June

The mingling of wild honeysuckle and sweet clover

is the fragrance of early summer.

In the morning dew, the presence of its perfume

floats above the green fields like a veil,

behind which is the sunny face of June.

She lingers in a small windowless room

off the sacristy.

Soon, she will take her father’s arm.

Soon she will stand at the altar

in those still white moments of prayer and proclamation.

And then, her veil removed,

she will kiss the brighter face of a bridegroom

whose very heat will singe the top notes

of honeysuckle and columbine,

will smolder in the bass notes of clover

and mown grass.

And later from the bridal bed,

the sweet scent of peony

will be just a memory.

Shannon Vesely

Both the bluebird and the indigo bunting are elusive birds. I hear them in the woods behind our house, I see their dark silhouettes in the tops of the trees at the edge of our timber, but I rarely have the chance to see them close enough to take in their blue splendor. Still, I crane my neck every time I hear their songs and scan the treeline for any flash of blue.

These are private birds, indeed. Except for the cadet blue of the common Blue Jay, brilliant blue is an anomaly here in the Midwest. Each spring, blue birds and buntings could flaunt their colors amidst the browns, russets, and grays of native birds. They could, but they do not. And this is what makes their allure even more precious. Their privacy is a ten-carat sapphire hidden in a pile of limestone and shale.

In his Notebooks 1951-1959, French philosopher and author Albert Camus writes:

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

Opt for privacy and solitude, neither of which make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. The blue birds and the indigo buntings are poster children for privacy and solitude, and we might do well to take a lesson from them. Perhaps our unwillingness to do so stems from a belief (albeit a misguided one) that there may be something more sinister behind that state of privacy. He believes he’s so much better than the rest of us; she is plotting something; he clearly has something to hide, etc. Those who value privacy are too often subject to such criticism. Failing to understand why anyone would opt for privacy, would need to breathe and to be, we look down upon them from social perches of superiority.

Some social media has, in many ways, made a mockery of privacy, choosing instead to air everything publicly, freely, frequently:

John Doe is drinking his first latte at the Starbucks on the corner of  Lattimer and Green! Jane Doe is starting day #7 of a new diet and exercise regimen destined to transform her in every way! John Doe’s son participated in the 25th annual county basketball tournament! Jane Doe’s daughter just befriended a new student who moved from Texas! 

Social media posts are sometimes like those infamous Christmas letters–but on steroids. You know, the ones that make you feel like you and your family are chopped liver? The ones that broadcast a family’s every triumph, every accomplishment, every plan that will make the world a better place. Those letters that get under your skin and cause you to justify your own family’s worth.

And what of these posts in which nothing is private? Are they valuable simply because they are public? Author Gore Vidal writes that Eventually all things are known. And few matter. If so many things are posted so that they may be known, will they ultimately matter?

French author Milan Kundera is less kind:

When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?

A concentration camp? That’s harsh–perhaps much too harsh. Still, he has a point. When what is private–and is generally best kept private–is broadcast, there may be unforeseen consequences: a loss of significance, intimacy, and sadly even integrity. Too much good stuff may dull our senses. Too much celebration may prompt us to turn a blind eye. When discernment is lacking, social media may be more of an assault than a refuge.

In her article, “The Psychology of Social Media” (Psychology Today, Nov. 14, 2016), Dr. Azedah Alai cites research that reveals that “engaging in upward social comparisons on social media is associated with negative outcomes for users such as lower self-esteem, and the potential for depressive and/or anxiety symptoms” (e.g. Vogel et. al., 2014; Vogel & Rose, 2016). In fact, Vogel’s earlier research (2014) reported that people tend to believe that others who use social media actually have better lives than they do. Our compulsion to scour social media in an attempt to keep up with the Joneses is literally making us sick. A healthy dose of privacy could be just what the doctor ordered.

And those who feel compelled to confess publicly? Often these confessions are desperate cries for acknowledgement, for affirmation, for some sort of connection. Certainly, there may be power and value in  connections with others who offer compassion and understanding. Private confessions, however, have the potential for so much more power and value. When you sit knee-to-knee with another human being who is willing and able to listen, it doesn’t get much better than this. In these private and intimate exchanges, we build genuine and lasting relationships that don’t depend on internet availability.

Don’t get me wrong. I use social media regularly and delight in pictures and posts from family, former students, and friends. To an extent, social media has made the world smaller, bringing people and places from far away right into your home. And for this, I am generally grateful. But I am more grateful that I can walk away from my computer and walk into the countryside around me. I am more grateful that I can choose to keep some thoughts, some feelings, and some dreams private. And I am eternally grateful that I can select with whom I will share these. Or not.

The first female Middle Eastern editor-in-chief of an English newspaper, Aysha Taryam claims that And so it is inevitable that the day has come when we write about privacy with such nostalgia, analyzing it as we would some unearthed fossil of a creature our human eyes had never fallen on.

Perhaps the fact that I am writing wistfully about privacy is evidence that we have come to look upon it with nostalgia. I can imagine sitting with my grandchildren and recalling those days when we had no wifi, when we learned to live with our own portion of solitude, when we relished a privacy that had everything to do with simply being and nothing to do with being antisocial. I can imagine explaining how some things are so precious that they need not be shared–or perhaps that they be shared with discernment.

