“Here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.” ~ Paul Gauguin

“Because she favours solitude and indwelling, an artist can live a significantly more claustrophobic life that she had ever intended.” ~ Eric Maisel

“The ecstatic state of wholeness is bound to be transient because it has no part in the total pattern of ‘adaptation through maladaptation’ which is characteristic of our species… the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realization that something is missing, from awareness of incompleteness.”

― Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self

Sometimes I look back on all of my relationships and am tempted to conclude that the longest and most powerful one, my “primary relationship” has been with solitude itself. It is in the accumulated years of a life alone in a room with work, or in the fields or the streets, wandering, that I have always felt most “my self.” Alone, there is no one to entertain or impress –– only impressions themselves and the gathering of them. If I am lucky there is not even a gatherer, just the verb itself, and some editing hand does the work without my being aware of paying attention, resulting in a collected sense of “coming to my self” ie. experiencing “meaning.” [Read more…]