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'The Grace of Solitude'
Overlook, Back River, Georgetown Island, ME
solitude
like a door
moving between self and other
opening and closing -
yet nothing moves
For much of my life, I suffered intense loneliness. This neediness made me unwisely vulnerable. I felt much in need of being loved - until loneliness became solitude. I am not saying I never feel lonely now; yet, that is not a problem - it just is, and I mean that not as a platitude but as a truth. Loneliness arises in the atmosphere of aloneness and dissolves back into solitude. Solitude is not an absence; it is a fullness. Aloneness is not a loss; it is a gift. I have been graced with solitude.
* * *
The River de Chute runs behind my apartment in northeastern Maine - what is called the Crown of Maine. It flows eastward adjacent to the Canadian border and crosses into the province of New Brunswick in two miles. My proprietor told me he had cleared a path in the deep snow on the descent down to the river. He said, "I see you like to go down there." "Yes," I replied, "it's a sanctuary." There I enjoy aloneness. The solitude is accompanied by the sound of the river flowing, the feel of the chilly air, and the spacious landscape of snow, trees, and hills. There, I am alone and not alone. And when I walk back up from the river sanctuary, I am alone and not alone. It is the same aloneness, the same solitude.
* * *
The spiritual life is a falling in love wherein one keeps falling. In this falling, one is totally alone. Being totally alone, one is in love everywhere, whether apart in solitude or among others in solitude. The solitude makes being alone aloneness, not isolation, not privacy. The solitude is endless, for the togetherness is endless. This solitude is the spaciousness making such kindness and compassion possible. This love feels less loving, yet, thereby, is loving. Hence, we cannot separate love, being alone, and being among others - these three are one. If I flee this aloneness, I flee love, and even in my being among others, I am fleeing them in my attachment to them. I can most love them when my solitude touches their solitude - a single solitude.
* * *
Paul Tillich -
Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone. Solitude expresses the glory of being alone. The innermost nature of solitude is the presence of the eternal upon the crowded roads of the temporal.
*The Eternal Now.
Thomas Merton -
One thing has suddenly hit me, that nothing counts except love and that a solitude that is not simply the wide-openness of love and freedom is nothing.
*Mark Shaw. Beneath the Mask of Holiness: Thomas Merton and the Forbidden Love Affair that Set Him Free.
* * *
An outline of a Face
Traced in the dark
An astronomer cannot track that line
From star to star
All I can do is keep falling
And fall some more
The Moon keeps calling me to Herself
And night shrouds the gate to Paradise
With this Not-Knowing
such joy does not make sense:
"What a relief!" -
Friend, you are so funny!
"Brian, thanks for noticing."
*Brian K. Wilcox. "Falling." Jan 16.2010.
* * *
Cynthia Bourgeault, in Love is Stronger than Death, reflects on her spiritually intimate relationship with the monk Rafe -
At any rate, this is the path I am walking, and the road map insofar as I am able to understand it. But I am reminded of Rafe's words, in one of those times of forgiveness after the storm, "I tried to give it a shape, but it has no shape. All I can do is open my heart more and more deeply."
* * *
We keep falling, letting the heart open wider to Life. We reach a point where we cannot not fall. As long as we are falling in love, that is what we most need to know - just that. Whatever else we need to know, we will when we need to. We only fall now; we only know now. So, we keep falling day-by-day and trust Life to unveil, in due time, what we need to see - that we cannot see, for we do not need now to see and may never need to see. And to see is not necessarily to understand; to see is to know. The more I fall, the less I understand, and the more I know - until what I most want is to see, to be awake to and intimate with Life. Nothing and no one is excluded from Life.
* * *
*(C) Brian K. Wilcox, 2021
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse. The book is a collection of poems based on mystical traditions, especially Christian and Sufi, with extensive notes on the teachings and imagery in the poetry.
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