The Priestess of Solitude

Solitude is not the absence of Love, but its complement.
Solitude is not the absence of company, but the moment when our soul is free to speak to us and help us decide what to do with our life.

~Paolo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

I am a master of solitude. I would like to be a temple priestess at the monastery of solitude. This temple would be on an island in the ocean, with wide open wind-swept spaces between palm trees, where you could see the horizon in all directions, where the sea meets the sky, and you could track the passing of the day by watching the sun’s movements overhead and the lengthening and shortening of the shadows on the sand. No need for watches or clocks. No need for cell phones or laptops, e-mail or Facebook. No need to earn money, pay taxes, or fear for retirement. In this temple of solitude, time is measured in the unfolding of the lives of the sea creatures that are revealed at low tide, fronds of seaweed blanketing colonies of mussels clustered on stones, small sea snails moving amongst them, cleaning house, vacuuming detritus the mussels have expelled, small green crabs darting out of crevices to snatch a meal that is the life of another small creature. For that small creature, time just ended.

And I, priestess at the temple of solitude, bow in gratitude to both crab and time-stopped creature for their reminder of what day on the calendar it is.

It is a day on which any creature may, and undoubtedly will, and already has, died.

Any creature may be devoured by the seagulls soaring overhead, by the sandpipers darting in the surf, jabbing for sand crabs. Any tide may wash up sea stars and jellyfish and countless little shrimp crusted through the dried-out sea whips of kelp.

The priestess of the temple of solitude strikes the temple bell and hears its echoes bounce among the trees, telling the time: the time to be awake is always.

Having lit her incense and bowed in all directions, the priestess sets out on her day's work, which is to walk the perimeter of the island, and observe, and witness the life and death of all her co-inhabitants on the island, to bow in gratitude for each beginning and ending. She knows the day's work is finished when she reaches the place she began.

Sometimes, though, she falters, usually when her starting place comes into sight, near the end of the day, and she sees the place she's seen hundreds of times before, and she loses faith. She sometimes cannot see the newness of that familiar place, and doubt floods in and she wonders if she's made a mistake in consecrating herself, her life, to the temple.

On those days, she stops, and studies the sand, and searches for patterns in the sand, for meaning in the ripples of blue-grey in the pool of water left by low tide—the dunes and blue-grey pools reflecting the grey sky overhead pulling at her heart and soothing her, but not answering her plaintive “Why?” and “How?” and “When?” and “Why not?”

In these moments, she collects small ocean-worn stones and broken shells and dried bits of seaweed, and she sets them out before her and arranges and considers them. Sometimes, they arrange themselves in a pattern that pleases her. Sometimes, they tell her a story.

Sometimes, though, they whisper to her a truth that amplifies her heartache: solitude is not the same as loneliness. You are a priestess of solitude, and loneliness is not that.

Loneliness is the yearning for the same gaze of devotion you give to us here on our shores to be focused on you.

Loneliness is the desire to look at the horizon alongside another.

Loneliness is the knowing that no matter how much your heart swells with the iridescent color lining the tender insides of an abalone shell, it will never feel like skin on skin or warmth next to warmth or hand clasped to a hand.

 Yes, she says to her kin on the island, the crabs, the sea snails, the mussels and gulls, yes, I see you know this, but what am I to do with my loneliness, here as the priestess of solitude on this island in the middle of the sea, this place that I love so deeply, so tenderly, but that has no one of my kind here?

Are you sure of that? asks a sea star curled into a crevice of the rock next to her.

Well, of course, I'm sure. I've walked the entire shape of this island every day, for days and days and days.

Yes, says the gull perched above the sea star, but have you walked it today?