From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

I remember the first time I read Randall Jarrell’s poem, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” I was struck with the fact that the ball turret which hung underneath a WWII B-17 was an awful reminder that people are material things, easily torn, not easily mended. The gunner, by necessity a short and small man, crouched in the fetal position inside a retractable, spherical glass and metal bubble equipped with two fifty caliber machine guns that pivoted 360 degrees, so that he might defend the vulnerable belly of the B-17. An incredibly small sphere, the ball turret made it impossible for gunners to wear full parachutes. As the gunners hung below the plane, they frequently had to endure temperatures that dropped to 50 below zero. In spite of their heated and insulated flight suit (which often came unplugged and left the gunner to make his own heat), many gunners suffered frost bite in their extremities and faces. The mortality rate for B-17 crews was a staggering 30%, but for ball turret gunners, an agonizing 60%. Ball turret gunners submitted themselves to a potentially deadly vulnerability, one from which both man and machine were all too easily torn. Still, we marveled at and even encouraged such vulnerability as heroic.

There are those who may regard vulnerability as a cross to bear, something to endure if they are to mature, overcome, and triumph. Like ball turret gunners, they may cautiously lower themselves into glass spheres from which they become wholly visible to those who are eager to attack the soft underbelly of their brokenness. They may even argue that vulnerability is a season (singular) to get through–a kind of rite of passage. Show the world who you really are. Embrace the initiation. Spend three days and nights in the wilderness with only a compass and canteen, and earn your life badge.

But is vulnerability really a just stage you pass through, just another life badge that you earn? Not so, according to author Madeline L’Engle who writes: When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability… To be alive is to be vulnerable. If vulnerability is a season (singular), it is a very long one that spans a lifetime. Accepting vulnerability, as L’Engle suggests, is the business of children and adults alike. It is an element of the human condition. And it comes with a guarantee of an infinite number of life badges to be earned.

A season of vulnerability, however, is not only a public airing of one’s victimhood (e.g. the Olympic backstories of athletes who choose to compete in the midst of, or just after, personal loss or the candid confessions of reality talk show guests who have survived incredible pain.) This kind of vulnerability has unfortunately grown into no vulnerability at all. It’s become standard fare–expected and even sought after–as if this status alone might gain one entry into a preferred and protected class. No doubt, there are occasions during which this may be authentic vulnerability, but too often it takes a more plastic, cultivated form. And thus, it may be boutique vulnerability at best.

The real stuff is the stuff of life. Writer and research professor Brene Brown continues to champion the role of vulnerability in our lives. In her best-selling book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, she writes:

Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.

She is not the first, nor will she be the last, to embrace authentic vulnerability as the path to better life and love. Poet Theodore Roethke claims that Love is not love until love’s vulnerable. Christian writer and theologian C. S. Lewis writes that To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal . He continues by warning that you can lock love up, and it will not break. It will, however, become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. Researchers, poets, and theologians seem to agree that vulnerability is, indeed, the birthplace and best incubator for love.

In his book Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, English poet David Whyte writes:

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

And if we were to truly inhabit our vulnerability, to walk fully through its door, what would that look like? Certainly, being transparent about personal loss can be cathartic and necessary. We live in a fallen world, and the consequences of this are apparent in its generous citizens of loss. The fact that these consequences don’t prevent the work of generous citizens of comfort is nothing short of a miracle.

But what about those who dance around the edges of vulnerability, who risk revealing other things? While it may be socially acceptable to comfort and accept our brothers and sisters who share their losses, it is not so kosher to comfort and accept others who struggle with anger, shame, guilt, doubt, pride, judgment and fear. We tend to tell these individuals–directly or indirectly–to keep these things to themselves or to share them only with licensed professionals. Rather than risk authenticity, we often counsel deceit. Undoubtedly, you could benefit from opening up about your anger or shame or fear, but this vulnerability will just alienate and/or condemn you. Better you just keep this to yourself. This is the uglier side of vulnerability: that for some, vulnerability should not be a legitimate choice.

American psychiatrist M. Scott Peck writes:

There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community.

