We are all bound up together
in one great bundle of humanity.

-Frances E.W. Harper



During the winter, I spend small portions of each month in Florida with my long-distance partner. We use the time to nurture and support each other, to replenish our depleted stores through long conversations on all kinds of matters, and to laugh—oh, how good it is to laugh!—before each of us returns to lives that ask much of us. These are cherished times when we relax into a serenity neither of us has to the same degree in our everyday lives.

Another beautiful day in paradise, we tease, as pelicans glide lazily over our heads. Long, leggy egrets and herons cruise at low altitude across our paths to reach their fishing grounds. Palm trees really do sway and rustle in the breeze. Monarch butterflies float right before our faces. Birds serenade us. Peace is granted to our spirits for a brief time. If I could fashion the world by my design, everyone would have periods of respite like this. I never take a moment of this time for granted. I try to make every moment matter, saving them up inside me for the time, days away, when I return to the brutal cold of a Northeast winter. In that respect, I’m like Frederick, the mouse-hero of the Leo Lionni story for children, who gathers his memories of the warm and happy times to comfort his fellow mice during the long, dreary months of cold.

We often stay on the small inner harbor of the city of Sarasota that is called “the Quay.” The Quay connects to the Gulf of Mexico by a narrow inlet from Sarasota Bay; sailors come in from the open sea for refuge, to replenish supplies, to launder their clothes, to eat heartily from the many restaurants in the area. At each end of the Quay, hotels stand as cheerful sentinels. Along each side, walkways for people to get from one area of the Quay to the others. It’s an exquisite place, managing to be both peaceful and vital at the same time.

It was mid-morning when I stepped to the balcony door, opened it, and let in a new day. Another beautiful day in paradise. The skies were bright, the air tangy from the sea not far away. The sun shone onto the surface of the water in a way I had not noticed before, illuminating it several feet below, making what was most of the time opaque, translucent. High over the Quay, five stories above the surface of the water, I saw an underworld of shadows, shapes and motion that, on other days, would be invisible to the human eye. At first, the shadows beneath the surface seemed nebulous, vague, impossible to identify. As I stood propped against the open door, dreamily waking from a restful sleep, I noticed only the splendor of a fresh morning spread before me. Then I heard the soft exhale of a mammal’s blow. It’s a sound easy to miss, and yet so evident once you hear it: Pffffff.

I startled and leaned over the edge of the balcony. There, beneath me, floating at the surface of the water, was the glistening gray back of a manatee, that odd-looking, slow-moving, gentle creature that inhabits the Florida waters during the winter months. Manatees look like a crossbreed of whale and seal, with a little bit of elephant thrown into the mix. These ungainly creatures weigh in the range of a thousand pounds and are paradoxically graceful in their natural environment. Manatees have been an endangered species since they were hunted in the last century to near extinction; now there are only about 3000 of them left in the United States. To spot a manatee is a treat, since they tend to submerge, and to stay submerged for up to twenty minutes if they’re resting, less if they are grazing along the surface of the water. This wasn’t the first time I had seen one, but it was the best look at one I had ever had.

I called to my partner when I heard a blow—pfffff—from another spot in the harbor. A second manatee rose to the surface about fifty yards from the first. Then a third, a fourth, and a fifth! The water became perfectly transparent, at least from our height over the harbor. What were, just minutes before, indistinct shadows were now the easily distinguishable shapes of nine awkward-looking, yet strangely elegant sea creatures. We counted several times, to be certain that we actually saw nine of them, a pod. One manatee surfacing every few minutes for a breath, moving so slowly that counting wasn’t difficult. A sparkle here, a glisten there, as a manatee’s back shimmered in the sunlight; a soft pfffff when one exhaled the last breath and inhaled the next.

Filled with quiet excitement, we looked around to share our thrill with others who sighted the little pod in the harbor. Absolutely nowhere, was anyone else watching. Women and men hustling briskly through the quay, surrounded by the noises of the everyday world, missed them entirely. There wasn’t another person out on the balcony of the hotel, at least not that we could see. There was something about this particular moment and this particular set of events—the time of morning, position of the sun, grazing patterns of the pod—that made them completely visible and audible to us when most others saw and heard nothing.

A little more haste as we began the day, a little less attention to what was around us, and this brief window of opportunity would have closed, unnoticed. Truly a magical experience, one to savor and remember. We lingered over it until the sun shifted position and dropped behind one of the many tall buildings on Sarasota Bay; the water was no longer illuminated or transparent to the naked eye. “Wow!” we crowed to each other with utter glee, “Now that was something special!”

