THOUGHTS ON SOLITUDE AND THE LAST BUTTERFLIES OF SUMMER

I love to be alone.

I never found a companion

that was so companionable as solitude.

Thoreau

I need to be alone . . . 

I need the sunshine and the paving stones

of the streets without companions, without conversation, 

face to face with  myself, with only the music of my heart for company.

Henry Miller

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone;

and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom;

for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

Schopenhauer

I live in that solitude

which is painful in youth, 

but delicious in the years of maturity.

Einstein

Loneliness is the poverty of self;

solitude is richness of self.

May Sarton

But your solitude will be a support and a home for you,

even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances,

and from it you will find all paths.

Rilke

Wherever I am, the world comes after me.

It offers me its busyness.  It does not believe 

that I do not want it.  Now I understand

why the old poets of China went so far and high

into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

Mary Oliver

"Why I Wake Early"

Uncontradicting solitude

Supports me on its giant palm;

And like a sea-anemone

Or simple snail, there cautiously

Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

Philip Larkin

In order to be open to creativity, 

one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude.

One must overcome the fear of being alone.

Rollo May

When from our better selves we have too long

Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,

Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,

How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.

Wordsworth

WINDOWS INTO RILKE'S SPIRITUAL JOURNEY

During a long walk this morning, I listened to an episode of On Being in which the host, Krista Tippett, interviewed Joanna Macy, who, among other things, is a translator of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.  During the course of the interview, Macy recited four Rilke poems that, in her view, provide windows into various stages of Rilke's spiritual journey.  These poems resonated with me, especially when considered in close proximity to one another.  Perhaps they will resonate with others as well. 

                                             God's True Cloak

                           We must not portray you in king's robes,
                           you drifting mist that brought forth the morning.

                           Once again from the old paintboxes
                           we take the same gold for scepter and crown
                           that has disguised you through the ages.

                           Piously we produce our images of you
                           till they stand around you like a thousand walls.
                           And when our hearts would simply open,
                           our fervent hands hide you.

                                             Book of Hours, I 4


                                              Widening Circles

                           I live my life in widening circles
                           that reach out across the world.
                           I may not complete this last one
                           but I give myself to it.

                           I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
                           I've been circling for thousands of years
                           and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
                           a storm, or a great song?

                                               Book of Hours, I 2


                                  Go to the Limits of Your Longing

                            God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
                            then walks with us silently out of the night.

                            These are the words we dimly hear:

                            You, sent out beyond your recall,
                            go to the limits of your longing.
                            Embody me.

                            Flare up like a flame
                            and make big shadows I can move in.

                            Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
                            Just keep going.  No feeling is final.
                            Don't let yourself lose me.

                            Nearby is the country they call life.
                            You will know it by its seriousness.

                            Give me your hand.

                                           Book of Hours, I 59


                                  Let This Darkness be a Bell Tower

                            Quiet friend who has come so far,
                            feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
                            Let this darkness be a bell tower
                            and you the bell.  As you ring,

                            what batters you becomes your strength.
                            Move back and forth into the change.
                            What is it like, such intensity of pain?
                            If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

                            In this uncontainable night,
                            be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
                            the meaning discovered there.

                            And if the world has ceased to hear you,
                            say to the silent earth: I flow.
                            To the rushing water, speak: I am.

                                           Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

MORNING WALKS, TIMELESS WISDOM

Never say there is nothing beautiful 

in the world anymore.  There is always something

to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.

Albert Schweitzer

I took another walk this morning through the 300-acre South Carolina Botanical Garden, which, to my good fortune, is located less than half an hour from my house. As I had done in recent days, I took my camera and was primarily focused on capturing images of some of the butterflies that are abundant in this area this during July and August.  As I finished taking photos of the butterflies and began returning to my car, I turned around and saw these wonderful green, oval leaves that were backlit by the sun.  It was a truly magical moment, one of those luminous moments in which time seems to be literally suspended.  After a few minutes of absorbing what I was seeing, I shot the header photo, which turned out to be my favorite image of the day. 

Here are some of the other images I've taken in recent days — mostly butterflies and moths, but also a few flowers along the way.  I've also added some insightful words from others who, like me, find nature to be a perennial source of beauty, contentment, and joy. 

I only ask to be free.

The butterflies are free.

Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole

what it concedes to the butterflies.

Charles Dickens

Bleak House

Happiness is like a butterfly:
the more you chase it, the more it will elude you,
but if you turn your attention to other things, 
it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.

Henry David Thoreau

It seems to me that the natural world
is the greatest source of excitement; 
the greatest source of visual beauty;
the greatest source of intellectual interest.
It is the greatest source
 of so much in life that makes life worth living.

David Attenborough

Deep in their roots, 
all flowers keep the light.