There can be no community without vulnerability. This, I agree, can be the redeeming power of vulnerability. If we invite real vulnerability–warts and all–into our relationships, we have the potential to build real community, the kind which takes shape as we embrace our common, messy and occasionally ugly humanity. Clearly, there is much risk involved as we lower ourselves, like ball turret gunners, into glass spheres which will expose us as merely human, easily torn and often not easily mended. But, together, I think we might inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss. And this generosity might just save us.

I don’t exactly recall the circumstances or the date, but I do recall the feeling. I was going to spend a day away from my life as a teacher, wife, and mother, and it struck me: no one would know who I was or who I had been. On this day, I could reinvent myself entirely. A new name, maybe something trendy or perhaps something traditional and old-fashioned? A new profession, as let’s say a ghost writer or a former intelligence agent? A new residence, perhaps Canada, or–in the likely scenario that my Midwestern drawl may give me away–North Dakota or Kansas? Why not? Anonymity was an unexpected gift, if only I dared unwrap it.

A few weeks ago, my granddaughter, Gracyn, was chosen as a class representative to attend an area young writer’s conference. She had submitted her original story and waited for weeks in hopes that she would have the opportunity to board a school bus which would take her from her local school to the university campus where the conference would be held. When her teacher gave her the good news that she would attend, she could hardly contain her joy. A day away from school! A day away from her family and friends, from her community! As frightening as the prospect may be for a fourth-grader, it was also exhilarating. I could see the possibilities flash across her eyes: a day away as a real writer!

In her novel, Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold writes:

She liked to imagine that when she passed, the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was. Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was immaculate anonymity.

A day away may afford this bliss, this immaculate anonymity for those whose schedules demand that others know where they are at any time of the day, those who have others waiting for them, and those who, like poet T. S Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, measure out their lives with coffee spoons. Just a single day during which to walk with purpose. Or without purpose. To try on a gregarious new persona–or a solitary, contemplative one. To know that you will return to your life, that you must return to your life, but that for that day, you are the potter before the shapeless lump of clay that can become any magnificent life you’d like it to be. Pretty heady stuff, indeed!

Even for those who find reinventions of this sort foolish and dangerous, a day away may still be an unexpected gift. As a young mother, I remember too many days (and nights) during which I drooled over the possibility of a day away from crushed Cheerios in the folds of my clothing, the persistent and pervasive smell of Lysol mingling with baby formula, and countless squabbles over who got the green Tupperware sippy cup for lunch. And then when I was away, I remember watching other mothers and children in shopping malls or in restaurants and, to my dismay, tearing up. It was then that I began to count the hours until I could return and gather their sticky selves into my arms. Days away were poignant and acute reminders that I cherished the life I had, mismatched Tupperware and all.

When I discovered Audible books, I really believed that I had died and gone to literary heaven! Before my day away would begin–that is, before I would literally arrive and open my car door to do whatever it was I was going to do–I could live vicariously through characters and places that took me away from my life in southeast Iowa. Without even leaving my car, I took on the lives of WWII resistance fighters in the French countryside and lighthouse keepers who lived in isolation for months. I could get away within the compact frame of my Hyundai Santa Fe. Audible presents me with fictional days (or years) away before the real days away begin. A twofer! What could be better than that?

In his poem, “Birches,” Robert Frost writes of a boy who likes to climb birch trees and ride them Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That, according to Frost, would be good both going and coming back. In the Sanctuary of a Day Away, it is good both going and coming back. A day of respite, reinvention, rejuvenation and then a return to the ordinary but extraordinary wonders of home.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about my next day away. I might be a motivational speaker from Maine. Well, I will have grown up and lived most of my life in the Midwest, but I will have moved to Maine to further my career. My name will be Philomena (this is a name that will turn some heads!) I’ll be assuredly optimistic and artfully witty as I espouse my motivational advice. Free, of course. And then I’ll return to my life as a retiree who generally goes by the name of Grandma. That will be good both going and coming back.

The chickens are eating the cat food, the deer are eating the chicken food, and the rabbit is eating the sunflower seeds that have fallen from the bird feeder. Our backyard is a literal frozen tundra, and even the hardiest creatures are finding it difficult–if not impossible–to paw or peck through the icy crust. Winter persists.