The next morning, we made certain to be awake and at the window in time for the manatees to appear. We quickly found this was a different day, a different set of circumstances, and a different experience. This time the water was opaque, impossible for the eye to penetrate, and all we could see was the occasional shining back as a manatee came up for breath. We heard their soft pffffting sounds of exhalation, but we could not locate them because the density of the water obscured our vision and hid their presence. We tried a third morning and it, too, was different from the other mornings. Each day presented a unique experience, no two of them alike. Sometimes we saw one, sometimes we heard one…but we never saw the entire pod in one sighting again.

This experience jolted me to think about how other creatures travel in herds, pods, or families in which the power of the sum is greater than the power of the individual parts. They stick together, call to each other frequently, watch for the safety of the others as well as their own. The more I thought about it, the more ingenious this seemed to me, and the more it brought into sharp relief one element of my lifelong quest to understand the way the world is configured.

Many years ago, I reluctantly moved from one high school to another at the beginning of my sophomore year. I had been both popular and happy in my rural school, where there was plenty of room for everyone to stand out for a unique quality or reason. Moving from a class of sixty students to nearly six hundred, I truly struggled to find my place in a class system of adolescents that had developed, before my arrival, a nearly incomprehensible set of rules for belonging. There were more cliques, sororities, fraternities, by-invitation-only clubs, and secret code names in this high school than I could begin to decipher. I felt utterly lost in an environment that spared no mercy on the uninitiated.

For reasons that made no sense, I made enough of an impression on Those Who Conveyed Status to be invited into some, not all, of those special echelons of belonging. It helped that I was a leader in a church youth group that was generally considered “the place to be” for social activity on a Sunday night. It helped that I was smart, attractive, and genuinely friendly to people in many different groups throughout my class, no matter the status they were granted or forbidden. I was a friend to geeks as well as to cheerleaders, to athletes as well as to academic shining stars. I lived in the same neighborhood as one of the co-captains of the football team, a shy and gentle boy. The freakiest kid in my class, who was singled out as a subject of much bullying and torment, also lived three houses down the street. It was not uncommon for me to walk to school with one of them, and home with the other. Both confided in me with equal trust that I would hear the stories of their lives, each of them hurt in some way by events they could not control, and that I would care about them despite their wounds, some more visible than others, and possibly because of them.

Mine was the front porch each of them, and others, came to when he needed a friend to talk out a problem with him. I think of four boys, all of them different from the others—the football player, the geek, the brain, and the class clown—who sat on my steps, talking about the difficult passage through adolescence, made harder in a school where kids were allowed to run rampant over each other. So long as it happened outside the building and after class hours, teachers, principals, and parents looked away as the kids of the in-crowd made life unbearable for the kids who didn’t fit in.

I often felt stuck in the middle of a system I had no part in creating, this division of status according to a set of rules built on the shakiest of foundations: so little to do with the quality of one’s character, and so much to do with appearances. I didn’t want to give up the status I had, but I didn’t want to give in to it either. I suffered privately through the remaining years of high school with a question that began to slowly form around my integrity dilemma of who to befriend, and why. In the beginning, the question was amorphous, ruminating in me until it began to take on a piercing clarity that reflected my own soul’s longing and would haunt for decades: Where are my people?

I was part of this world of small-minded, cruel-hearted adolescents, yet I was not one of them. I suspected others agreed with me but didn’t risk, as I did not, taking public stands against hurting the kids who did not conform and were, as a result of their other-ness, excluded from circles of belonging. I suffered with why I stayed silent, although I remained silent along with everyone else, acutely aware that the consequences of speaking out would be my own expulsion from the pockets of acceptance I had found for myself.

I knew. I knew what we were doing was wrong. Yet, beyond my meandering walks home with the football captain and the geek, I took no steps to challenge or change a system that—no excuses—separated out and wounded one group of students so others could live with the illusion they were somehow better. I did what I suspect most kids do under circumstances that are daunting: I held what I knew in a private corner of my heart, I participated as little as possible with the taunting of others, I walked away when I could. And I waited.

I was aware enough to know that I was waiting for others to emerge from the hoards and stand beside me against this system. Too afraid to stand alone, I waited for “my people,” the girls and boys who saw the pain I could see in the eyes of my rejected friends. I waited for the teachers who comprehended the enormity of the wounds meted out every day in the name of popularity. I waited for the ones who hated this system as much as I did, to come out of hiding, and say what we believed. My people did not come forward for me, and I did not for them. On the day we graduated from high school, the system was still firmly entrenched.