Theodore Roethke

Butterflies are self propelled flowers.

R.H. Heinlein

My soul can find no staircase to Heaven
unless it be through Earth's loveliness.

Michelangelo

I embrace emerging experience.

I participate in discovery.

I am a butterfly.

I am not a butterfly collector.

I want the experience of the butterfly.

William Stafford

The temple bell stops
but I still hear the sound
coming out of the flowers.

Basho

I dreamed I was a butterfly,
flitting around in the sky;
then I awoke.  
Now I wonder:
Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly,
or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?

Chuang Tzu

When you take a flower in your hand
and really look at it, it's your world for the moment.
I want to give that world to someone else.
Most people in the city rush around so,
they have no time to look at a flower.
I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

Georgia O'Keefe

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we would rise up rooted, like trees.

Rilke

The earth laughs in flowers.

Emerson

It is written on the arched sky;
it looks out from every star.
It is the poetry of Nature;
it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

John Ruskin

Nature is not a place to visit.
It is home.

Gary Snyder

I go to nature to be soothed,
and healed,
and to have my senses put in order.

John Burroughs

The butterfly counts not
months but moments,
and has time enough.

Rabindranath Tagore

Nature never deceives us;
it is we who deceive ourselves.

Jean-Jacque Rousseau

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, 
There is rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes, 
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

Lord Byron

A RINGING GLASS THAT SHATTERS AS IT RINGS

If we are to live in the present moment, a worthy goal for most of us, it is helpful to always remain mindful of the impermanence of things.  As Samuel Johnson famously said, "when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

Here are two fine poems that deal with life's impermanence and what it means for those who want to avoid sleepwalking through life.  Enjoy!

                                     The question before me, now that I

                                     am old, is not how to be dead,

                                     which I know from enough practice,

                                     but how to be alive, as these worn

                                     hills still tell, and some paintings 

                                     of Paul Cezanne, and this mere

                                     singing wren, who thinks he's alive

                                     forever, this instant, and may be.

                                                     Wendell Berry

                                               Sabbath Poems 2001, VIII


                       Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,
                       like winter, which even now is passing.
                       For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
                       that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.

                       Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.
                       Climb praising as you return to connection.
                       Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,
                       be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.

                       Be.  And, at the same time, know what it is not to be.
                       That emptiness inside you allows you to vibrate
                       in resonance with your world.  Use it for once.

                       To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayable
                       numbers of beings abounding in Nature,
                       add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost.

Rilke

Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, VIII

(translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

To always "climb back singing," to continue ringing the glass even as it shatters.  Is there any better resolution we can make for the new year?

. . . AND THE NEED FOR SILENCE

From yesterday's post on the creation of a sacred place in one's home to something closely related and equally important — the need for a modicum of silence in one's life.

Soon silence will have passed into legend.  Man has turned his back on silence.  Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation . . . tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.  His anxiety subsides.  His inhuman void spreads monstrously like gray vegetation.

Jean Arp 

Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence.

Rilke

The quieter you become, the more your can hear.

Ram Dass 

In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness.  Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.

Gandhi 


Now all my teachers are dead except silence.

W.S. Merwin 
(from "A Scale in May")

SUNSET, STONE, AND STAR

                                                        Sunset

                                             by Rainer Maria Rilke

                                          (translated by Robert Bly)

                      Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors

                      which it passes to a row of ancient trees.

                      You look, and soon these two worlds both have you,

                      one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,

                      leaving you, not really belonging to either,

                      not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,

                      not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing

                      that turns to a star each night and climbs—

                      leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)

                      your own life, timid and standing high and growing,

                      so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,

                      one moment of your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.


Note on Translation:  In The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell), this poem is listed under the title, "Evening."  While I like Mitchell's translations on the whole, I prefer Bly's translation in this particular case.  See Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Robert Bly).

SOLITUDE AND STILLNESS

Since returning from my coast-to-coast walk across England in June, people have been asking me how it feels to get back to "reality."  Reality?  Here in the United States as we complete our first decade of the century?  Here in the mecca of crass materialism where ignorance is increasingly valued more than intelligence?  Here, where mendacity is the coin of the realm in both political and financial circles? Here, where a major senatorial candidate believes that scientists have cloned mice with fully functioning human brains; where another major senatorial candidate has been indicted on obscenity charges; and where still another major senatorial candidate has suggested that the United States deal with immigration from Mexico in the same way that East Germany dealt with the West Germany during the Soviet era (i.e., a Berlin Wall with electric fences, land mines, and armed guards instructed to shoot trespassers)?

