The Firmament Behind the Stars
Friendship, community, great gifts, and good reads.
With so many new readers here, I wanted to say hello and welcome!
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Read on for contemplations on friendship, the next installment in our “letting go” series, and a 25% discount on subscriptions.
Through the spring and into the summer, Andrew and I shimmied through an ongoing dialogue about friendship and community. About place and home. It was a conversation that wove through our days: a few words while brushing our teeth; a thought shared over breakfast, inspired by a book I was reading or a podcast he was listening to. We’d been unspooling our ideas slowly, a gentle background susurrus, like the sounds of an ocean or distant freeway. Maybe this conversation would eventually lead to us making some big life changes… but maybe not.
Then Hurricane Helene slammed into Western North Carolina and community was no longer a theoretical concept. We quickly learned who in our cove was good with a chainsaw, who had a working well, and which houses had satellite internet.
Our home is in the woods just below the Blue Ridge Parkway in Asheville, North Carolina. The driveway is a quarter-mile climb. We can’t see the road from the house. And we moved here from downtown three months before Covid.
All this to say, we don’t really have neighbors with whom we regularly rub elbows. Living in urban neighborhoods, we were in and out of neighbor’s homes for a cup of tea, to help choose paint from the swatches hung on the dining room wall, or to borrow a tire pump or a leaf blower or a cup of rice. We didn’t need to be friends to do this; we just needed to be neighbors. The neighborhood provided a loose web of connections we could count on.
By contrast, during Covid, I would walk for hours through the woods here without seeing another soul. We would say hi to the other dog walkers as we passed them on the street but that was often the extent of our interactions. Coming into the hurricane days, we didn’t even know most people’s names. At a neighborhood meeting, the kind we had daily when the power and water were out, a woman I had met right after we moved here said to me, “I’m sorry we never made more of a connection. First there was Covid and then, well your driveway is so long. When I walk by, I can’t see whether or not you’re home and it’s just too much effort to walk up.” Which is fair… because that’s how I feel standing in the road looking up her driveway and wondering if I should hike up to say hello.
What we began to realize, as we ran up and down our driveway seventeen times a day to deliver water from our well or help in chainsaw gangs or just hang out down by the road to see other humans, was that having community was not the same as having friends. Friends were the bright lights in the sky, but community was the firmament. Friends you want to like— you want to feel in some way sympatico. But community is a different beast. It’s not so much about liking as it is about understanding the gifts each person brings to the larger group and respecting them for their contribution.
As Andrew and I began to parse this out, we realized that while we have friends, we don’t currently have a sense of community.
Which brings me to our work of releasing and letting go. This is seasonal work: we are syncing ourselves with the ebb and flow of energy in the natural world. We are seeing what we look like when all our leaves fall away.
This week we join Inanna at the fifth gate where she is asked to lay down her armband. In ancient times, an armband was worn as a sign of your tribe. This gate asks us to reflect on the question: who are your people and who are you without them?
Think of family, friends, neighbors, work colleagues: who are the bright stars and who are the firmament? What do all these different relationships mean in your life? What would it feel like to be without them?
(Andrew and I have realized that we don’t actually like how our lives feel without a strong sense of community.)
Scroll down for more contemplations and a way to ritualize this moment
You can find the other legs of this journey of letting go at these links:
A few essays on friendship and community to explore (if you feel like it!):
And a reminder:
December 17 is the last post before I take a (brief!) break to relax into these dark days.
So in next week’s post, I will include a PDF of the entire journey and post a video talking you through the final steps of this seasonal ritual for paid subscribers.
I will pre-schedule short posts on December 24 and December 31 so those who aren't paid subscribers can complete the journey.
Please note that I will not be replying to comments on Substack or answering emails from the winter solstice through New Year’s day.
25% Off Paid Subscriptions through December
When I offer a discount, I know there’s likely to be someone who paid full price right before the discount went into effect and who might be smarting at having paid full price. The only way around this is to never offer discounts, which would be sad for all those who can’t afford to join us otherwise. I always strive to make the content worth it, no matter what price you paid.
What is a subscription? A subscription is an energy exchange— I put energy into the creation of Something True, you offer some energy back to sustain the project (and me!).
And now our final questions and a ritual…
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