The dirt road does not end, but it looks like does. I am riding on a bicycle past small houses with thatched roofs, houses and mango trees that eventually give way to mountains. Mountains that once you reach them let you have the impression that you will soon fall off the edge, slipping through the cracks between dirt road and the purplish mountains that regally rival sky. When you sign-up for the Peace Corps one of the things they warn you most about is how isolated you will be. Though our training was jam packed with advice on what to do if you see a black mamba snake or how important it is to take your malaria medication, we spent a fair amount of time discussing, strategizing, and somewhat dreading, the loneliness we were all expecting to feel as we settled into our various village communities in Malawi, Africa.
At the beginning of my Peace Corps experience, I craved being with others, I would cycle, take buses, and hop in the back of a truck, to be with someone who spoke my language, someone who knew where I came from and could dream with me about ice cream and showers. Eventually though, I came to crave my solitude the same amount and sometimes even more, than I craved the company of others. My solo bicycle rides were my favorite. I would often go out around meal times, to avoid an entourage of children, and cycle into the mountains immersed in a warm twilight. Though separated from my family and friends back in the U.S. I don’t think I have ever felt so close with the world, so intimately acquainted with what I had been used to experiencing mostly through, and with, other people.
What I feel is most true, what my faith tells me, is that there is something larger than all of us that connects us together by igniting our potential to love, similar to the “connective tissue” articulated by Dr. Martin Luther King when talking about the human community.
Because my truth centers on people, much of the time I crave the intimacy of others, not just physical intimacy or the intimacy of being with a partner, but a general intimacy that is a closeness, that is a familiarity, of all who surround me. My God is the experience of people seeing humanity in others and the space that is created to hold this, this net of love that holds and protects.
This faith is often tested when I am not connected to other people. Questions arise of how to connect and feel love when I am alone, when I am separated and isolated off. We all feel this at times, sometimes for longer periods, sometimes more intensely than others.Many talk of times of darkness and suffering, putting at the end of their stories, tales, and sermons, a picture of light.
To thrive in our world, we cannot always look towards the future, we cannot always look towards the light. Darkness is often plentiful and all around us. Feeling and being alone is part of our daily existence. I do not, however, think this is as horrible as it sounds.
I believe, I know, that we can learn to change this loneliness, this feeling we so often feel in the darkness and transform it, embracing the intimacy we find when we have transformed our loneliness into solitude.
On this Valentine’s Day, we explore how to ground our souls in an intimacy with the world that will sustain our tender, craving hearts, through times of light and dark, whether these hearts rest most comfortably between Malawian mountains or amidst pieces of southern New England ocean.
Even in Malawi when experiencing the intimacy of cycling in-between mountains and maize fields, I relied on my main need for intimacy to be filled by other people. So much of the time, we all work to gain intimacy with each other, working on our relationships with our friends, loved ones, and families. We rely on our most intimate relationships to be the ones that save us from loneliness, holding us close in the safety that is the familiar.
We embrace times of solitude, but often spend more time looking for intimacy with each other, wanting to be wrapped up in a love that so often gives us the courage and perceived power to love ourselves. Learning to find intimacy in solitude gives us a bit more freedom as we can practice and engage intimacy at any time, even at times when we are alone. Solitude is almost always there, and indeed when we recognize it, it has the possibility to nourish us.
In this way, locating intimacy in solitude allows us to enter into relationships with others and the world in a more meaningful way that takes our relationships deeper. This intimacy allows our relationship with the world to blossom into activism and our relationships to each other to be more grounded and firm in love.
“To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings,” writes David Whyte in his poem ‘Everything is Waiting for You.’ We, as Unitarian Universalists, talk of standing on the side of love, often in an activist context, working both with our hearts and hands to craft a world that is grounded more in love than it currently seems to be. Though we often work feverishly on this task, we sometimes as activists, as people who stand on the side of love, do feel abandoned and perhaps lose sight of our surroundings and the very world we are fighting to save. Activism, standing on the side of love, can be lonely work.