I don't think so.  Call me old-fashioned, but this doesn't look like reality to me. Frankly, I found much more reality walking across England through places that have remained much the same for the past five hundred years, if not the past fifteen hundred years.  If I am to find reality in my own country, it will have to be in places of solitude, places of stillness where the heart can find solace and renew itself.  Oh how we need to get far from the madding crowd.  Then, perhaps, we can rediscover not only ourselves, but who we were before the advent of televisions, talking heads, cell phones, and, yes, computers.

Enough of my rant.  Just read what others have said about the rewards of solitude — how vital it is to sanity, how indispensable it is to creativity, how necessary it is to the growth of wisdom.  I begin with a quote from Thoughts on Solitude, a book by one of my spiritual heroes, Thomas Merton.  If something in this quote resonates with you, please check out Robert's recent posting, "The Friendly Communion of Silence", which appears on The Solitary Walker's other blog, "Turnstone."  That posting has more extensive quotes from Thoughts in Solitude.

I also want to recommend Ruth's excellent posting of today, "Horrors Transcended,"  which appears on her blog, "Synch-ro-ni-zing."  Included in this post are examples of three inspirational people who faced and overcame great social challenges during their lifetimes.

Vocation to Solitude — To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over that land and fills its silences with light.  To pray and work in the morning and to labor and rest in the afternoon, and to sit still again in meditation in the evening when night falls upon that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and stars.  This is a true and special vocation.

Thomas Merton
Thoughts in Solitude

                                       

When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself.  When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.

Eckhart Tolle

I said to my soul, be still, and wait . . . the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting . . . the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing.

T.S. Eliot 

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone.  It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone.  And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Paul Tillich

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.

Mary Sarton

In solitude, where we are least alone.

Lord Byron

Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude.

Paul Tillich

What a commentary on civilization, when being alone is being suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it — like a secret vice.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.

Rilke

Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.

Miguel de Unamuno

Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.

Marcus Aurelius

AUTUMN WHISPERS

All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travelers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.

Thomas Wolfe

Nothing stirs the soul like autumn.  We awake from the nepenthean sleep of summer and witness something even more beautiful than we imagined —  more beautiful perhaps because we are forced the recognize the transient nature of what we love.  It is a time for reckoning,  a time to discard the frivolous and return to our essence, a time to prepare for the coming winter.  That is why, as Thomas Wolfe observed, all things point to home in late October.  Home is the place where our hearts find solace, the place where our authentic lives are rooted, the place where we will wait like the ancients for the reassurance of another spring.

Some of our finest poets have meditated on the implications of autumn for the human spirit.  What they have to say is much of what I feel during these closing days of October. What you take from these poems will depend upon where you are at this point in your own personal journey.  Enjoy.

                                    A certain day became a presence to me;

                                    there it was, confronting me -- a sky, air, light:

                                    a being.  And before it started to descend

                                    from the height of noon, it leaned over

                                    and struck my shoulder as if with

                                    the flat of a sword, granting me

                                    honor and a task.  The day's blow

                                    rang out, metallic -- or it was I, a bell awakened,

                                    and what I heard was my whole self 

                                    saying and singing what it knew: I can.

Denise Levertov

"Variation on a Theme by Rilke"

                                     Withered vines, gnarled trees, twilight crows,

                                     river flowing beneath the little bridge,

                                     past someone's home.

                                     The wind blows from the west

                                     where the sun sets, it blows

                                     across the ancient road,

                                     across the bony horse,

                                     across the despairing man

                                     who stands at heaven's edge.

Ma Chih-Yuan

"Meditation in Autumn"

                                     Nature's first green is gold,
                                     Her hardest hue to hold.
                                     Her early leaf's a flower;
                                     But only so an hour.
                                     Then leaf subsides to leaf.
                                     So Eden sank to grief,
                                     So dawn goes down to day.
                                     Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost
"Nothing Gold Can Stay"

         

                                  Lord, it is time.  The summer was so great,

                                  Impose upon the sundials now your shadows

                                  and round the meadows let the winds rotate.

                                      

                                  Command the last fruits to incarnadine;

                                  vouchsafe, to urge them on into completeness,

                                  yet two more south-like days; and that last

                                        sweetness,

                                  inveigle it into the heavy vine.

                                  He'll not build now, who has no house awaiting.

                                  Who's now alone, for long will so remain:

                                  sit late, read, write long letters, and again

                                  return to restless perambulating

                                  the avenues of parks when leaves downrain.

Rilke

"Autumn Day"

                                   The leaves are falling, falling as from far,

                                    as though above were withering farthest gardens;

                                    they fall with a denying attitude.

                                    And by night, down into solitude,

                                    the heavy earth falls far from every star.

                                    We are all falling.  This hand's falling too —

                                    and have this falling-sickness none withstands.

                                    And yet there's One whose gently-holding hands

                                    this universal falling can't fall through.

   

Rilke
"Autumn"

Peace to Everyone!