My Person

"These are my people."

"He's my person."

During the last few years, I've said, and heard said, statements like these.  What we mean when we claim people as ours may be: This is my tribe.  These are the people who share my core beliefs, my politics, my values, maybe a similar history. These are the people with whom I can be real, who--even if we are separated by time or geography--will pick up right where we left off next time we're together.  We belong to the same tribe, and we usually feel a sense of recognition when we meet.

What we mean when we claim one person as belonging to us may be: This is the person in the world who most gets me--and vice versa.  This is my best friend, my beloved, my soulmate, my most trusted confidante, the one person I "can call at three in the morning."   Most people desire to be and have one person to count on, someone with whom we can reveal our deepest longings, secrets, opinions, weird habits, and terrors.

Anais Nin was a prolific diarist.  In one of her diaries, written in the early 1930s, she wrote: “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”  Likewise, when the friend who is a "world in us" goes away, for whatever reasons, a part of the world we counted on vanishes with them.  Among other things, we miss who we were with that person.

Romantic and religious songs through the ages reflect the longing for friendship and love, however we define those:

My one and only love....
You light up my life....
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine....
He walks with me and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own....
I will follow him....
Wherever he leads I'll go....
My World is Empty Without You....

In 1965, the Righteous Brothers sang "Unchained Melody" to audiences of screaming teenaged fans.  How many of us fell in love to this song, danced to it, believed it, wanted exactly that when we heard it?  How many of us married because of it?

In 1990, Ghost came to the big screen, starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore.  By then, those of us who had fallen in love to "Unchained Melody" 25 year earlier, even if we were no longer true believers, still cried as we watched that unforgettable scene at the potter's wheel.

Set anything to music and it gets permanently embedded.  We can hear one bar and can sing along all the way to the end.

In the Baptist churches in which I grew up, people got saved to religious music.  To love songs, we got married, followed him, made promises.

Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is not a religious song, yet it has all the lifts and falls and harmonies of one, the tone evoking something familiar.

"It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift..."

Whitney Houston's "The Greatest Love of All" is not about love for another person, but "learning to love yourself"--yet it has the feeling and tone of romantic songs.

So who are my people?  Everyone reading this for sure.

Who is my one person?  Is it myself?  Is it the handsome imaginary bearded man who showed up in my dream last night?  

I don't have a closing point here, no an answer to those questions.  Instead, I'll close with the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, the early-20th-centure poet:


        "...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."