The Silence and Beauty of Solitude

Saturday 18th July 2009

“To live wisely and intelligently requires a deep, meditative re-examination of priorities.”
Light on Enlightenment - Christopher Titmus

It’s Saturday morning - I’m surrounded by people in a noisy café, smack bang in the middle of a shopping mall, twittering, chattering humans pausing momentarily in between bouts of compulsive spending, some reading newspapers, others stuffing kids with yet more consumer products, lives bulging with shopping bags. There’s an endless undercurrent of busyness, it hums like the fridge we don’t notice til it stops. Shopping malls…hundreds of egos projecting themselves out into the world, bouncing off each other, colliding, repelling, then turning in on themselves, exchanging useless information and regurgitating it to pump up self-images. A million useless, frenetic conversations with no genuine communication.

Tons and tons of wasted human energy.

The hectic buzz of a Saturday morning café.

The flavour of espresso bites…then lingers deliciously on my tongue. I feel the buzzy vibration on my inner energy field.
Personal velocity.

It’s Saturday afternoon – I’m surrounded by windswept canopies of trees and birds; water trickles somewhere in a creek closeby; there’s a kiss of sunshine through crisp wintery air. I inhale the fresh purity of green life, oxygen, the gift of photosynthesis.
No-one’s up here at Horsenell Gully today…just me…such a small me in the vast beauty of nature, there’s room to relax and expand into the spaces between the threads that weave our world together.

I bathe in the silence and solitude, soaking it up to recharge my people-depleted energy.
More and more I’m making choices that enhance this quietness, living a simple life with simple pleasures. As the activities and people drop naturally away, new shoots appear in the undergrowth of my life. A new kind of life energy is arising that is pure and powerful; it’s the energy of a focussed life, channelled through the purifying lens of clarity and one-pointedness. Debris and clutter and disappearing, my life is being washed clean by the illuminative power of simplicity, silence and solitude.