In a few days, my little cabin near the woods will be completed, thanks to my husband’s carpentry skills and willingness to make my dream come to fruition. Even though it is a mere 100 yards from my house, it is far enough and separate enough to provide me with an ample supply of privacy and solitude. This will be my Walden, and like Thoreau, I will go to the woods because I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I will write in this cabin and choose what–if anything–will become public. In truth, I suspect that much of what I think and write will remain–as it should–private.

And if I happen to see a blue bird or an indigo bunting close enough to take in its blueness, I will choose to keep this private, too, reveling in an intimate moment that truly matters.

for my mom on Mother’s Day

A white rabbit dozes in the shade by our chicken coop. Under the grill, his white son watches the yard warily. The gray son hops from the base of an oak tree to the edge of the timber, while his mother crouches beneath the cage that was her former home. Only the white daughter is missing. Until I spot her ears sticking up from the brush by my husband’s trapping shed.

In the spring of 2017, I bought two rabbits (of unknown gender) for my grandchildren for Easter. And these bunnies lived happily together in their hutch until the morning when I opened the cage to feed them, and there were three hairless babies squirming in the corner. This was when Tiger, the proud father, got a new home. Two had become five! And the five were soon separated, each in his or her own cage.

All winter, I fed, cleaned, and unthawed hundreds of frozen water bottles. Because my grandchildren have recently gotten a new puppy and had long lost interest in the cute bunnies that had grown large and become much less cute, I pronounced that we would let them go, loose them into the wild (the timber that surrounds us). Hearing no protests, I waited until two weeks ago when I was convinced the grass was greening and the weather cooperating. Then I let them go.

I was prepared for a collective bolt for freedom. In those moments before sleep, I had feared for their lives as they were forced to survive in the wild. They needed a Rabbit Grylls (a Bear Grylls for would-be wild rabbits), a helper, a mentor for the transition from kept to independent living.

But alas, I worried for naught. They didn’t bolt. The woods didn’t beckon them. The grass was not greener on the other side. In short, they stayed with what was familiar, often sleeping below the very cages of their captivity. When I woke this morning and looked out of my bedroom window into the backyard, there were Tiger, Cocoa, and their offspring–now official yard rabbits–grazing on the rain-drenched hillside.

Familiarity breeds content, claims writer and columnist Anna Quindlen. The yard rabbits wholeheartedly agree, preferring the familiarity of the mown yard to the tangle of timber that surrounds. They co-exist with the cats and dogs and have become a common sight as I work in the yard or play with the grandkids on the swingset.

Recently on a trip to my family home in Kearney, Nebraska, I found myself seated in the same auditorium I sat in for assemblies during seventh grade. Now renovated into a performing arts center, my old junior high dazzles with a spacious and well-appointed lobby, a remodeled auditorium with cushy seats, and restrooms that look–and smell– nothing like the ones I remember. My mom had taken me to an evening of Barry Manilow’s greatest hits. One of the youngest in the audience, I sat beside my mom and her 80-year old friend, waiting for a Canadian gentleman and his band to take the stage.

Surrounded by senior citizens (oh wait, I am a senior citizen now!), I was taken back to the spring of my seventh grade year when I tried out for cheerleader on the very stage in front of me. I was instantly transported back to those moments when I stood on the wings of the stage, pacing and running through the cheers in my mind in preparation for my tryout.

And then I was in Miss Lindstrom’s math class on a Friday afternoon, listening as she read (in character–beautifully and bizarrely in character) a weekly chapter of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby. Long before political correctness, Miss Lindstrom reveled in her weekly oral performances, and we listened, lest she pull out the ruler she used to rap our knuckles.

And when the performance began, the songs of my college years flooded back: Mandy, I Write the Songs, Can’t Smile Without You, It’s a Miracle, Looks Like We Made It–the hits kept coming. I could sing them all, could see myself on the dance floor of Dickie Doogan’s on a Friday night, could feel the way those songs shaped my young adult notions of love and life. It was all so gloriously familiar–the place, the company, the songs.

Pulitzer prize winning author Wallace Stegner writes:

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

It may be less likely, and perhaps we have lived too shallowly, but like Stegner, I do believe that the familiar draws us back to those places intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to. You can come home again. And when you do, you can leave the shallows for the deep waters of familiarity.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity, writes Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Coming home again, I often find that the very things I took for granted now take on new importance. They shimmer in their simplicity and familiarity. A newly upholstered auditorium seat, a Barry Manilow tune, the scent of your mother beside you. What was hidden before when you were younger and home was a place to launch from is now magnified, awash in colors you had only imagined.

I spent several days with my mom, eating at the same table around which so many family and friends have gathered, sleeping in my old bedroom, sitting on the sofa and looking out at the blue spruce tree that has come into its own magnificence over the years. Home.

The familiar is underrated, I’m afraid. In our quest for bigger, better, and newer, we may turn our backs on the wonders of those familiar people, places, and things that are the essence of home. Truthfully, I think the rabbits have it right. What is familiar has it own unique parameters, and you can find hidden treasures within them for the rest of your life.

For me, my mom represents the best of what is home. Each time I visit, I drink another cup of coffee, for I’m never in a hurry to leave the woman and the place whose familiarity continues to sustain me.

Because I’ve been singing his songs and because he says it so well, I’ll let Barry Manilow have the last words here: