"I have a need for solitude
I never feel peace
in crowded rooms.
I like the sound
of silence coming on..."
I never feel peace
in crowded rooms.
I like the sound
of silence coming on..."
The following, remarkable photo taken by my friend, Todd Herzer, was the perfect reminder to revisit the following post from 2010 - about my once, insatiable need for solitude.
Sometimes re-visiting the depths of my own spiritual journey starts with a photograph or a song. Mary Chapin Carpenter has sung me down many a dusty road. With my hands on the wheel, sobbing, driving hard and fast just to get away from the sadness, her songs have been the answer to my prayers for a song that will make me feel less alone.
Her CD "The Age of Miracles," was borne on the wings of her own "miraculous" adventure through a life-threatening health-related crisis. A wilderness experience that led her into a period of what she characterized as" painful depression, fear, and anxiety."
The lyrical content of this CD is masterful, sobering, intuitive, and deeply moving. What it takes me hundreds of words to hint at, she hammers home with three verses. When married to her musical vision, it is a CD that makes my heart weep, sing, and soar. Her songs have always reminded me that I am not alone on this wilderness path.
There are cuts on this CD that I can't help but listen to with my eyes closed. It is almost as if I am remembering how it felt to have lived through the moments that gave the song birth. She is singing from her own experience, but like a tuning fork, it is resonating with my own.
There is one song that, when I read its title, "I Have a Need for Solitude," I couldn't help but wonder if we weren't actually "twin daughters of different mothers."
For me, solitude is not just a refreshing interruption from the otherwise social norms of people and events. Solitude is my natural habitat -- like salt water to a sea anemone. I need it.
It is the oxygen I begin to gasp for, after a long day of truly wonderful conversations, and deeply inspiring interactions with people who I truly love. And it has only been by the grace of God, that I have learned to accept and appreciate the importance of these shifting levels of aloneness in my life. But that was not always the case.
There was a time when I seemed to need solitude in a way that was almost crippling. My need to be alone felt insistent.
There were days when taking our daughters to school, or having people come into our home, was terrifying. It was as if the sound of other people's voices, their shapes slicing through the changing light, the movement of air, the rustling of atmospheric ions as they stole from room-to-room, felt like someone was sucking all of the carefully negotiated alone-ness out of my perfect solitude -- and I couldn't breathe.
Unfortunately, my profession as a spiritual healer seemed to give me an endless supply of "get out of jail" cards --justifications for why I needed to leave a party, a gathering, a dinner. My work gave me one great excuse after another for demanding my solitude.
I would seek it out from daybreak to well-past midnight. Often staying up through the night, because it was only after my family went to bed, that I could most easily find it.
There was a point in this chapter, when my favorite place in the world was a three foot by five foot windowless, cedar-lined closet under the eaves of our house where I had a little chair, table, lamp and fan. I would take my phone, and go there for hours on end, just to take be alone in the dark, take calls and pray. For me, it was a slice of heaven. It became a self-imposed tomb that I never wanted to leave.
Yes, I did learn to cope with the need to be out-and-about as a mother, wife, professional, and member of my community. But it was a coping - not the peaceful shift from alone to "in company" that I knew was balanced and right. The ache for solitude was never far from reach. I took it with me wherever I went. And when society became too much, I would retreat. I would leave. I would excuse myself and find a place to hide - a bathroom, a closet, the backseat of my car, under a quilt, in my head -- all alone.
Social gatherings felt cloying, dense, and paralyzing. Solitude was like walking into a fresh, sweet, light-filled clearing -- a high mountain meadow, fragrant with the scent of chamomile and pine.
But as much as I loved it, and as happy as it made me, it was not freeing or liberating. I truly thought that I couldn't be "me" anywhere else. My need for solitude had become a prison, instead of the open space I thought it was. I was trapped in the self-certainty that without solitude I could not be inspired or creative. It felt like madness, and I didn't know how I would find my way out of the labyrinth of my own creating -- or if I even wanted to.
And then something quite beautiful happened.
On a very ordinary day - while I was sitting all alone in my perfectly silent kitchen - I realized, that in all spiritual actuality, solitude was impossible.
And in that moment, I started to feel the grip of my need to be alone, relax. Solitude was no longer the holy grail in my life. Just like that.
As I sat there surrounded by blue and white gingham and bathed in golden light, I found myself asking, "Why would I want something that was never going to be true in God's eyes."
