In This Solitude I Am Anything But Alone

For the last seven months I have been in solitude. Last fall I ended a partnership and started the most arduous, intense writing project I’ve yet tackled; a memoir about belonging, initiation and beauty through the lens of my older son’s heroin addiction. I was heading into a coveted six-week writing sabbatical and had already been wondering how to protect my schedule upon my return, to stay focused on the memoir until I had a solid first draft. I’d decided that after I returned from my all-too-short sabbatical I would keep my life pared down – only seeing the number of clients required to cover my bills. As a so-called introvert I’ve never been an avid socializer and yet, I also committed to doing only two social engagements per month.  

(A caveat for those who really DO live in solitude: while in comparison to the average human in my town of Boulder CO I am a veritable hermit, I don’t live what I would call a solitary life. It’s more like the kind of Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ solitude given that I spend three days during the week welcoming people into my home to sit with them as a mentor and guide. While my home is situated at the edge of town next to fields that extend to the mountains, I’m still in the suburbs just a few yards from my neighbors. Also, I have cherished, deeply intimate relationships including my two adult sons, with whom I spend regular time. This time spent with them does not factor into the scheduled socializing I’ve alotted myself. With these people my soul is fed in every moment.)

These last seven months have been a kind of Earthly heaven I did not know was possible. A new experience for this introverted spirit of mine and, up until seven months ago, entirely foreign to me. Up until seven months ago I have been partnered and/or mothering – and for many years both at once – since I was seventeen. This year I will turn 58. Forty-one years of a kind of focus on others that is now free to listen, to reshape its ears, to rediscover The World.

In our disfigured culture of self-imposed orphaning, many would say I’m alone. And yet, in this period of prolonged solitude I have experienced more moments of intimacy than perhaps ever before. Those of you who know me know this is saying a lot. Perhaps it’s even unbelievable. I am known for my capacity to be intimate, to get right in there, to see into the depths, to hear what isn’t being said as it booms cacophonously in my ears, to fall deeply in love with someone as soon as I experience a moment of soulful depth with them. And still…these last seven months of vastly more quiet, more space and no intimate tending of other humans under my roof have been one miraculous moment after another. Moments that happen unpredictably, like when I’m opening the oven to put the chicken to roast, or taking the garbage bins out to the street, or opening my eyes in the morning to stare into the dear dark eyes of twenty-six pound Snugs, the yearling terrier who is the newest addition to my ragtag pack. I hope it’s obvious to the reader that not a single one of these moments involves another human. Deliberately. Necessarily.

In fact, I have never felt less alone than in these last seven months. To put it even more accurately, I have never felt more intimately connected, more essentially companioned, than in these last seven months. Certainly, I have had my moments, when the deepest and most tender of my girlhood woundings has gotten so hopelessly stirred up. These moments always in response to the relentless and sinister messaging – overt and covert both, from the man-made society around me – that there must be something wrong with me that not only am I spending so much time not with other humans, but that I am deeply nourished here in this place. A woman of value is never unpartnered, man-made society tells me. A person of value is one who runs from one social engagement to another (or from one social media post to another), barely able to keep up with the demands for her presence and attention…what does it mean about YOU that you are here kneeling in your garden, talking to yourself amongst the squash and bean starts? Of course, the eyes of the man-made world cannot see or hear who I’m talking to in my garden, all around me in plentitude, everyone sharing their stories of what happened last night – those marauding racoons! – and some serious complaining about who is getting too close to whom in a garden I way over-planted in my typical early-Spring delirium.  

May Sarton writes on the importance of ‘being alone’ describing exactly what I’m experiencing, going as far as to call her solitary life her “real” life. After seven months in this unwitting experiment, I’m a convert. Once I dared step out of the shape of Partner and graduated from the shape of Mother, The World was right here, waiting for me. (Note: when I say ‘The World’ I am referring to the larger, wilder, more intelligent world; the one we come from; the one to which we owe everything; the one to which our bodies will return, though that implies that we ever left, which we did not; where the Ancestors and all that is unseen but very much still present and participating lives; Dreams and the Dreammaker; The Mystery; The Anima Mundi. This is an animist World, where everything is an everyone, with souls and unfolding stories of their own, all playing out in an intricate inextricable, magnificent, generative drama - Life.) Once I quieted myself, reorienting myself away from the man-made world, The World found me even more fully than it ever had before. For the first time in my life, I stood unobstructed and (mostly) undistracted. No longer otherwise occupied with the daily intimate wellbeing of other humans, I began to take a shape recognizable to The World. A drastic restructuring to be sure. Many things fell away, including more than fifteen pounds, as if I wanted – needed – to make myself as receptive and porous as possible, to feel the myriad ways The World would make contact with me. 

There have been moments, like yesterday morning’s unfolding, where I find myself in terrain of such intimacy I feel I cannot take any more. My developmental editor and writing coach had given me the task of printing the memoir and reading through what has become an unwieldy 400 pages of writing, to take an inventory of the story so far. As I read I found myself in the midst of a conversation – you could say – with Belonging. Or perhaps it was a conversation with The Mystery about belonging. It got raucous. Confusing. Deep. More voices chimed in as the morning’s rain poured from the sky and the landscape appeared and disappeared behind shrouds of mist processing like specters across the impossibly green fields. Like we were all sitting around a table in a loud old-world pub passionately arguing, attentively listening, at times like heated debaters, at other times like relay racers on the same team, passing the baton of an idea to run all-out with it for the next quarter mile before passing it on, breathless and spent, to the next one of us who was ready to take belonging further.

