pray anywhere. After all, God is everywhere, so you can find him everywhere. But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself .’
Exactly what this ‘self’ might be remains, of course, the continuing philosophical (and psychological and spiritual and intellectual) question. If the self is just ‘me’, how can ‘I’ lose it – or for that matter find it? Nonetheless, over and over again people write of solitude that it allows them to ‘re-gather’ a sense of self that can get ‘scattered’. Oliver Morgan, quoting from Koch’s Solitude (see Homework for details), uses the image explicitly:
I can sense that my ‘person’ is pulling back from its scattering into the details and plans of today, like a wave rolling from sand and shore back to its ocean source – collecting itself into a unity of ‘ocean’. ‘I’ am here, present to myself and available for a possible revelation of what is inside me … I am present too for experiences of those guiding, inner images (personal metaphors, archetypes) that I sense shape my values, actions, judgements and decisions during the rest of the time.
Thomas Merton, from a religious angle, sees this process as morally necessary:
All men need enough solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally. When that inner voice is not heard, when he cannot attain to the spiritual peace which comes from being perfectly at one with his true self, his life is always miserable and exhausting … If a man is constantly exiled from his own home, locked out of his own solitude, he ceases to be a true person.
But you do not need to be so grandiose about this business of knowing the self; it is not just a truth for reflective philosophers or great minds. It can be quite domestic and ordinary. Here my friend Jill Langford describes what joy solitude gives her and how she goes about getting it in a very busy life:
About twenty-five years into my marriage, with seven children, I asked my husband for a one-man tent for Christmas. A little taken aback, perhaps, he nonetheless granted my request and bought me a super little army tent or bivouac shell that you honestly couldn’t squeeze two people into. You erect it, quite easily and quickly, crawl in on your belly, then turn over onto your back, clutching a sleeping bag, raise your knees and wriggle your legs, then bottom, then torso into it. Et voilà. You stay in that position till morning, then you do the same in reverse. There is no room to sit up and you’d be a fool not to have a wee before retiring, since the whole procedure is well-nigh impossible in the middle of the night.
I use this little tent just whenever I feel the need to take off, alone, for whatever reason. For me, it works like a battery charger when I feel weighed down by the burdens of living in community and am dragging my feet. Actually I don’t use it very much, but knowing it’s there to use if I want to is sometimes enough in itself to bring a spring back into my step.
When I do need to use it, I find it best to have a car handy, since there is nowhere to store any kit inside the tent and in my part of Scotland it’s usually raining. The car is good because it gets you far from home quickly, so no one will come tramping across the fields to find you until you are done with being alone. This usually takes two full days, but a single night would be better than nothing.
The first morning, emerging from your bivouac-thing, there is a great sense of joy and freedom. You feel quite alone in the world and no one knows who you are or why you are there. You could be in a campsite surrounded by happy families or out in the wild woods with silent, dumb creatures that creep and crawl. It makes no difference, the point is that you are alone because you wanted it this way. You don’t talk to a soul the whole time. You just get up, brew a coffee on a camping stove and
Exactly what this ‘self’ might be remains, of course, the continuing philosophical (and psychological and spiritual and intellectual) question. If the self is just ‘me’, how can ‘I’ lose it – or for that matter find it? Nonetheless, over and over again people write of solitude that it allows them to ‘re-gather’ a sense of self that can get ‘scattered’. Oliver Morgan, quoting from Koch’s Solitude (see Homework for details), uses the image explicitly:
I can sense that my ‘person’ is pulling back from its scattering into the details and plans of today, like a wave rolling from sand and shore back to its ocean source – collecting itself into a unity of ‘ocean’. ‘I’ am here, present to myself and available for a possible revelation of what is inside me … I am present too for experiences of those guiding, inner images (personal metaphors, archetypes) that I sense shape my values, actions, judgements and decisions during the rest of the time.
Thomas Merton, from a religious angle, sees this process as morally necessary:
All men need enough solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally. When that inner voice is not heard, when he cannot attain to the spiritual peace which comes from being perfectly at one with his true self, his life is always miserable and exhausting … If a man is constantly exiled from his own home, locked out of his own solitude, he ceases to be a true person.
But you do not need to be so grandiose about this business of knowing the self; it is not just a truth for reflective philosophers or great minds. It can be quite domestic and ordinary. Here my friend Jill Langford describes what joy solitude gives her and how she goes about getting it in a very busy life:
About twenty-five years into my marriage, with seven children, I asked my husband for a one-man tent for Christmas. A little taken aback, perhaps, he nonetheless granted my request and bought me a super little army tent or bivouac shell that you honestly couldn’t squeeze two people into. You erect it, quite easily and quickly, crawl in on your belly, then turn over onto your back, clutching a sleeping bag, raise your knees and wriggle your legs, then bottom, then torso into it. Et voilà. You stay in that position till morning, then you do the same in reverse. There is no room to sit up and you’d be a fool not to have a wee before retiring, since the whole procedure is well-nigh impossible in the middle of the night.
I use this little tent just whenever I feel the need to take off, alone, for whatever reason. For me, it works like a battery charger when I feel weighed down by the burdens of living in community and am dragging my feet. Actually I don’t use it very much, but knowing it’s there to use if I want to is sometimes enough in itself to bring a spring back into my step.
When I do need to use it, I find it best to have a car handy, since there is nowhere to store any kit inside the tent and in my part of Scotland it’s usually raining. The car is good because it gets you far from home quickly, so no one will come tramping across the fields to find you until you are done with being alone. This usually takes two full days, but a single night would be better than nothing.
The first morning, emerging from your bivouac-thing, there is a great sense of joy and freedom. You feel quite alone in the world and no one knows who you are or why you are there. You could be in a campsite surrounded by happy families or out in the wild woods with silent, dumb creatures that creep and crawl. It makes no difference, the point is that you are alone because you wanted it this way. You don’t talk to a soul the whole time. You just get up, brew a coffee on a camping stove and
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