Places Alone

Places Alone

I know for myself that there are times that I wish to be around people.

And then there are times that I bask in being by myself. There are certainly times that I feel lonely; I want to have human contact and interaction with others; but, there are certainly those times when I have to be inside my own head, and have or possess my own God-given solitary places and spaces, minutes or hours or even days or lifetimes apart.

As a small child I definitely experienced long periods of time by myself and alone; I learned to enjoy those moments, those periods, those intervals with nature or God or the spirits of the living and dead, past and present and future characters of reality or fiction, imagination, story, fantasy or fancy, from pictures, book, magazines, movies, or simply the stones and sticks, the small life of buggy insects or crawfish from the nearby yards and woods and creeks.

I have learned enough about my own parents to know that they, yes, as social creatures were ones to gather their friends and commune with family or others, but they both had their private and alone times, doing what they enjoyed, whether it was the work in foreign jungles of far off Togo or Sierra Leone or Cambodia or Java, or closer by in the mostly empty apartments or residential houses with their silent basements and lonely attics and freshly dug crawl spaces, running the life giving electricity of the modern age with the ancient earths and soils of the generations of yesterday, from thousands of years ago...

We, my biological fathers and mothers (living and not), my countless sisters and brothers globally, from shore to shore and across a thousand other island beaches and littorals, wander in their own circles of solitude with the greater inner and expansive universe of everything and nothing, talking to Siddhartha Gautama and seeing and immersing oneself in nirvana, achieving the zen of Phil Jackson and Michael Jordan and his buddy Gus and Jack Kerouac and Paul Bowles, and maybe even Salmon Rushdie and millions of the Trekkies trekking and countless before and after them throughout our endless galaxies...

And on the surface, in many respects, we are alone in the mountains or the hills or the lonely, isolated river paths going back and forth from the freshly cloudless or cloud-filled skies surrounding us.

Alone, self-possessed and searching, like Ahab after that monstrous fish of the ever darkening deep?

Aye, my lady, that is where I am.

And as alone as I go, I am with you all the while.

Thanks for being there with me: mother, father, sister, brother, friend. 

God and even the Devil cared to pursue me, and I merely kept to myself and enjoyed the whole thing, with or without words or meaning, with or without the sounds of music or formless opacity.

Alone, but accompanied by all and everything always.