An ode to my person
And no, I'm not dating again
My best friend, Lisa, is coming to visit me today. Lisa has been my bestest friend since 1985, the year we were both 13 year-old seventh graders at Alice Deal Junior High School. It’s been so long, and she’s been such a constant force for good in my life, that I don’t really understand the world, or myself, without her at the very center.
Our birthdays are only eight days apart (All hail, Capricorns!), which might have something to do with our temperamental similarities (though it might also be our shared history of complicated families and trauma). We’re both smart, in a brainy, bookish sort of way. We’re both driven and responsible to a fault. We share a commitment to our own healing, a thoughtfulness about the world, and also a juvenile fondness for any joke about butts.
When I was going through the worst, early days of my divorce, she sat on the phone with me for hours nearly every day for at least a year (despite her more than full-time job and live-in partner). It was like high school all over again, except only one of us was prone to declarations about her latest epiphany. Her willingness to listen to me ruminate on the same unanswerable questions over and over again with unending loving regard, to hold faith in the best of what I am capable of when I could barely remember who I was, is one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received.
When I took off my wedding ring, I replaced it with a ring she bought me on a whim in a jewelry store in College Park, Maryland one random, sunny afternoon when we were in college. In part, it was an acknowledgment that though I’d lost my husband, I hadn’t lost my person. Ultimately, it was a reminder that I hadn’t lost myself, because Lisa would never let me do that.
Despite all the ways in which she and I are similar, though, there are significant ways in which we’re different. Lisa chose not to have kids, for one. She’s been a successful, career-oriented, childless New Yorker for decades now, while I ran away to the country to farm (for a time) and raise a family. One of the last times she came to visit us on the farm, despite living in a Manhattan apartment that reverberated with the rumble of the expressway across the street 24 hours a day, she bemoaned the loudness of the cows lowing to be milked before dawn, which still makes me howl. (And she would still insist, if you asked her, “Cows are very, very loud!”)
She’s also an atheist, which has, at times, been almost weirder for me, as a person whose faith feels inextricably tied to my sense of myself and the world. I know, at the same time, she’s one of the most careful, thoughtful, ethical people I know. So, it was, largely inspired by her, that I wrote the following newsletter way back in the earliest days of this project:
Is God Required For A Life of Integrity?
Since I started to really think deeply about integrity— what it is, how to cultivate it, and why it’s so important— I have asked myself this question repeatedly:
I argue in it that a belief in the Divine isn’t required to practice integrity, but a sense of something transcendent to bow to in your most private moments probably is:
If there is no transcendence for you, if you are the sole center of your own universe, then you are always and only skating on your ego, and eventually, you’re going to end up on your ass with nothing to grab onto to help you get back up. Those of us trying to live with integrity spend a fair amount of time on our asses. The transcendent gives us a leverage point to get up and moving again.
In the end, Lisa probably doesn’t agree with me entirely about the necessity of something transcendent to bow to in your integrity practice, but maybe she does. I certainly don’t know anyone else who loves her people better through all the vagaries of life than her, and what is more transcendent than love?
I hope you all have good weekends. And maybe you can find some time to contemplate the following question:
What do you bow to?
XO, Asha
I enjoyed reading your essay, Asha. You ask, in conclusion, "Who do you bow to?" My answer: the earth. Knowingly or unknowingly I have always been bowing to, touching, reminding myself of whence I and all of us came - from the earth, from the incorporated star dust. The transcendent is not so much above and beyond in its limitlessness, its eternal presence as much as it is integral and indelible to every atom in existence. So when I first felt the grace of the Great Mystery present and powerful, and I bowed down to that, even then, my forehead touched the ground be it the fuzzy carpet, wooden floor or actual earth. When mindfulness became more of my practice, still bending forward to bow reminded me of that origin - that the threads of the carpet came from so many hands involved, so many plants and chemicals, the wood boards so much life, rain, air, clouds (Thich Nhat Hanh). It's all very humbling, literally grounding. And yes, it helps with integrity but none of that requires a belief in a Transcendent God. My husband is an agnostic and he reminds me in so many ways, that integrity requires only the recognition of one's effort to respond in a loving and generous way to the people and world. When one lies to oneself about that - or deceives others no amount of spiritual claims or religious affiliation can shore up integrity.
I have a best spirit soul friend who makes sense of the world for me to and it is the best and one of the longest lasting relationships in my life. We Get each other. We trust each other implicitly. I dread the day We are separated by death or disease. I do not know how any of us have been so lucky, or so blessed, as to have this kind of life saving, life defining friendship. I owe my sanity, survival, and much of my growth as a human being to their steady presence, unwavering love and witness, and the priceless opportunity to do the same for them.