You can feel lonely around people, but in solitude all people are within you. You can hold yourself in pure silence where nothing appears but everything is available.
You are with, not apart.
You are lone, but not alone.
Silence wraps, doesn’t confine.
A moment of solitude can transform the day, but loneliness coffee drips throughout it.
There is a roundness to solitude, an edge to loneliness.
We are held, not longing to be held.
Yet solitude can take on any flavor. Sadness is welcome, grounding, whole, not overbearing or dulling. There’s something to be uncovered by going deeper into whatever human flavor is present, not the desire to escape.
The deep breaths of solitude reach the heart, don’t stutter the mind.
There is an ache though.
The ache is holding humanity in small moments.
It’s in the gut, the way a baby might drop in the last months of pregnancy. Loving the yin and the yang, truly acknowledging loss and birth and the grand cycles of repeating life.
The ache is humbling, large, it trembles a little within us. I think of it as the portal from loneliness to solitude.
Let the ache visit as a weekend guest would. Your routine won’t be your own, and you might both love and hate the intrusion until you accept it. And then the weekend is over. The ache ripples away, leaving a light echo, of loneliness or solitude?
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