“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous…”
The quote is from Thomas Mann and in a lovely moment of synchronicity it showed up on my calendar on the same day when a random prompt from my snippet box read simply “The Retreat”. It was a day that felt like summer – such days are intermittent this year – our drought-year prayers were still being answered. Sunny summer days are once again a blessing, and rain had been beginning to feel like less of one. It was a day that I started sitting outside on the stoop, with a cup of coffee, and my journal and the blessing of time.
I wondered about Mann’s word “perilous”. Why did he feel that beauty should be perilous?
Perhaps in that it can be addictive, the risk that we might succumb totally to the pleasures of solitude and not see the slippery slope to isolation.
The rest of the quote makes perfect sense to me. In solitude we are able to be more ourselves. Our inner critic is stunned into silence when we have no-one to impress or accommodate. In solitude we are free to dare to create – to put the pen to the page, or the paint to the canvas, to wield the threaded needle, or whittle away at the wood – just to see what might emerge. Alone we can see that it is beautiful, or laugh at our feeble attempt and discard it this time around.
In solitude our mind is free to wander down its own backstreets, poke about in the litter, dig in the forgotten patches of earth. In solitude we find things we had forgotten. We look at things more closely. We forge links and connections that did not exist before. We start to tell our own story – or the one we wish we had – or the ones we choose to make up.
In solitude we become children again: both in awe of the world and curious about it. We become playful. We make ourselves smile at our own absurdity.
This is the place where we can be gentle with our self. It is the space where we can notice our flaws and accept them. We can notice that the adage that “only Mother Nature is perfect” is not literally true; that even Mother Nature is not so. We can be still and really look at our natural mother and see her flaws and failings, her imperfections, her re-workings, her trying-again.
We can see the trees with their twisted limbs, and broken branches, and flaking bark. We can see rocks and pebbles and flints, scratched and chipped and broken apart. We can see how cirrus and cumulus and stratus fight for portions of the sky. We can see bindweed strangling its way to the light. Cuckoos and raptors and small birds suffering. Jellyfish washed up on the shore. Tectonic plates unstable. Storms. Hurricanes. Droughts. And deserts suddenly blooming in a downpour.
Everything changes. Shifting imperfect nature. Beauty. Destruction. Forest fires from lightning strikes. Tsunami. Volcano.
If that is perfection, then aren’t we also perfect in all our scratched and broken ever-shifting beauty.
Or should I say: aren’t we also beautiful in all our troubled, fractured, frightened imperfection?
In solitude we open to what is. On this ordinary morning in my garden, what is includes the tinkle of the wind chime. Blue tits chittering in the holly tree. The spiral shell of the snail on the wall. The way I welcome snails and detest slugs. Snail. Slug. Do we name creatures with reference to our emotional reaction to them? Snail s a languid kind of a word. Slug is an abrupt and ugly one.
I like to be alone. I know that I can be too much so and when I am the darkness opens up before
me. But generally, I love the quietness that allows me to hear myself think – and also lets me hear the world going about its business somewhere around me, but not in my space.
I wonder exactly where that boundary line is between traffic being “noise” and being distant enough to be a quiet hum, the shift from intrusive racket to soothing lullaby.
Looking back to my years of anger and frustration, I realise that it wasn’t just the stress of work and the demands of modern living: it was also that I filled every hour of every day (more or less) with contrived sound – television, music, radio – background noise that let me pretend that I wasn’t
alone, when ‘alone’ was exactly what I needed to be.
I should have known. I should have realised why I craved the walking. It was never about mileage and box ticking achievement of routes or hills. It was always about solitude. It was about the mind-freedom that comes with not talking. I should have known, because as a child I did. I would often take myself off for a walk along the beach or up the lane. “Don’t go too far,” Mam would call after me. She had no idea that where I was going wasn’t far at all. I was going inside. In the busy-ness of later life, I forgot that too.
I am glad I remember it now. I’m even more pleased that I can indulge in solitude whenever I feel the need. And yet even more so that I recognise that it is an indulgence – an activity, therefore, that must have its limits. In order to benefit from the retreat, I believe, there must be something from which we wish to retreat, but also to which we want to return. In solitude we encounter our truest self, but having done so, I think it behoves us to bring her (him / them) back out into the world. I think these retreats are very much about learning how to be in the world – not just how to be when we choose to step outside of it.
I have written elsewhere about the deep dark well, that place I go when solitude tips over into loneliness or helplessness or whatever it is on those days. It occurs to me now that solitude is the opposite of loneliness. Rather than a deep dark well, it is a bright bubbling spring. It sparkles with light and potential and movement and music. It invites me to sit beside it and catch some of the magic.
It invites me to sit still, to look, to listen, to smell, to taste, to touch – to imagine – to create. It invites me to put the pen to the page.
What comes of that might be beautiful – or it might be absurd. It might make me smile either way. Either way it will have been worth the time, the quiet, the taking time to spend time with myself, and it will also leave me refreshed and ready to step back into the world.
