Welcome to lonely lagoon.

I expect I didn’t know what I’d find on this farm, and by this farm I suppose I mean my heart, a natural progression due to my habit of self-imposition. However, this or that reveals itself to me and I find myself surprised, as if I did in fact expect something else. One of those things I’ve found is loneliness. Mostly, I’m surprised it keeps showing up. I actually wonder how many times I’ve written about loneliness already, how many times I have written the actual word. Is it not going away because it’s one of those “being” things where I need to embody the anecdotes I tell myself about loneliness? Instead I find my pen unraveling the gift my sordid subconscious packed for me.

Loneliness doesn’t need an anecdote, doesn’t need fixing, is not itself a problem. It just is. It seems obvious that I need to sit with it this week, since that seems to be the thing to do around here, sit with discomfort more. Does not running away seem so popularized? Do let me know, as I tend to confuse my internal reality with my external one. Whatever may be, I know reappearance is the unresolved’s resolve.

“We could ask ourselves, ‘Can I touch the center of my pain? Can I sit with suffering, both yours and mine, without trying to make it go away? Can I stay present to the ache… and let it open me?’” – Pema Chodron.

Every time I run away from it, I make it worse in a very obvious sense. I isolate myself, I self-loathe in private, I disappear, I stop engaging, I withdraw, thinking, “Why am I more downtrodden by loneliness than others?” All the signs and symptoms of being alone, and I create them instantly. The form that loneliness was – a fear, an idea – materializes into a somehow realer sense designed by my uncanny will! I took it from what it is to portray a conveniently morbid casting of my life’s events.

The form it takes, however, is merely a side effect, a display of some self-fulfilling prophecy, but not what hangs me at the gallows. My interpretation of its essence, rather, is where the pain actually derives. I sense a Buddhist teaching too shy to surface. Dare I will the essence to mean something else, something positive? Reassuring? I suppose a fact about the universe that I have settled into at this point is that we are the universe experiencing itself. Maybe the deep haunting of having a breath is a constant yearn to reconnect with the other parts of the universe from which we were separated upon receiving this life. Yes, that is how it feels, not good nor bad, but a longing. And if so, then loneliness could be such a sweet feeling. I feel deeply, I yearn so deeply, to simply exist with the other parts of me, of we, of us, of it, that I feel the magnetism when it is not near. How strong is the love the universe has for itself. How kind, too, to know that if I feel this way toward it, it feels unto me.

I wait for absolution, an outdated habit of the mind. It doesn’t go, but it no longer grasps.