It was as clear as day to me that I couldn't be me - truly me - all alone, without you. And not just the "you" of my immediate friends and family -- my husband, my children, my friends. But all who I am blessed to have waft through my life -- like the perfume of hyacinth blossoms on a warm spring day.
I realized that I could express love, without "you." I could not discover myself as generous, kind, compassionate, honest, forgiving -- without you. Each of the you-s in my life, allow me to more fully be who I am. God's beloved and be-loving child.
Although it's been a struggle at times to remember that I really do want to be this "best me," -- and not someone who seeks out closets and solitude like a drug -- I now find, that even in those lovely moments when the gift of solitude does descend like a divine surprise upon my day, I am no longer more at peace than in a crowded room or a noisy kitchen. I've stopped seeking something spiritually unattainable -- since, in Truth, we can never really be alone anyways. We live together as "one universal family, held in the gospel [the good news] of Love."
We are not, as Mary Baker Eddy states in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "isolated, solitary ideas." We are each, and all, members of the body of Christ, the spiritual collective called "man." In Truth, we are but individual saplings - the branchings of a vast root system. We are the offshoots of one spiritual organism -- one that is even larger than "the aspen grove," which stretches its arms across the Continental Divide. We are one with "the earth and the sky, one with everything in life," -- and I am as much you, as I am myself. We are His.
Yes, to answer the unasked question, I still love my solitude. I love my alone time when the house is clean, the silence is golden, scent trails of lavender swirl with the shifting breeze. In that space figurative notation paper hangs in the air -- just waiting for poetry and music to find their positions, like birds on a wire, and become a song or a prayer.
But I no longer like my life better without people in it. I no longer think that I need soliude to be myself -- to breathe, to feel peaceful, or to hear God's voice.
And yet, as Mary Chapin Carpenter sings, I will always love, and welcome, "the sound of silence coming on."
Thank you MCC -- so grateful you are in our world. I have missed your voice. Thank you for your words, your music, your heart that sings to us of miracles. Thank you for bringing this statement to life for me:
"My sense of nature's rich gloom,
is that loneness lacks but one charm
to make it half divine — a friend,
with whom to whisper,
"Solitude is sweet."
- Mary Baker Eddy
Sometimes re-visiting the depths of my own spiritual journey starts with a photograph or a song. Mary Chapin Carpenter has sung me down many a dusty road. With my hands on the wheel, sobbing, driving hard and fast just to get away from the sadness, her songs have been the answer to my prayers for a song that will make me feel less alone.
Her CD "The Age of Miracles," was borne on the wings of her own "miraculous" adventure through a life-threatening health-related crisis. A wilderness experience that led her into a period of what she characterized as" painful depression, fear, and anxiety."
The lyrical content of this CD is masterful, sobering, intuitive, and deeply moving. What it takes me hundreds of words to hint at, she hammers home with three verses. When married to her musical vision, it is a CD that makes my heart weep, sing, and soar. Her songs have always reminded me that I am not alone on this wilderness path.
There are cuts on this CD that I can't help but listen to with my eyes closed. It is almost as if I am remembering how it felt to have lived through the moments that gave the song birth. She is singing from her own experience, but like a tuning fork, it is resonating with my own.
There is one song that, when I read its title, "I Have a Need for Solitude," I couldn't help but wonder if we weren't actually "twin daughters of different mothers."
For me, solitude is not just a refreshing interruption from the otherwise social norms of people and events. Solitude is my natural habitat -- like salt water to a sea anemone. I need it.
It is the oxygen I begin to gasp for, after a long day of truly wonderful conversations, and deeply inspiring interactions with people who I truly love. And it has only been by the grace of God, that I have learned to accept and appreciate the importance of these shifting levels of aloneness in my life. But that was not always the case.
There was a time when I seemed to need solitude in a way that was almost crippling. My need to be alone felt insistent.
There were days when taking our daughters to school, or having people come into our home, was terrifying. It was as if the sound of other people's voices, their shapes slicing through the changing light, the movement of air, the rustling of atmospheric ions as they stole from room-to-room, felt like someone was sucking all of the carefully negotiated alone-ness out of my perfect solitude -- and I couldn't breathe.
Unfortunately, my profession as a spiritual healer seemed to give me an endless supply of "get out of jail" cards --justifications for why I needed to leave a party, a gathering, a dinner. My work gave me one great excuse after another for demanding my solitude.