I went on to college and encountered a similar phenomenon in a small, all-girls school. There was a kind of ruthlessness to the way girls were swiftly assigned degrees of popularity by an invisible committee that was never named but decidedly self-appointed. Within weeks, and before we ever took the measure of another girl’s spirit, we were divided into groups that belonged…and individuals who didn’t, couldn’t ever, figure out the rules of belonging. This time, though, there was one professor who looked on this with compassion, and sought out the students who needed extra support. Because she was funny and bright, a popular teacher in the school, she conveyed a kind of “belonging by proxy.” Students sought out by her received—because of her popularity as a beloved teacher—a singular respect. She understood the system worked against certain students…and played by the rules in order to change them. I saw, in her actions, how one individual, acting decisively, could make a difference.

Jean took me under her tutelage. I thought she was brilliant, and she saw something in me worth fostering. Away from school grounds, we talked for days about what was involved in daring to challenge the system; daring to be different; daring to stand out, even when the consequences were bitter; daring to be outspoken when the circumstances called for courage. She quietly handed me Betty Freidan’s newly published book, The Feminine Mystique, while my peers were making plans to follow graduation with weddings, and said to me, “Perhaps you should read this before making decisions about your future.” Like the fictional character of Katherine Watson in the movie Mona Lisa Smile, Jean wanted me to consider that there was more of a life waiting for me than marriage alone.

She was the first of “my people” to appear. With her, I felt the tremendous relief that accompanies being seen and known for who I was, and not who I was supposed to be. Jean was as authentic a person as I had met at that point in my life, and the miracle was that I could be real with her. For years after I walked away from that narrow-minded environment, for years after I left nursing as a profession and started over as a psychotherapist, I dreamed of Jean and the influence she had on my life by simply seeing what was already alive in me, by encouraging me to fulfill all of my potential rather than just one part, by creating a safe milieu where I could discover the person waiting to be called out of me.

I waited a long time before I found another Jean. Now, I knew what it felt like to be seen and known, to be in relationship with a friend who wanted to be as real with me as I wanted to be in return. No more playing by other’s rules, it was time to explore the rules encoded in me, longing to blossom. More lonely than ever, I waited for “my people” to show themselves. The next one came through the kitchen door on the morning of a play date, her three year old clinging to her hand. As our children played contentedly in another room, I placed a cup of steaming tea, laced with honey, before her and took the plunge. I had been alone too long, lost in the ache for adult companionship mothers at home with babies often feel. What’s to lose, I thought to myself, except some face. I was sure I could do without “face,” so I drew a deep breath, settled into my own chair at the table, and bypassed the matters of little meaning that makes up the first layers of social small talk.

“Do you believe in reincarnation?” I asked this young mother I had only met briefly on social occasions. She hesitated, peering into my eyes to see who or what was real, and then sat back, smiling. “So,” she laughed, “I can see that we’re going to be good friends!” And, for many years, we were good friends and companions as each of us searched for a life of meaning and purpose that included, but was not restricted to, mothering our children. By this time, I’d had enough experience to know that “my people” were not commonplace, and that finding them required something of an effort. I still had so much to learn, a little at a time, with each one that appeared.

Years would pass, there would be no one, and then, suddenly, several of “my people” would arrive at once. On occasion, I found them; at others times, one of them would find me. Some stayed for years; others, for a specific purpose. They left when we’d learned from each other what we were meant to learn. I lost some of my people to the travails of life. Some have died; others simply disappeared when we had used up reasons to go on with our friendship. One person at a time, in loving and lovely increments, I began to feel that I was part of a larger pod, or family. Like the manatees, we keep a watchful eye on one another, depend on each other for survival, and hold at heart the best interests of the whole as well as the individual parts.

I love each one for as long as I’m able, and, when it’s time, I kiss them, bless them, let them go. I am now a few days from my fifty-seventh birthday, and—because of my people, the friends who allow me to become more and more real in their embracing presence—I quietly and humbly claim my place as an elder in the tribe of humanity. Looking back from the vantage of age, I guess there have been about a dozen of my people who have come forth through the years. People with whom I have a deep spirit of kinship, and the sweet comfort of knowing and being known. People with whom there is no need to obscure evidence of my faults or signs of my strengths. People who fit me, as I fit them, with an ease that is all the more precious because it is so rare. Their names are unimportant except to me, and they are the music of my soul: Jean, Susan, Audrey, Susan, Marvin, Ellie, Julian, Bob, Deborah, Christina, Jim, Cheryl, Lu. My children, Sarah and Josh. I am exceptionally blessed to include them in my family of kindred spirits.

