Tag: stillness

Solitude’s Recompense

More than eight billion souls rise each morning to breathe another day—many of them lonely. While others seem to rollick in life’s plentitude, they feel left out.

Loneliness has many strands. Ultimately, it’s feeling you’re disconnected. Or like the world’s hung up on you.

Loss is loneliness’ common denominator. It comes in many currencies: loved ones who’ve died or drifted away, a romance gone sour, schoolmates reduced to memory, a job that vanished overnight, aging, the slow erosion of health

According to a Gallup/Meta survey, 25% of people in 140 countries experience loneliness “very or fairly often.” In the USA, 1 in 3.

Loneliness can be grievous. Even fatal. There seems to be a herd instinct governing human behavior. We like togetherness. Like cows in a pasture, we like facing in the same direction.

And yet the paradox: you can feel most alone in a crowd, the noise of others drowning out your pulse. For introverts like me, solitude grants restoration, not exile. My happiest moments have often come in silence: in a garden, along a woodland path, or beside a pounding shore.

A few days ago, I wrote of three places I’ve been that have sustained me, each of them granting solitude—a chance to reflect, to locate myself, to fish in life’s stream, that rare chance to glimpse Eternity.

Recently, I’ve found someone, Scott Stillman, who shares my love for solitude, writing eight splendid books on this theme. He has a way of putting things:

you are not broken for needing stillness

you are not flawed for shrinking from noise

your mind is simply attuned to something different

something more aligned with the quiet current

that flows beneath all of existence

Three Places I Remember Most: Reveries in Stillness


There are three places I’ve been that I’ve loved the most, but not in the way most travelers recount their memories.

Each remains a palpable memory, not because they yielded an Eiffel Tower, Cancun beach, or haute cuisine New York restaurant; but on the contrary, a stunning silence, sweeping me out of myself and a landscape weighted with human duplicity.

In those moments I floated, unmoored from gravity, a wanderer among the stars —part of everything that has been or ever will be, glimpsing eternity beneath all mortal breath, my entrance into epiphany.

It happened first for me years ago at Arlington National Cemetery, the white rows glimmering in the rays of early morning sun.

The second at Kitty Hawk, where the Wright brothers’ fragile dream first lifted from the earth. I stood alone, wombed in stillness, as if the air itself remembered that first exultant rise.

Most memorable of all, traveling eastward from Edinburgh, and suddenly they unfurled, the Highlands, spectacular in their rolling verdure. I stepped from the car into a silence so immense it seemed alive.

In its haunting stillness, I understood Emily Brontë’s fierce passion for the Yorkshire moors, resounding in her poetry and prose:

“you are not broken for needing stillness
you are not flawed for shrinking from noise
your mind is simply attuned to something different
something more aligned with the quiet current
that flows beneath all of existence.”

Like Emily, I exalt in that stillness, shaking hands with Eternity.

Poetry is Truth in Sunday Clothes

quietnessWe live busy lives and often it seems difficult to take time out, catch our breath, and maybe just reassess whether what we’re chasing is worth our time and worry.

In a frenetic world, we probably all have a favorite way of finding sanctuary–perhaps taking time off, or traveling to some idyllic spot, or just off to a meal out or a movie with sweetheart or family, or maybe indulging in a hobby or interest. Me, I like gardening.

I know one thing–we all need time-out, moments when we can drench ourselves in silence and apartness, returning renewed and, just maybe, wiser–the gift of self-reflection when we glimpse where we’ve been, and are, and where we need to go.

Cultivating quietness long term means we have to work at it, just like other good things in life. They say practice makes perfect. I don’t know about that, but I do know it makes things better.

Some find meditation important in gaining equilibrium, and I can endorse that, particularly the Zen kind with its focus on mindfulness that affords me access into myself without my need to control.

Lately, I’ve added poetry to ways I can augment my need to exit life’s speedway. I bathe in its wisdom, marvel at its concision, the depths of psyche it plums, its mellifluous stream of words, the cornucopia of  tumbling imagery that makes me see again things I’ve missed or erringly tossed or lost in my life’s journey.

We busy ourselves in a world often filled with self-centeredness and aggressiveness that, if we’re not careful, can dull our humanity and turn our hearts to stone. Poetry helps us keep the wolves at bay–the world’s and our own–and with our best self, love and hope again.

Poetry does it all so well.

As poet Joseph Roux marvelously puts it, “Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.”

I like that, and I think you will, too.

–rj