If there is a curse in this world, it is loneliness, an old woman once said.

It’s ironic, isn’t it, that although there are more people on than ever, and the size of the earth hasn’t grown, people seem lonelier than ever, too. despite the telephones and televisions and teleconferencing, we’re dropping like flies from addiction and suicide, from a pandemic called Being Alone.

Loneliness is a feeling. It’s often transitory, and based on incomplete or inaccurate information.

Solitude is a condition. It’s often spiritual, and upwells from a deeper aspect of ourselves.

The topic of loneliness is now topical because most of us are locked in on lockdown. I haven’t seen another face up close in a couple weeks. I haven’t had a face-to-face conversation in more weeks. I haven’t touched another human body in months.

The faces I see, the voices I hear, are on Zoom – in a Brady Bunch array – where it seems as if everyone is looking at me. The faces I see are on old DVD’s or reruns of Super Bowls 23 years past. Yesterday, I watched Pat Sumerall and John Madden deliver the broadcast for a Packer’s-Patriot’s standoff. Brett Favre and Drew Bledsoe were the quarterbacks. It’s surreal, like watching reels from a time capsule sent by an innocent race before apocalypse. I feel sometimes like the last man on earth. That’s loneliness.

What about solitude?

I am privileged to be surrounded by forests of ponderosa, pinyon and juniper. I walk about a half-mile east, and towering stands of pine sway in the blue skies, their orange bark brightening my eyes as I rest my bum on a fallen log. Crows caw overhead, always in pairs even if I’m not. And I don’t care that I’m not, because I’m in solitude.

Sometimes, the flight calls of mallards fill the air as I scare them up from the bulrushes and cattails that rise beyond the forest. Great blue herons wading along the shore slowly flap up out of the water as I approach. Redwings in their sunset songs zealously guard their nests, flitting over my shoulder as I hike by. I try to tell a turkey vulture from a red tail hawk circling on the thermals overhead. In all this, I am not lonely, but captured by solitude.

It’s only when I see a couple walk down the dirt road with their Water Spaniels, or hear the incessant drone of tractors on the land next door and see a man and his friend grading their road, that I feel the compare of loneliness. It’s the world of people and their companionship that reminds me of my sole condition. For although I’m not the only one alone, when you’re alone, it feels as though you’re terminally unique in that separation and apartness.

It is a truism that the times I’ve felt the loneliest were when I was surrounded by others – drunk at a pick-up bar. And the times I’ve felt that I’ve most belonged were when I was by myself – surrounded by the boles of pines as far as my eyes could see, standing on the North Rim.

Everett Ruess was an American artist and writer whose journals became famous after he disappeared, at the age 20, near Davis Gulch in the canyons of the Escalante River, in Utah. The circumstances of his disappearance in 1934nemo remain a mystery. Near his last known whereabouts, the word Nemo was inscribed near a corral he’d built for his donkeys. It means No One in Latin. In his last correspondence, he made clear that he had no intentions of revisiting the world. The wilderness of southern Utah was enough for him. The beauty that held him was sufficient, even though his only companions were a couple of burros.

Worldwide, most of us live in cities; big conurbations that many of the urban dwellers wish they could escape. And some do, dragging their ways along with them until there’s less opportunity to create the initial conditions for solitude in the places to which they’ve sought to recreate it. The conditions necessary for solitude are silence and stillness. Yet I am surrounded by people in an increasingly noisy and bustling world. With this crowded fact, I must reconcile. I must atone, since I brought myself out here into the nothingness, dragging my books and my TV’s and my cars along with me.

If I break it in the right place, atone becomes at-one. Oneness is a solution to loneliness. Yet in order to execute this solution I must include everyone in its circle. I can’t keep out the noisy neighbor or his barking dog. Right now, he’s got his chainsaw whining and who knows who he’s chopping up? How do I reconcile all these new neighbors and the noise and busyness they bring with them from the cities? How do I harmonize their presence with anonymity of solitude?

I’m not sure. I’m surer of the fact that solitude can’t have much to do with the physical state of being alone, any more than the physical condition of apartness has much to do with the feeling of loneliness. Solitude is an inner state, not an external one, just as loneliness is also an inward condition that has more do with feeling cutoff from myself than it does with whether I’m surrounded by other bodies. Loneliness really comes when I’m feeling disconnected from myself. Then, I can’t help but experience disconnection from others, and I’ll feel lonely, even in at a ballgame.

And so, I guess what I’m coming to is this: solitude is connection. It’s the experience of being connected with a deeper aspect of myself. I can experience it when I’m in a crowd, in a city deep at night, or at the very end of Hole-in-the-Rock Road, not far from where Ruess dissolved into at-oneness. At-oneness is solitude, since when I’m in solitude, I’m at one with myself and with everyone and everything else.

In the end, all we’re left with is love. Isn’t it strange that this is the last thing we choose as a balm for our loneliness? Almost as a consolation prize. And we uncover it in the last place we look: deep within ourselves, and just as much, in the eyes of everyone.

© 2022 by Michael C. Just

Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.

You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23

Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Four of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within