"To be alone for any length of time is to shed an outer skin. The body is inhabited in a different way when we are alone than when we are with others. Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.
The permeability of being alone asks us to re-imagine ourselves, to become impatient with ourselves, to tire of the same old story and then slowly hour by hour, to start to tell the story in a different way as other parallel ears, ones we were previously unaware of, begin to listen to us more carefully in the silence. For a solitary life to flourish, even if it is only for a few precious hours, aloneness asks us to make a friend of silence, and just as importantly, to inhabit that silence in our own particular way, to find our own way into our own particular and even virtuoso way of being alone.
To inhabit silence in our aloneness is to stop telling the story altogether. To begin with, aloneness always leads to rawness and vulnerability, to a fearful simplicity, to not recognizing and to not knowing, to the wish to find any company other than that not knowing, unknown self, looking back at us in the silent mirror.
One of the elemental dynamics of self-compassion is to understand our deep reluctance to be left to ourselves. "
David Whyte
Consolations The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
The timing of things is getting quite amazing. The other day Nancy sent that quote of his in her comment and today his book came. I didn't open it until just now, to read the above, and am quietly startled by how it directly and completely addresses how i experienced this day. Which was, once again, a very soft and gentle Good day.
Morning is beginning so much earlier. Dusk coming so much later. The "day" is stretching out, becoming so much more of its self. I am finding myself IN it. Moving inside it with a feeling that i am moving inside something that is no longer what i would call Mine. Not MY day. just the day. I'm simply here. There is some confusion to this and Whyte's words helped me identify that confusion that has been becoming more evident for a while. FINALLY. Finally, my life is becoming how i have always imagined it might be. There have been times when i knew it a little but they were short lived and i knew they would be....brief reprieves. But, here i am. This might be IT.
and it's not a Spellbinder.
The Sitting meditations are becoming. Often a half hour leads into an hour. I can imagine more.
Today i could report these things:
that i left the dishes sit all day so i could use only one squirt of dish soap, having forgotten to get some the other day in town.
how the afternoon SUN LIGHT danced on that coil of wire at the left hand post...which you can kind of see here, but it was truly magical as i saw it....
and that's about it. It was Soft. Smooth. Easy. The Goats all moving about in their way without any commotion. Easy. The Goats were easy. Tay was Easy. Tazmeena, Easy. Easy and Gentle. I was content to just look at the Cloth, not feeling the need to do anything....
and this is really not what Blogs are about.
So what do i do?
I can't just go along here reporting Sun on a roll of fencing every day. Sometimes there will be Cloth work to look at. Sometimes, Things Out Side to tell about. But probably not every day. You would think....DUH?
so...hmmmm. I "look at the unknown self in the silent mirror".
