Keep going. Encore!” And I waste the last clear perfect notes thinking that  the solstice is already behind us, and all too soon he will head south, and the woods will return to silence. But isn’t the very fact that he’s not around all year, that he shuns my feeders, that he stays hidden in his woodland cloister what makes him so precious? If I heard him in all seasons, would I still listen?

From all indications, the coming winter will be an especially dark one. Like the chipmunks, I will retreat from porch and yard and go to earth in my cottage, to sleep and snack and endure as best I can. I will be grateful for every cheeping titmouse and chickadee that visits my feeder while I await the little brown singer’s return. I will think of him scratching for insects in the leaf litter of some southern wood, but saving his song for the love season in Vermont, and for his fellow hermit, me.

There Be Dragons, Continued: It's Not the Weather

"Wait until spring to decide!  You'll feel differently about everything then.  It's been a terrible winter..."

This is what people have been saying when they hear that my spouse and I are planning to move to a retirement community.  And the weather probably does have something to do with precipitating this  decision, but only a very little something.

I was already thinking about it a year ago, when I wrote a post in which I wondered how much longer I would be able to keep up my fantasy of the self-sufficient life.  I thought about it last fall, when I was incapacitated for weeks with shingles, and again in December, when my husband and I both came down with epic colds.  And I first thought about it two years ago, on the January night when  my husband developed severe chest pains.  It wasn't a heart attack--he's fine--but we didn't know that as we waited an hour for the ambulance to reach us, and then raced forty-five-minutes to the hospital.

The fact is, we're isolated on our little hill, and not just from services and stores (I once drove forty-five minutes to buy a spool of brown thread).  When you don't have a job or a child or a church to jump-start your social life, it takes more energy than I have to manufacture one from scratch. The last nine years have offered me a solitude that Thomas Merton would have envied.  But despite my eremitic tendencies, I am no Thomas Merton.

Of course the prospect of disposing of tables and chairs and file cabinets and my beloved old canning jars so that we and the dogs can fit into a two-bedroom cottage makes me groan, but waiting another five years wouldn't make the task more palatable.  And it would be downright awful to have to do it under pressure of illness.  Since it's clear that we cannot remain on our hilltop forever, it makes sense to do it while it's easier than it will ever be.

As for where we'll end up, we'd like it to be in Vermont.  We're far too fond of its fields and woods and calmly grazing cows;  its billboard-free, mostly empty roads;  its herbalists and bee-keepers and philosopher-farmers; its unapologetic granola attitude.

We'd hate to leave all that behind--not to mention the good friends we've made.  And we'd miss the winters.

(To be continued.)