boom.

       "There is a tension in living fully, what often feels like a opposition between our longing for the solitude where we can find our own company and the desire to be fully and intimately with the world.  When we learn to live with both the desire for separation and the longing for union, we find that they are simply two ways of knowing the same ache: we all just want to go home.

Some days,  solitude is an impossibility.  Caught up in the activities of daily living, i ache for my own company and am filled with a  sorrow that makes me weep when i cannot find it.

       And at other times, i do too much and run too fast deliberately, unconsciously hoping to avoid the cool and steady gaze of myself.Sometimes i don't like keeping company with myself so i fill the empty moments with TV, or work, or a book, or time with another. it takes courage to be willing to meet myself over and over again, seeing in my own face more beauty and grace and ability to love that i had hoped for , more judgment and impatience and need than i had feared.  I forget that it does not matter how far or how fast i move, but only how much of myself i take along for the journey.

       If i do not find a way to regularly create a place in my life for time that is empty, when nothing is scheduled or expected or reached for so i can be with myself, my glands swell, warning of an impeding descent into illness, calling me back to stillness.  

And sometimes, when i find that sweet solitude, i hear warnings about isolation.  Some summers, when i was alone in the wilderness, content in my tiny trailer at the edge of the lake, i would not speak to or see another human being for weeks. There, i could slow it all down.  I felt power of life being lived around and within me. I became like a sun-warmed rock in the center of the stream. The water parted around me, danced in Spirals, and flowed on, gently wearing away all my sharp edges.

Once a man who was my lover and friend, and wanted to be something more, came to see me there unexpectedly.  I had just split an armload of wood and was carrying it into the trailer as he appeared.  He stayed only briefly. Later he told me, " when i came down the driveway and saw you standing there with the wood in your arms, your face glowing from the wind off the lake and the effort of chopping wood, i thought," she belongs to this place. She's at home here, alone in the bush. She's not missing me, she doesn't need me here.' I felt like an intruder.

His observation surprised me.  I heard the voice of my mother warning, "You are to independent. Don't get to good at being alone or you'll end up by yourself. Everyone needs someone".

Her fear finds a small corner in me, but i resist the idea that i will be with another only to avoid being alone. Surely, the ability to truly be with myself does not exclude the willingness to fully be with another. I do not seek isolation. The longing for another remains even when i am able to be with myself, although it is smaller, a whisper that tugs at me gently. Even there, in my place of solitude in the wilderness, i found myself at moments wanting to turn to someone and share my awe at the brilliance of the full moon on the still water, the delight of watching the otters playing at the edge of the stream.  But the loneliness was bittersweet and bearable because i knew myself and the world in a way i sometimes do not when i let my life become to full of doing things that do not really need to be done."

-Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Invitation, p. 129-130