May Sarton

Loneliness is the poverty of the self, solitude is the richness of the self.
-May Sarton

Begin here. It is raining. I look out on the maple, where few leaves have turned yellow, and listen to Punch, the parrot, talking to himself, and to the rain ticking gently against the windows. I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my "real" life again at last. That's what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life, unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and "the house and I resume old conversations."

The ambiance here is order and beauty. This is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?

Now I hope to break through into the rough, rocky depths, to the matrix itself. There is violence there and anger never resolved.

My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge, empty, silence if I cannot find support there. I go up to heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing on myself inexorable routines.

-May Sarton Journal of a Solitude