 At one point I realized I wasn’t breathing and tears were rolling down my face from the intimacy of this moment, from the generative collaborative landscape I had found myself in. Ideas I could not have, would never have, come up with on my own were swirling in the verdant maelstrom of our galloping. My breathless tears simply the only thing I could possibly offer in exchange for the generous nourishment of such awe and beauty. Such brilliance that exists beyond the endless talking about ideas that we humans seem to do, as if our capacity to talk about someone else’s ideas means anything worthy about ourselves, as if talking about things accrues a kind of social capital.

 No, this was like being there in the Great Cosmic Hall when The Universe was contemplating whether or not it would create Earth, as if those I am in conversation with (or whose conversations I am offered the honor of overhearing) have the power to open doors to new worlds where the questions live. Not just any questions, the embodied numinous and mysterious questions whose purpose might not be to be answered but rather simply to be lived. As if the information I receive from here is the final word. Or perhaps it’s the first word. Our belonging is immutable. We belong. The rupture is that we have forgotten our belonging. Okay, then, what is belonging? Is it a being? A state of being? Speaking as an Animist, maybe Belonging is an elemental individual, like Air, Water, Earth, with a soul and an unfolding story of its own? In the ecological world everything has a partner in the form of an opposite – like Life & Death, forces always occur in pairs. What is the equal opposite of Belonging? If our belonging is a given, immutable, how can it have an opposing force? What if it is not belonging that has an opposing force, but our experience of our belonging?   

I have had many thrilling, vibrant and generative conversations with humans. And as wonderful as many of those have been, they have not been like this. This only happens for me when I am without human company. Where I diverge from Sarton and others who write about the importance of ‘being alone’ is that, to me, it is wholly inaccurate, in fact arrogant and disrespectful, to use the word alone. In these last seven months, I have been so many things but never have I been alone. It’s as if by minimizing my human contact, by making my human world much smaller, The World got immeasurably bigger, more present, louder. It makes sense to me. My experience of the human world – beginning as early as age seven – is that we humans have deliberately orphaned ourselves from The World. We have sterilized and sequestered all that is not ‘safe’ and predictable. We have turned ourselves into creatures barely recognizable to The World, even as our impact on The World, not surprisingly, grows exponentially. We have constructed a world within The World, a nearly impenetrable prison that we perceive as a fortress. To step outside those walls, to step away from the barrage of social noise, to allow ourselves to quite naturally take a different shape by moving into extended periods of quiet solitude, is at least one step in our rehumanizing and healing. Outside the prison things might get raucous, as they did this morning for me. But even here it feels so very different from the blaring relentless noise of the human world. The sound of The World is like a symphony, like a jungle after a rainstorm or the night sky on a new moon. So many conversations. So much wisdom. And I can feel myself a part of it.  

Many artists speak of the requirement of ‘being alone’, of solitude and quiet (as in, without human others or their invented landscapes) in order to deliver what is ours to offer to The World. As a person who has always been deeply fed by the non-human world, I would never have disputed this. As a mentor devoted to nurturing our belonging, it is a doctrine I preach. While the man-made world is a deliberately anti-soul landscape, it is our souls (as opposed to our egos, our man-made personalities) who are findable to The World. And still, I could not have imagined the bounty awaiting me, simply of my own creativity, curiosity and capacity in these last several months. Nor could I have imagined the generosity of The World, as if I am not just welcome, but an essential part of the continued unfolding.

Thomas Berry speaks of inscendence – the opposing action to our almighty transcendence – which finds us spelunking down in a “descent to our pre-rational, our instinctive resources.” Inscendence is what we must do to assist in the co-creation of a sustainable human culture. “We must go back to the genetic imperative from which human cultures emerged originally and from which they can never be separated without losing their integrity and their survival capacity.” I imagine what I’m up to over here in my current solitary quiet version of deep non-ordinary listening is the tricycle to Berry’s inscendence. Perhaps the humble yet necessary first step. I have replaced the daily mundane conversations between humans (which can be lovely and even soulful, but they are happening between two humans) with the quiet, spontaneous, mysterious conversations with the other-than-humans. And that has allowed for an access to my own spontaneous, mysterious nature I have not experienced, at least since I was five or six and still in my original love affair with The World.  

I don’t know how long I will be able to stay in this quieter solitude. At least the way I have done it, it’s not kind to the bank account! But I do know that this place feels like the fertile ground from which our most important work will sprout. And so, I am going to attempt to weave my love of weaving with my certainty that vibrant, generative community (human and other-than-human together) will be what heals us, with an invitation to come be in this quieter solitude, together. If you’re curious, you can read more about that here.

In the meantime, I will close my computer and return my attention, the ears of my soul, back to the conversations happening beneath the noise; the ones between the squashes and the beans, the meadowlark and the field grasses, and my own hungry soul and that of The World.