“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” –Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I went to the park--the woods, alas, being very far away, and the park being very near. It was beautiful and empty, and at one moment I lay on my back in the middle of a golf course with winters frozen yellow grass penetrating through my sweater and into my skin, staring at the smear of sky and the barren gray tendrils of the tops of trees. At that moment, the park transcended its status as park, removed itself and me from the decay of the city, and, if only for a moment, became the “woods” I was seeking--because this morning I woke up with the lines from a Decemberist’s song repeating in my head:
“Big Mountain, wide river,
There’s and ancient pull.
These tree trunks, these stream beds,
leave our bellies full.”
I went to the woods, because my belly feels empty. I wanted something to fill my empty chasms.
I am alone a lot during the day. I try to find a way to escape from my loneliness. I demand to be distracted from the unsettledness of being alone, so I find another person to talk to, I read, I watch movies, I sleep, or (lately) I glut myself with the internet. These past few weeks, I’ve felt like I’m living a half-life. I find myself almost daily in an internet fugue-state that I try to snap myself out of. A voice keeps calling to me saying, “arise, oh sleeper, rise from the dead.” And “awake, my soul.” I feel myself faltering, though, at a loss to know how to arise, how to awake my soul.
Today though, I chose to be alone. Rather, I chose to be in solitude. I’ve always tried to draw a distinction between being alone and being in solitude. Being alone is often something I have no choice over, being in solitude is something I choose into. In aloneness, I seek to end my isolation. In solitude, I use the quietness of my isolation to connect to something eternal. Being alone makes me want people to rescue me, distract me. Being in solitude makes me think about how I can connect better to other people. Being alone makes me want to escape; being in solitude is itself an escape.
There were no words spoken this morning. I sat on a ledge and watched a red cardinal flit through the tangled branches of leafless trees. The gray clouds moved like a city crowd, each personality emerging; here one is menacing, aggressive; here one is demure and sad. Brown leaves curled upward on the ground, their frozen tips like fingers trying to grasp the sky. I thought about Jesus telling people not to babble in prayer, thinking their many words could save them. I thought about my feelings of remoteness, of my desperate want to fill my silences with noise. I wondered if one could pray without talking, could pray simply by staring out in the static silence of the winter air.
I went to the woods to pray.
“Big Mountain, wide river,
There’s and ancient pull.
These tree trunks, these stream beds,
leave our bellies full.”
I went to the woods, because my belly feels empty. I wanted something to fill my empty chasms.
I am alone a lot during the day. I try to find a way to escape from my loneliness. I demand to be distracted from the unsettledness of being alone, so I find another person to talk to, I read, I watch movies, I sleep, or (lately) I glut myself with the internet. These past few weeks, I’ve felt like I’m living a half-life. I find myself almost daily in an internet fugue-state that I try to snap myself out of. A voice keeps calling to me saying, “arise, oh sleeper, rise from the dead.” And “awake, my soul.” I feel myself faltering, though, at a loss to know how to arise, how to awake my soul.
Today though, I chose to be alone. Rather, I chose to be in solitude. I’ve always tried to draw a distinction between being alone and being in solitude. Being alone is often something I have no choice over, being in solitude is something I choose into. In aloneness, I seek to end my isolation. In solitude, I use the quietness of my isolation to connect to something eternal. Being alone makes me want people to rescue me, distract me. Being in solitude makes me think about how I can connect better to other people. Being alone makes me want to escape; being in solitude is itself an escape.
There were no words spoken this morning. I sat on a ledge and watched a red cardinal flit through the tangled branches of leafless trees. The gray clouds moved like a city crowd, each personality emerging; here one is menacing, aggressive; here one is demure and sad. Brown leaves curled upward on the ground, their frozen tips like fingers trying to grasp the sky. I thought about Jesus telling people not to babble in prayer, thinking their many words could save them. I thought about my feelings of remoteness, of my desperate want to fill my silences with noise. I wondered if one could pray without talking, could pray simply by staring out in the static silence of the winter air.
I went to the woods to pray.
Great post!
ReplyDeleteAs to Thoreau, he had to find out the hard way that, as they say, "no one wants to party with an uptight woodsman"