I would seek it out from daybreak to well-past midnight. Often staying up through the night, because it was only after my family went to bed, that I could most easily find it.
There was a point in this chapter, when my favorite place in the world was a three foot by five foot windowless, cedar-lined closet under the eaves of our house where I had a little chair, table, lamp and fan. I would take my phone, and go there for hours on end, just to take be alone in the dark, take calls and pray. For me, it was a slice of heaven. It became a self-imposed tomb that I never wanted to leave.
Yes, I did learn to cope with the need to be out-and-about as a mother, wife, professional, and member of my community. But it was a coping - not the peaceful shift from alone to "in company" that I knew was balanced and right. The ache for solitude was never far from reach. I took it with me wherever I went. And when society became too much, I would retreat. I would leave. I would excuse myself and find a place to hide - a bathroom, a closet, the backseat of my car, under a quilt, in my head -- all alone.
Social gatherings felt cloying, dense, and paralyzing. Solitude was like walking into a fresh, sweet, light-filled clearing -- a high mountain meadow, fragrant with the scent of chamomile and pine.
But as much as I loved it, and as happy as it made me, it was not freeing or liberating. I truly thought that I couldn't be "me" anywhere else. My need for solitude had become a prison, instead of the open space I thought it was. I was trapped in the self-certainty that without solitude I could not be inspired or creative. It felt like madness, and I didn't know how I would find my way out of the labyrinth of my own creating -- or if I even wanted to.
And then something quite beautiful happened.
On a very ordinary day - while I was sitting all alone in my perfectly silent kitchen - I realized, that in all spiritual actuality, solitude was impossible.
And in that moment, I started to feel the grip of my need to be alone, relax. Solitude was no longer the holy grail in my life. Just like that.
As I sat there surrounded by blue and white gingham and bathed in golden light, I found myself asking, "Why would I want something that was never going to be true in God's eyes."
It was as clear as day to me that I couldn't be me - truly me - all alone, without you. And not just the "you" of my immediate friends and family -- my husband, my children, my friends. But all who I am blessed to have waft through my life -- like the perfume of hyacinth blossoms on a warm spring day.
I realized that I could express love, without "you." I could not discover myself as generous, kind, compassionate, honest, forgiving -- without you. Each of the you-s in my life, allow me to more fully be who I am. God's beloved and be-loving child.
Although it's been a struggle at times to remember that I really do want to be this "best me," -- and not someone who seeks out closets and solitude like a drug -- I now find, that even in those lovely moments when the gift of solitude does descend like a divine surprise upon my day, I am no longer more at peace than in a crowded room or a noisy kitchen. I've stopped seeking something spiritually unattainable -- since, in Truth, we can never really be alone anyways. We live together as "one universal family, held in the gospel [the good news] of Love."
We are not, as Mary Baker Eddy states in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "isolated, solitary ideas." We are each, and all, members of the body of Christ, the spiritual collective called "man." In Truth, we are but individual saplings - the branchings of a vast root system. We are the offshoots of one spiritual organism -- one that is even larger than "the aspen grove," which stretches its arms across the Continental Divide. We are one with "the earth and the sky, one with everything in life," -- and I am as much you, as I am myself. We are His.
Yes, to answer the unasked question, I still love my solitude. I love my alone time when the house is clean, the silence is golden, scent trails of lavender swirl with the shifting breeze. In that space figurative notation paper hangs in the air -- just waiting for poetry and music to find their positions, like birds on a wire, and become a song or a prayer.
But I no longer like my life better without people in it. I no longer think that I need soliude to be myself -- to breathe, to feel peaceful, or to hear God's voice.
And yet, as Mary Chapin Carpenter sings, I will always love, and welcome, "the sound of silence coming on."
Thank you MCC -- so grateful you are in our world. I have missed your voice. Thank you for your words, your music, your heart that sings to us of miracles. Thank you for bringing this statement to life for me:
"My sense of nature's rich gloom,
is that loneness lacks but one charm
to make it half divine — a friend,
with whom to whisper,
"Solitude is sweet."
- Mary Baker Eddy
I smile when I think of this verse today. In it, I am sitting in the forest with my back to the trunk of a sturdy tree -- but not all alone, just all quiet. Around me are countless other solitude lovers -- basking in the pine-filtered light, the wind-hushed quiet, in our aloneness -- together.
offered with gratitude -- and with Love,
Kate
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