Arctic vortex? Snow quakes? You realize that these have become household words, and then you begin remembering scenes from Stephen King’s The Shining. You recall images of Jack Nicholson’s character, a writer, who has retreated to a Colorado resort–closed for the season–for quiet time to write. You remember how, after weeks of snowy isolation, he slowly lost his mind. Sitting alone before a typewriter on a small table in a grand room, he composed page after page of All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, as sheet after repetitive sheet fell in piles at his feet. King describes Nicholson’s character as a microbe trapped in the intestine of a monster. Frigid temperatures, record snowfall, microbes trapped in the intestine of winter monsters–spring cannot come too soon!

It’s the sheer length and breadth of it, the gray skies that that doggedly spit and spew ice and snow, the way we drag it, like a shroud, through our days. Winter persists. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes:

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it all will your heart survive. [The Sonnets to Orpheus: Book 2: Xiii]

This is it exactly: a winter so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it all will your heart survive. It all began so cozily with nights before a crackling fire, and now it simply will not end. And wintering through it has much to do with tapping into the invincible summer that Albert Camus claims that he found in the depth of winter.

For me–as I suspect for many–it’s not so much the incessant cold and snow but the isolation that winter often brings. I used to walk along the old highway near my home as much for the sense of being a part of something larger than myself than for exercise. Now, I retreat to a far room in the basement, mount my elliptical machine, and move my feet for 30 minutes. Alone. With only my own thoughts to keep me company.

This solitude is not always the good, contemplative kind. It’s often the inward-turning, self-doubting type of prolonged isolation. I remember the summer during my college years when I got a job cleaning motel rooms. Initially, I recall how much I enjoyed my own quiet company. In contrast to working fast food and life-guarding–both positions in which I was never alone, crushed in activity and noise–I relished the independence of it all. Until one day, I did not. Day after day of isolation had taken its toll. I no longer wanted to be alone with my own thoughts and feelings. I tried desperately to turn them off and often resorted to turning on the television (a clear violation of work rules) to drown out the rising fear and doubt. What if I couldn’t get the last class I needed to graduate? What if I couldn’t get into grad school? What if I simply wasn’t cut out to be a teacher? Or a serious student of anything? What if–heaven forbid–I was destined to wield a mop and a spray bottle of Lime-Away for the rest of my life?

Having taken a course in pioneer literature, I was acutely aware of the devastating effects of prairie fever. Isolated and often left alone for months while their husbands or fathers looked for work or conducted business, some prairie women succumbed to debilitating depression, to delusions and even to suicide. Author Willa Cather once described the Nebraska plains as the dark country and the end of the earth. These were women who were well acquainted with the night to borrow a phrase from poet Robert Frost. They understood that winter only added insult to injury. In 1893, E. V. Smalley wrote:

When the snow covers the ground the prospect is bleak and dispiriting. No brooks babble under icy armor. There is no bird life after the wild geese and ducks have passed on their way south. The silence of death rests on the vast landscape, save when it is swept by cruel winds… [The Isolation of Life on Prairie Farms]

I have noticed, however, that collective isolation (is this a term I can use?) tends to elicit a kind of unique camaraderie. Standing in the grocery line checkout, strangers often talk to each other, joking–or lamenting–about the latest weather forecast or commenting on the large displays of ice-melt at the store’s entrance. Weather isolation breeds unlikely, albeit temporary friendships. This has made me sincerely grateful for my weekly grocery shopping trips. A loaf of bread, a gallon of milk, a new friend? Why not?

And my new mantra is one borrowed from English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley: If winter comes, can spring be far behind? Ah yes, the passing of isolation and ice and the emergence of all things green and fragrant and an outdoor world peopled with, well, people! This world is right around the proverbial corner, and most of us can see its lilac face shining in the distance.

Months from now, there may be a time when I look fondly back on this winter of the arctic vortex, record snow, and seemingly permanent ice-fields. But probably not. Like comedian Carl Reiner, I will look back on all this snow as an unnecessary freezing of water. I’ll take my frozen water in ice cubes floating joyously in freshly-squeezed lemonade, thank you very much. And I’ll forget all about these isolating winter months when I walk the violet-laden path to my grandkids’ house.