Where We Can Meet

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

Rumi

I have recently finished listening to the novel, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.  I cannot recommend it more highly.  I’m sure reading it from the page would have a similar effect, but listening to it on Audible brings the story to life.  The narrators do an incredible job of capturing the unique personality, the tone, the timing, the emotional depth, or the lack thereof, of each character.  Over time, their voices become familiar, recognizable.  And without knowing it, you, as the reader, find yourself insatiable to learn more about each one.

The book is about a woman who, from an early age, found that through writing letters – and later – email messages, she was best able to express herself.  She felt most comfortable in the world of words.  You soon realize that Sybil, the protagonist, is a precise person, a person of propriety and purpose.  In your mind’s eye, you can just see her sitting there at her writing desk with her favorite pens and paper set neatly in place.

What I like most about the book is the way Evans skillfully reveals more and more about each character, especially Sybil.  It’s like the unfurling of the paper-like petals of a peony, its fat, bulbous head transmuting into the delicacy of a multi-layered fan.  At the beginning of the book, Sybil appears to be more focused on doing things correctly – both her doing and everyone else’s – than in personal engagement or heartfelt connection.  So, she comes across as rigid, cold, and uncaring.  By the end of the book, after all is laid bare, Sybil has become accessibly human, riddled with flaws, guilt-ridden by irreparable mistakes and at the same time, remarkably gracious and generous.  What I like most about the book is how Sybil represents the worst and the best about what it means to be human.  She plays out that truism:  When you get to know a person well enough, when you are allowed to go beneath the surface of actions to their underlying  motivations, you can’t help but have your heart open to them.  That does  not mean, of course that because you open your heart to them, you should not set appropriate boundaries, rather you are given the opportunity to hold a space of mutual respect and compassion.

In The Correspondent,  Evans takes us on that journey of discovering the deepest truth of all of us.  And when we get there, our own humanness is reflected back at us, and we discover Rumi’s hallowed meeting place, that field out beyond wrong-doing and right-doing.