Entreaty for a tempered solitude

Most human beings are not made, ultimately, for solitude.

Yet a person's self-awareness benefits from regular retreats into solitariness - which is really a state of being free of burdens and responsibilities, when you may open up like a great hollow in a weathered rock, through which the wind pipes hitherto unheard tunes.

It can be frightening or strange to be thus 'free', strung through by unrecognised moments to your self as they come and go in terrible, relentless succession.

It is often fulfilling, even saving, to attend to the needs of others, to be distracted out of our inner emptiness by their calls for our help, strength, counsel. For, who are we, when we are not serving others?

God's company (though by many names He be known) is essential if one is to enjoy one's solitude and come away refreshed. Being in nature, whether actively or passively, uplifting music and reading, inspired creative work and craft, even chores - these are, when your solitude is tempered by God's presence (more commonly called love), all infused with holiness, filling a person's alone time like rain swells a stream.

Or simply attending to (meditating on) a beautiful scene or object, opening heart, eyes, ears, nostrils and skin pores, to breathe in the moment's undemandingness, will allow that out-breath that releases excess of individuated thoughts and feelings, returning you to sweet anonymity, your very own lightness of being, in the hammock of creation.

And yet, the following sonnet by John Keats, extolling solitude in nature, ends tellingly:

"The sweet converse of an innocent mind, / Whose words are images of thoughts refined, / Is my soul's pleasure" too. It is my experience that the most blissful state of grace on earth is when you can enjoy any of the holy activities I've mentioned, in the company not only of God, but also of your Beloved.

Despite having been advised, repeatedly, to 'stand in my own power' and 'be my own woman', it is my experience that I stand best, firstly, in God's power, that is to say, in the power of love; and, secondly, that I am (mostly) my favourite own woman tempered in the vicinity of my gentle Beloved's fragrance and breath, unimposing though they may, and must, be, as we each spin our separate strands on the mystery web of life.

Memorial preparations

All the bustle and fuss –

human care and love

as fast as Velcro

– me but the burr,

bad-tempered vegetable

looking for

freedom:

slip me between, Darling,

fetch me to

the leafy silver

of

our breathing.

I post this poem in commemoration of tonight's being the eve of the first memorial service for Norman, held on 5th August 2017 at the Vula Vista Venue at The Edge Mountain Retreat in Hogsback.

It is included in ' Sacred Space', section 3 in Greater Matter as it currently stands (in its second draft).

So quiet, but not

You've been so quiet, said one of my readers.

But quiet has gone. A lone, lanky, lovely visitor dropped in on me
entirely unexpectedly. How now to find
my silence, whence the new things come?

It is an opportunity to strengthen, to refine me, to define
the boundaries of my crankiness, the rudeness of
my solitude.

And then a friend
whose face lends me
its poem.

Bow-line

You've a bow-line arcing

up from your eye 

into your brow -

as if you've always held a quantum of your thoughts aside

- in case you'd one day need them 

for a dancing star.

- Silke Heiss, 8th July 2018