Lonely places can bring bliss
Sometimes I think I’d be lonely without my loneliness to keep me company. When you spend a good deal of time by yourself in pursuit of sole endeavors, there isn’t often a voice telling you you’re alright, and doing the right thing. But there may be one telling you that you’re doing the wrong thing. When you spend most of your time writing, you have a built-in editor in your head, and it ain’t telling you you’ll win the Pulitzer. What do you do with that?
I live 11 miles from the nearest town, a vast conurbation of 1,100 people. During Covid, I had almost no human contact for the better part of two years. They use solitary confinement as torture for a reason.
But there is one advantage to being alone: I have the opportunity to transform loneliness into solitude. It can be a long, painful journey, with no voice to reassure you you’re on the right road. You go within, since there’s no other direction in which to go.
Day after day, which build into weeks and years, you go there. And nothing happens. And then something does. Do you do it? Do you make it happen? No, but you do create the conditions necessary for this experience to come.
What is this experience? Past all the shadows and demons, there’s a bright light. It’s not the visible light you might imagine it to be. It’s a spiritual knowing, and it is this: that the ultimate reality is love. That you are loved. That you are love. That you do love. You’re loved by everyone, because deep down within themselves, that’s what they are, too. You’re loved by everything, because everything is love. Every space. Throughout all time. In each dimension. All matter. All energy.
It’s an indescribable feeling; a knowing really. A sense of sublime beauty, a joy mixed in with splendor, found buried beneath all the ugliness and sham. For the ugliness is just a portrait of my expectation of how I thought things should be, of how I insisted they needed to be before I could give myself permission to experience that unexpected beauty and that unearned joy. The sham is our demand that we suffer first, and earn through our guilt in the crucible that burns off our imagined transgressions. Sin is just us playing God, demanding suffering as the price we pay for paradise, since then its heaven on our terms, a reward we’ve earned through the price of our punishment. Who are we to judge ourselves? Love doesn’t judge us. We do.
How can love’s presence be absolute, when all about us there is suffering and pain? It is our self-centeredness which lulls us into the belief there can’t be an ultimate reality which is good and which wills the good, the best, for us. We claim it is our experience which molds our belief, when really we see what we first believe. Our motive: it is better to rule in hell, even if it is a hell of our own creation.
The cause of our disillusionment, the source of our disbelief in the ultimate good, is our own denial. Enthralled with the world we’ve created, entranced by the dream we’ve fashioned with our powers of illusion, we push out of awareness the ultimate reality, which is love. And so it comes to us in dribs and drabs, in fits and starts, in ancient ideals which seem across the parsecs an infinite distance, and an infinite epoch away. It is time and space that we’ve created as obstructions to our awareness of love’s presence, as obstacles to our experience of joy, as objections to the presence of the sacred in everything profane.
What I really must realize as a precondition to this happiness is that there are no preconditions other than those which I raise against my experience of reality. These barriers aren’t external to me. They seem to be outside myself, so that I can claim helplessness and seek the assignment of blame.
My way out of this is to spend time alone. Then this awareness of love, which is synonymous with love itself, comes to me. I needn’t do anything to bring it forth. I don’t have to conger up its presence. It just comes. It rushes in to fill the vacuum left by the exit of my illusions. Because it’s omnipresent. Its omnipotent. It’s all there is.
There are other roads. They’ll bring you to the same place. And even this path of solitude is also the path of people, since none of us can survive alone.
And there are pitfalls. Solitude can quickly turn to isolation, which can just as easily lead back toward solitude. These patches of bliss seem to come and go on their own. I’m not in conscious control of them. And the strangest things can bring them on. Sometimes when I’m depressed and down on myself, a light cuts through the fog of my isolation.
So I prefer my own company, which is the company of God, for deep down, God takes root in us the same way the branch roots itself in the leaf. Take comfort, then, in times of loneliness. Don’t seek them out, but don’t chase them away either. The silence that attends your aloneness may have something to say.
© 2025 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s short story collection, Canyon Calls, was published by Zumaya Publications in 2009. Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
Mike’s other titles, including his novels, The Crippy and The Mind Altar, as well as Canyon Calls, are available through his websites, https://justmikejust.com and https://canyoncallsthebook.com or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Five 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, has been published by The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within
You Get the Two has been published by Hellbound Books and is available in print, eBook, kindle or audio format at Kids are Hell!- Anthology (hellboundbookspublishing.com)