In the long, quiet walk to solitude,
each step feels uncertain.
Slips, trips—mud clings to my feet,
yet no step is lost.
Nature abides in every leaning,
silently tending each footprint.
Though my breath is unsteady,
her daily rhythms remain unshaken.
Leaning on her roots and branches,
remembering the seasons of growth and decay,
my heart aligns with her spacious pace.
Her winds comb my tangled thoughts.
Just this—alive, like a tall cypress
rooted in both heaven and earth.
Just this—flowing, like a mountain river
untethered in cold turbulence.
When the loud, modern realm overwhelms,
she offers her hand in trust.
This smile, these senses—
bloom with wild enthusiasm again.
Post Script
I wrote this poem after a separation and a period of depression, while serving as the on-site resident at a retreat center. Another group was using the property, and I was there to watch over the land. I was still hurting, but the relationship itself was no longer the immediate setting of my days. My attention was returning to the responsibilities before me and to the living world around me.
Solitude was not new to me, nor was the difference between solitude and abandonment. I had known both from an early age. The poem does not record the discovery that I could be alone. It records a mindful return to a capacity I had known before: being by myself without experiencing myself as isolated from life.
The “she” in the poem is Nature. She does not rescue me, explain the pain, or offer forced optimism. Roots remain tangled, water turbulent, and decay part of the seasons. Her spaciousness simply permits uncertainty without allowing uncertainty to become the whole world. Through breath, mud, wind, trees, and water, the senses begin remembering what depression had obscured.
Blaise Pascal famously connected human unhappiness with our inability to remain quietly in a room. He was writing about diversion, our tendency to flee from ourselves through continual activity and distraction. The solitude in this poem poses a related question: can I remain where I am without needing another person, another story, or another distraction to make the moment bearable?
Nature complicates the image of the solitary room. Being alone there is not the same as being without company. Cypress, roots, wind, moving water, and the body’s own breath are not scenery surrounding an isolated self. They participate in the moment. Solitude becomes less a withdrawal from the world than an unguarded way of belonging to it.
Mindfulness here is a return. It is not the achievement of a new state, but the remembrance of how to inhabit an old one. I had once known how to do things by myself without feeling alone in Nature. That knowledge had not vanished. It had become difficult to reach.
“Wild enthusiasm” is therefore not a command to become cheerful. It is a remembrance. The appetite for life was not manufactured by overcoming sadness. It had remained somewhere within experience, capable of blooming again when attention returned to the senses.
The accompanying photograph holds that remembrance. The land does not promise an escape from pain. It simply remains alive and available, inviting attention back into a world larger than the story of what has been lost.
Image credit: Photograph by Joseph Patterson (2024).
Primitive Joe 