ALONE ON THE MOUNTAIN

I spend great stretches of time alone up on the mountain with the sky on my hands, tending soil, seeds and plants, rearranging rocks the better to suit their natures vis-a-vis my need for stone walls, gazing out at the Lake and its majesty, getting as involved as I humanly can in thunderstorms and hurricanes, learning from them the many small things about myself, my past, my path, and the vortex of truth and illusion.

There is no greater teacher than solitude, as anyone who makes it back from the desert knows. Not solitude in the negative standard 'loneliness' sense, but in the aboriginal magnificent spirit-quest uplift sense. In the city, when you are alone it is a societal matter; when you are alone in the country you are alone, you realize, with everything. In persisting, you learn to listen at last to the symphony of all. You learn the geography of silence, find your way at last to the gate at its heart, and pass beyond into the secret garden. You learn there are places where the soul does not grow.

The need for such knowledge is the reason children leave home and go hungrily into the solitude of their own lives, to learn what is to be learned there. Too often, though, this quest is stifled at the start, even before the start, by societal and parental agendas, derivative teachings diluted to local purpose and contemporary assumptions of morality.

And so in the same nature of things are parents given a second chance when the children leave home, leaving the parents alone at last to learn (or not) what is now there for them to learn. Too often, though, because they have always followed a prescribed path, they do not know what to do with newness, and now is as opaque to them as tomorrow. It will take time, and changes, for them to truly grow from here. But to those who have never stopped growing, there is no change involved; one simply continues becoming.

YOU HAVEN'T BEEN LISTENING

When you're talking to yourself and you realize you haven't been listening, then one or both of you has to make an adjustment. Either you have to become more interesting, less of a mealy-mouthed drone and more of a discerning speaker with a spellbinding style that captivates you, or you have to learn how to pay considerate attention and listen intelligently, instead of mind-meandering all over the place while you're trying to make a point.

Conversely, you can maybe stop talking to yourself so much and start talking more to other distinctly individual persons, or you can just shut up for a while and see if you feel like you're really missing anything. Maybe in the meanwhile take some elocution classes, or join a listening-impaired focus group. Or both.

This realization came to me yesterday when I was soloing the usual drive along the Lake and got to speaking out loud on something I was thinking about, when at some point realized I wasn't listening to what I'd been saying (merely polite and distracted responses), like I was some obnoxious chatperson on the train I had to indulge-- and I was doing it all by myselves.

We truly do like solitude, but we can go too far.

SOLITUDE

What price the sweet solitude spelled by a hawk in the sky, stance of a crow on a fencepost, call of a frog from an apricot limb, song of cicada from a cedar bough, the gaze of a deep-blue lake amid green mountains outlining a sky as blue at sunset as golden at dawn--

Solitude, the subject of the long slow sunset chorus, whispering heights of bamboo, gold-headed jade of rice stalks, all spread out like a tapestry before islands in the rising mist, willows bowing to the evening breeze, jasmine waiting for the night--

Solitude, now and then crystallizing as a thought, a memory, washes in to the fertile shore you are...

OF TOMORROW

Ah, the deep pleasure it is to sit here at the end of a fine hardworking day, entire body wrapt in that luxurious lassitude of labor (strictly unintentional alliteration) and watch the hawks riding the air swells in timeless professionalism, enjoy the swallows filling the still-blue air with their kind of writing, take part in the sun setting in its lightspilling way over the blue lake...

From here where I sit I also overlook the woodsplitting stump where I’ve just been laboring into the shadows, the wheelbarrow resting on tomorrow’s woodpile; with cold beer in warm hand I trace the striations of calm and turbulence wrangling their curlicues on the boat-empty water as the lake too settles from a day’s work, rolling over in shades of blue and gray toward tomorrow, its fluxing currents of warm and cold not so different from my own - we are ancient relatives, after all - it is a time of welcome solitude for the lake and I, its body knowing as well as mine the traverse of sun into stars, light into dark, warmth into cold, here in this now that is the source of all understanding, of genesis, of tomorrow.