Of Cages and Cures

"Go build yourself a hut, and there begin

 the grand process of devouring yourself alive.

I see no other alternative, no other hope for you." 

 

~ Ellery Channing to Henry David Thoreau

 

Replica of Thoreau's Cabin

Original Cabin Site on Walden Pond

 

"Self-care" is a term tossed around today in a variety of different ways. As I said in a post below, I am sort inoculated to the term and have no real fondness for it. When you practice self-care, you are generally making an attempt to improve your physical and emotional health, but what that looks like remains up for debate because it varies vastly from person to person.

 

When Thoreau's friend Ellery Channing says "go devour yourself... I see no other hope for you," we are certainly left to wonder if peering through the lens of self-care if this wasn't perhaps some bad advice. Now, we can argue that it worked out alright for Thoreau, tuberculosis aside. But imagine with me that you've just heard a professional counselor give this bit of advice to an intelligent, melancholy man who arrived in his/her office with emotional and intellectual restlessness.

 

Hard to imagine, yes? Go devour yourself? Retreat from human spaces into the cages of your own mind? Isolate yourself to your books and your writing? None of that seems to much like "self-care." The potential to dig oneself deeper into the hole feels completely plausible.

 

One of the reasons I believe a general malaise has fallen across our culture is that we tend to see comfort as a cure rather than a cage. Medication is prescribed to "relieve" the discomfort that we feel, or sometimes that others feel, due to our mental or emotional conditions. The thought of devouring ourselves never really occurs to us and certainly isn't treated as a prescribed course of action.

 

This trip was not only an experience of a lifetime for me, created for me to absorb the thoughts of dead poets and writers in a state of appreciative bliss -- it was also designed to be self-care. Up to this point, I've been trying to blog about my visits (and I have at least two more to do - one on the Poe house and another on the Twain house), but with my trip now complete it seems only fair to address the second half of this blog's title: The Oddities of Self-Care.

 

How is swimming in Walden Pond or reading Leaves of Grass at the tomb of Walt Whitman self-care? In one aspect, I believe my trip has fed my cage just as much as it has fed a cure. Like Thoreau, I often feel as though I have no other choice but to devour myself in musing and writings of great men gone by... in that sense, I've just spent one week feeding my cage.

 

Watching the sun rise while floating on my back in Walden Pond, watching that last star get absorbed in a curtain of light, watching the surface of the lake transform into a canopy of mist heightened by the first rays of sun -- there is no substitute for an experience like that. I was so cold in there, as it was about 55 degrees outside and most of my body was miserable and aching; my wet head jutted upward into the cold mist only heightened the physical discomfort I was feeling. But I didn't want to leave... it certainly felt Divine and I started to wonder if perhaps "there was no other hope for me." I fed the cage and wanted to stay in the woods forever, to turn my back on man and live alone with Nature.

 

On the other hand though, I believe this trip helped to define the kind of pastor I will become. I did leave the pond and will continue leaving a thousand ponds hereafter. The temptation is to believe that I am somehow unique in this regard, but nothing could be further from the truth. All of us have that listless wandering grafted into our souls; all of us look for the tender retreats. We all want a Garden of Eden. Carving out spiritual spaces to swim freely, shameless, and naked before all of God and creation seems not so far fetched a calling. Taking our man-made things, our tendency to hide from both God and ourselves, burying ourselves away in the tombs of our technologies, all of it can often serve as a veil we wear over the deeper parts of who we are and what we were each born to do: to enjoy God and reveal His character, image, and likeness in our own brief lives.

 

I am tempted to list out in bullet form the kinds of things this trip has revealed about me, and I'd like to believe, about all of us as human beings... but I'm not going to. I will blog a bit more and to any who take the time, I think some of that list will appear wedged within the paragraphs. In the meantime though, it will suffice me enough to say that there are many cages and many cures both within our hearts and outside them in popular culture.

 

Sometimes the cures lie at the very bottom of who we are. Sometimes we have to eat our way there; and the sustenance of such a meal is not without cost. But then again, nothing worth having is without cost. And maybe that's the true meaning of self-care.