Redtree Times

Haven of Spirit— Now at West End Gallery

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a 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, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

I don’t know if solitude is for everybody. Some people might look at the painting above with a little discomfort, seeing only isolation and loneliness in it. But for myself, it represents a total freedom of the self, one that allows one’s absolute truth to emerge. A freedom that allows one to experience clear glimpses of our connection with all being.

The lines above from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage express this feeling well. Alone on a shore, one can begin to hear and converse with nature. The lap and roar of the sea becomes language as does the light of the sun and moon as it sifts through clouds above. It is in these conversations that we come to better understand that we are both small and large, insignificant yet integral.

Of course, this is not a practical matter for most of us. I have my own little island of solitude here in my studio but am not isolated. My regular life has me out in the world, interacting with people on a semi-regular basis. But knowing that I will soon be back on my island where the only conversation taking place is in myself steadies me on those occasions.

Hermann Hesse put it well in the excerpt below from his book, Reflections. He mentions it as being a way of bitter suffering. I suppose initially, for those who have been always in the society of others and seldom alone, this may be the case when faced with solitude. But, as he points out, when you get past that discomfort, the rewards of solitude are rapturous.

We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.

― Hermann Hesse, Reflections

This post is from about five years. I read it this morning and it fit my mood and the painting above so well that I thought I’d rerun it. I had to laugh reading the original because it said I interacted with the public on a regular basis. This was pre-pandemic, of course. In the intervening years I have withdrawn even more. Moved my island a little further from the shore, to put it another way. I ended up changing that to interacting on a semi-regular basis.  In five more years I might change that to on a rare occasion. or once in a blue moon. Who knows?