Talking with a few friends the other day regarding the ‘state of the world’ in general, and human behavior in particular, I happened to say how important it is to have ‘a refuge’…. at which point all conversation stopped…. and it was obvious that I was expected to ‘spell out’ just what I meant by this comment.
“What exactly do you mean by refuge?” asked one of them.
“I mean a private place where you can gather your thoughts and feelings without being disturbed; where you can feel ‘at one’ with yourself… even psychologically ‘safe.’”
My questioner looked puzzled. “You mean completely alone…’ she replied.
“Yes, all by yourself… because I think that only then can you get to that state of meditative calm which as is said, ‘passeth all understanding’ … when you seem to step out of the world for a moment or two… and feel yourself to be a different person, completely fulfilled, everything accomplished; transported to a near sublime realm of existence… on ‘cloud nine’ as they say…”.
“But what’s the point? I’ve always got my friends to spend time with; they take me out of myself…”.
“Of course that works to some extent, but the level of self-realization I’m talking about is not quite the same thing.”
Silence all round, at this point.
“Let me explain,” I went on…. “The other day, while waiting in a doctor’s office, I realized that solitariness is but one necessary condition that induces the kind of reflection… the sense of meaning and purpose in life I was thinking about…. But when I talk about a ‘refuge’… I have in mind a place, a haven, where love abounds – and that requires at least two of you. And in my own case it involves a dog, a wife, and myself…. living in a place called ‘home’, where mutual caring and devotion takes one into a higher and meaningful appreciation of one’s very existence. And I say this with real conviction, for in that doctor’s office, sitting with a dozen or so other patients – most of them obviously frail and, seemingly, somewhat alone in their lives – I became acutely aware of the fact that all of us in there were psychologically alone… in the realization we were all going to die in the end… yet that such psychical solitariness was, in my own case, greatly eased by the love binding all three of us – dog, myself and my wife – together. And I reminded myself, sitting there, that I was one of those lucky ones who possessed the ultimate ‘refuge’, the best ‘haven’… where one can experience a truth greater than that presented by our timebound and body-wracked selves.
Is this too ‘old-fashioned’ a way to conceive of, and experience, love and refuge?"
Love is the emblem of eternity: it confounds
All notion of time: effaces all memory of a
beginning, all fear of an end.Madame de Stael, Corinne