Strength for Us Both
Some books draw us back to them because some truths need more time for us to sit with them. To have us weigh and consider more carefully those things they feel need further thinking on by us. When I first read Marianne Fredriksson’s “Hanna’s Daughters” 18 months ago I was inexplicably moved. The story could be everywomans, though not specifically, simply in some aspects of the detail. The fabric in which the story is woven is not simply complex, but flawed in places, beautiful in others. So what brings me back to this book 18 months after my first reading of it?
Perhaps I need to understand something further, something that in that first reading I skimmed across the face of, feeling it had no real rhyme for me then. It doesn’t now either I don’t think. However, these things come to us for their own good reasons and I, including you, see on such occasions through a mirror darkly.
In Chapter 34 the words, ” … and that not even love can free a person from loneliness … ” leapt from the page to meet my gaze again. No significant reason for me as far as I could see but they did. It occured to me then it didn’t really have to mean anything to me but it could be a signpost for someone. Is that someone you?
On the occasions that I have had to feel lonely in my lifetime I’d have to say that I felt terribly overwhelmed by its bigness and that the ensuing tidal wave of lonely emotion that it unleashed darn near sucked the life out of me.
It felt like being caught in an ocean rip, being sucked down and under, unable to get to the surface. There’s a certain terror that being caught in an ocean rip can illicit from a person, and worse, there’s a total desperation to live that nearly kills us instead.
And fear. The thought of being swallowed up by it never to be spat out at the other end near drowns a person. I know, I know from experience about unseen ocean rips. And like those ocean rips, loneliness can suck the life from you if you let it. It’s exile of the very worst kind.
The way back, is to stop fighting because the sea will eventually spit you out, perhaps further away from where you were dragged under and maybe you’ll be further out than you’ve ever been, but you’ll be alive. No small mercy there.
This entry’s for you whoever you are, my friend caught in an ocean rip of loneliness somewhere. Here’s my hand, it’s the least I can do and it’s the most I can give you to bring you in to a safer harbour. My hand, take it. I have the strength for us both today.