Each of them is a person who, best that can be done, walks his or her walk with great integrity, authenticity, truth, and compassion at the core of their lives. Each one has a generous heart, extended toward not only me but many others. They are good people, quietly helping the world be a little better for the difference he or she can make to the life of another adult or child. They suffer few illusions about themselves, about me, or about what one must experience in the course of a life fully inhabited and well lived. They teach through their actions toward others as well as their words. They are not afraid to say what needs to be said for truth to be known, yet each has learned to speak truth in a manner that heals and reconciles rather than divides. They are peacemakers, my people, each in a way unique to her or to him.

We have learned a few things together. One is that we are not the only ones who search for an acceptance that truly welcomes the other into our embrace, warts and all. All of us long to find “our people,” some of us more consciously and intentionally than others. Another lesson is that “our people” come in all forms, and we cannot predict what form a kindred spirit might take before knocking at the door of our lives. Therefore, it only makes sense to welcome everyone. Politically, I have always lived on the liberal edge of the middle, and so have many of my friends. In the course of finding my people, I have been surprised to discover one of them was anything but liberal. We were cozy in conversation one night early in our relationship, when he put an arm around me and eased me close. Relaxing into the warmth of his embrace, I watched a thought flit by, and spoke it out loud. “Just tell me you’re not a Republican,” I murmured into his soft sweater, barely audible, even to myself. The pause between my question and his answer was vibrating with paradox, as my assumptions abruptly collided with reality.

“I’m a Republican,” he responded thoughtfully. “Is that going to be a problem?” Well, yes! Of course, it’s a problem. I don’t open my heart this way to Republicans. I twisted around to protest what I was sure was a joke being tried out on me. It wasn’t a joke. There, in that kind and gentle face, in that endearing smile, was one of my people. No use denying it. Nothing to do but drop my assumptions. In one enchanting moment, I discovered that—for all my years of spiritual practice, all the efforts made inside me to release people from categories that divide us, all my talk about the importance of welcoming those who are different, learned in adolescence, carried into adulthood—I still held a hard edge around people whose political perspective was “other” than mine. He smiled, waiting for me to recognize him as one of my people, wanting me to love him because of our differences, not in spite of them. Waiting for me to walk my talk, no less than I wanted from him. Wanting me to release my attachments to form. Wanting me to become one of his people too.

I could almost hear the shattering of my illusions. In the middle of this stricken moment, with no warning, I burst out laughing. I looked at his beautiful face, so filled with compassion…and laughed until I shook out all the hard edges still clinging to my spirit. He was, is, always will be, one of my people…and his politics only serve to teach me how to listen for the viewpoint of the holy other. How could I not be grateful for the lesson?

This ragtag group of people—men and women, adults and children, straight and gay, old and young, poor and wealthy, liberals and conservatives—are my pod, my people, my family of the heart. They’re the ones who take me in when I’m cast out, who come to my door when they need to be welcomed, who talk truth to me when I’m dancing with illusion, who listen when I straight talk with them. It isn’t easy being a pod, and most of them not even knowing each other. It isn’t easy to find each other, if my struggle tells the tale. We wait for long periods, and then…surprise! Someone enters our lives who speaks the language of my heart, or yours, and we are immediately at home inside ourselves again. This time, not so lonely. This time, in the presence of another soul whose heart lights up when we walk into the room.

The day the sunlight struck the water in precisely the right way for us to see beneath the surface to the pod of manatees floating there, seems a metaphor for the process of seeking and finding our pod. Sometimes, when the shadows of everyday reality part at the right moment, we can see another person standing before us in their holy splendor. Another day, at another time, the density of our own awareness might obfuscate the sight.

So I try to welcome the moments I can: discovering one of my people; delighting in the gifts each brings to me; learning what there is to be learned from that person; teaching what’s mine to teach; loving them when I’m not furious at the ways they disrupt my predictable life and mess with my illusions.

Then I kiss them, I bless them…and, when it’s time, I let them go.


~~~~~~


• Who are “your people?” Who is included in your pod? Write their names, and sit quietly with the list. Bless each one. Be grateful that you have found, and made a place for, each other in your lives.

• Who might you be screening out—by age, religion, appearance—as I screened out Republicans? Where are your hard edges toward others who might have gifts to bring into your life? Meditate on softening them. What happens when you accept someone totally unanticipated as a friend or close companion? What beliefs change in you as a result of this holy surprise?

• Among your pod, is there anyone who is ready to move on? Are you holding that person back? What would it take to let him or her go?

• What are the unspoken truths you hold in common with the members of your pod?