If we are to embrace a finding of intimacy in our solitude, we might find new ways of standing on the side of love. We might find that even when we don’t feel it, we are in fact intimately connected as humans, lovingly attached by a connective tissue. A connective tissue that compels us even when we feel we are alone, that standing up for love, human rights, and justice, is one of the most intimate and courageous acts we can do for our loved ones.
It is from this place that we see each other more clearly, spotting the wreckages, and being able to dive into these wreckages with a deep and grounded sense of what it is to be alone while still loving even when there is no one else around.
How then do we begin to get acquainted with this solitude? How does one venture into a solitude that will be our grounding in the stance we take with love?Rainer Maria Rilke, in his a published collection of letters to a young poet entitled, surprisingly, ‘Letters to a Young Poet,’ comments on the love that can come from solitude:
“love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind;”
A simple way into solitude could be, might be, choosing to love it. As UU’s we choose to stand on the side of love, and in order to do this we must also activelylove. A true sustaining love must love all parts of the world even the parts that are messy, the parts that are blistering wounds. In our solitude we can come to love these parts and then go forth to heal them.
Rilke goes on to discuss the people that may be wary of one’s love of solitude, counseling the young poet to
“be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy…be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
Rilke describes a gaining of intimacy with solitude that grows our capacity to be in tune with the quiet moments. A time to cultivate a grounding in which we can reconcile that this time of being alone often means a greater intimacy with the world and that this intimacy with the world gives us the power to love even when it is just us, even when there is only darkness, a intimacy we can always have even when there is no light.
This search Rilke describes of being with solitude, calls upon the young poet to have faith that in fact there is love when no one understands, there is love when it is just you, and this love is blessed enough to be stored into an inheritance. This type of love not only speaks to the resiliency of love itself, but to the resiliency of the people who carry and spread it.
Frida Kahlo, famed painter and artist, did many self-portraits one of which includes two of her. The figures sit knees pointing towards each other holding hands. The same expression, the same face and hair side by side with two exposed hearts, a slim red vein connecting them at the neck. Frida Kahlo sits next to Frida Kahlo against a troubled dark and cloudy sky in the portrait entitled ‘Dos Fridas’ or ‘Two Fridas.’ Art historians talk about this piece as both a response to Kahlo divorcing Diego as well as her relationship with herself when she spent a vast majority of her time alone after being quite sick with polio.
She writes in her diary, "I experienced intensely an imaginary friendship with a little girl more or less the same age as me ... I followed her in all her movements and while she danced, I told her my secret problems."
Frida, like many artists, found a concrete way to embrace her aloneness, attempting to transform her loneliness into solitude. Frida both in her creation of art and in her childhood creation of an imaginary friend, does not step away from solitude, but instead finds in it a place for creation. When she felt alone and isolated after her divorce she chose to dive into the wreck and found creative inspiration within that wreck.
St. Valentine himself was single and celibate, and though this route isn’t for everyone, there are times when one needs to be their own valentine.
In these moments it is a good plan to know how to approach that space and not only embrace it, but find within it, a different way of relating to ourselves and the world. Artists take the concrete actions of changing loneliness to solitude by creating art, transforming the space into one not of loneliness, but of new creation, re-birth.
As we work to transform our loneliness to solitude and embrace the intimacy of the world we may take the route of the artist and write, dance, and paint, we may instead meditate, or we may just listen and wait for what we hear when alone and listen with love, instead of panic, instead of fear, listen as we welcome a moment to be truly intimate with the world.
Perhaps, recognizing the intimacy of this situation allows one to not only see this as holy work, but as actual holy. In her poem Leaves and Blossoms along the Way, Mary Oliver writes: “God, or the gods, are invisible, quite understandable. But holiness is visible, entirely. Some words will never leave God’s mouth no matter how hard you listen.”
Perhaps the words that never leave God’s mouth are too holy to be listened to and can only be felt. I encourage all of us, to both go in search and to sit with moments of loneliness and transform them to solitude. Whether we handle our transformation with an artistic creation, mediation, a treat to ourselves of a Malawian bike ride, or a practice of being that goes beyond listening, we are sure to get closer to intimately knowing the world, a world in which everything is waiting for you.