Dearest,
“I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is 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.”
May Sarton wrote this in her diary sometime in the early 1970s when meditating on her need to be alone in order to crack open her inner life and clarify it bit by bit. These lines receive you as soon as you walk into her Journal of a Solitude, a book I have been poring over the last three months. As a friend recently said, it is tempting to devour this journal in one sitting over several cups of a brew of your choice, but you would be wise not to do that. Sarton’s words are a caress to a part of you that you still cannot name, and so the longer you can hold on, the better you can “taste them fully”. “When I am alone”, Sarton writes, “the flowers are really seen; I can pay attention to them.” I am guessing poet Mary Oliver too would approve of this. In How To Go To The Woods, Oliver instructs that when you are alone you become invisible and “can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing.”
Well, May Sarton consciously chose to isolate herself so as to pay attention to her real life, much like how Henry David Thoreau “went to the woods to live deliberately” and Pico Iyer rushed to Japan to fulfill the need in his bones for a pause which he describes as “the rest in a piece of music that gives it resonance and shape”. You and I, however, because of the pandemic, have been compelled to physically distance ourselves and stay in our homes. In such times, though we acknowledge our privileges, it is natural to feel cornered by the universe and pinned to the here and now. The question that follows then is what does one do in this nook? What does one do when they are made to resume conversations they’d been running away from? “The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out”, writes Pema Chodron in her compassionate and intelligent book, When Things Fall Apart. “When things are shaky and nothing is working, we might realize that we are on the verge of something… a very vulnerable and tender place, and that tenderness can go either way. We can shut down and feel resentful or we can touch in on that throbbing quality.” Through this newsletter then, I welcome you to explore the tenderness of each moment by walking into its mysteries with me, Riya. Here, in the nook, we open ourselves up to the universe in hope to encounter our heart.
To receive the newsletter in your inbox, you can sign up here: tinyletter.com/thenook