. . . May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) moved to Maine to spend the last chapter of her life living alone in a house with a garden on the edge of the sea. Friends came to visit, as did strangers who admired her poetry and had found her address in the phone book—those were the days—but she cherished her solitude . . . .
—Maria Popova, “200 Years of Solitude: Great Writers, Artists, and Scientists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Fertile Aloneness”
I crack a hard cider, write poetry, and then grow listless until I follow it with another hard cider, putting off replying to texts in favor of a session of feeding peanuts (in shells, unsalted) to jays, which absorbs all my focus and grants time to peacefully mull things over—to smooth me out enough to foment a modicum of peace. Often if I can’t figure something out, the sounds of the words help.
I try to see them one at a time. I mean every encounter here to be more than superficial, to be a real exchange of lives, and this is more easily accomplished one to one than in a group. But the continuity is solitude. Without long periods here alone, especially in winter when visits are rare, I would have nothing to give, and would be less open to the gifts offered me. Solitude has replaced the single intense relationship, the passionate love that even at Nelson focused all the rest. Solitude, like a long love, deepens with time, and, I trust, will not fail me if my own powers of creation diminish. For growing into solitude is one way of growing to the end.
—May Sarton, The House by the Sea
The echo of the foolish words lingers on the air, is brushed away, dies forgotten, the air closes behind it.
—Rose Macaulay, Personal Pleasures: Essays on Enjoying Life
Wise words stick.
We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness. . . .
True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.
One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.
In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.
—Wendell Berry, What Are People For?
Sustained aloneness brings you to a tipping point where the pendulum of life returns you to others.
—Stephen Batchelor
Two ravens sing with me before flying up for the walnuts I left on their log.
There are other languages being spoken by wind, water, and wings.
—Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
A mother’s love for her children, even her inability to let them be, is because she is under a painful law that the life that passed through her must be brought to fruition. Even when she swallows it whole she is only acting like any frightened mother cat eating its young to keep it safe.
—Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days
I usually struggle to give way to wakefulness in the morning, as I enjoy my dreams and this reality is so . . . mixed. It takes time to adjust—but there’s a grim joy in melancholy. I think it’s the remnants of the Gutball—anyone who’s been with me a while remember that? I haven’t thought about it in a while. (How far we’ve come!) The Gutball is a sense of having to be where I don’t want to be or do what I don’t want to do. It’s grief and despair—a visceral NO. The melancholy tells me it’s still here, but milder than it used to be. I’m closer to where and how I want to be. Also I’m fortunate, as I’ve managed to keep or regain a channel to my childlike wonder, so I’m ever open to bouncing back, given the slightest chance.
The melancholy can be a type of compassion, too—an understanding of the vastness of suffering. There is a greater vastness of joy, which can be harder to tap into at times, from the heaviness, but it’s there.
When I see ring-billed gulls picking on the flesh of decaying carp, I am less afraid of death. We are no more and no less than the life that surrounds us.
—Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
The people were stripped of their animistic spirituality and encouraged to see the world as inert matter that could be manipulated and used but could not and would not speak back. This is part of the foundation of the profoud alienation of capitalism. We are encouraged to see ourselves as alone in the world. We are the only subjects, the only actors, the only ones who can speak. And so if we want to know about the world, we can’t speak to the world directly. We have to talk to another human, one who “knows.”
—Clementine Morrigan, “Regarde l'Objet: A Materialist Theory of Re-enchantment”