LONELY NEVER ALONE

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Let's think about lonely. 

One of the people I love most in the world called my wife last Saturday night.  She is young and vivacious, lovely and regal, luminous and adorable---just like her sister.

Puppy dogs and children are caressed by her presence.  Clowns drop all their bowling pins when she walks past.  Mimes stop miming their own business to compliment her sense of fashion.  Old people ask her the same questions over and over just to hear the sound of her voice saying the same answers. 

She is both complex and simple.  Like her mother and sister she loves science, art, but she also like Bioshock and creating a stylish room.  Her simplicity reveals itself when she says, "Roll Tide!" and "Mommy, hold me."

She is intrinsically fascinating--just like her sister and her mother.  My wife and I cannot see enough of her and her sister. 

How can such a one ever feel loneliness?

The night she called found her not in her accustomed place, which is the center of a social universe in everlasting orbit around her.  She called from her home.  The blues had arrived for conversation or maybe just to cuddle.  She felt lonely. 

At the time I was trying to write the great American phrase while listening to my wife’s side of the conversation and inferring that an old friend of youth had paid this person I love a visit. 

I shouted, “It’s good to be alone.  Take a break from the world.”

I’ve known her pain.  It’s a stab of restlessness, a hole of emptiness, an indefinable yearning.  Sometimes it does not matter how many people we surround ourselves with, we find ourselves turned back into ourselves.  Lonely happens.

I’ve always cherished those times.  I miss the authenticity of being thrown back onto myself.  Most of my life, I am lost in what I do, whom I accompany. 

I sense no remedy.  No drink, drug, or visitation can assuage the vastitude of inner space I feel expanding inside my chest. 

During those times, it never matters what I do.  I depart the normal rumble and tumble of my life as one cast suddenly back into Eden.  The strangeness of it I forlornly feel since I have been mythically wayward for eons.

Loneliness is a keen awareness of being alive and aloof.  Of course, for me, during those times, my thoughts invariably turn to God.  The underlying power of being itself is in the house! 

I know many people have no sense of being enveloped and embraced by a loving presence.  Truly, I have relied on faith, not sensation, during those times I felt utterly alone.  I know that for myself, as well as for others, there really is no such thing as utterly alone, but reason can be easily shrouded. 

Nonetheless, I pray, aloud or in my head, “How you doing?  I love you.  Thanks for all these breaths.  Keep them coming!”  And then pray a conversation about the day, the world, the universe, the past, present and future, people, whatever and whatsoever until I move past language to presence.

That I am not alone becomes real; loneliness transforms into make believe.

I have friends in my life with whom I easily converse for hours.  They come bearing gifts and good times.  We talk and talk, but we also sit in the wordless communication of presence. 

In my solitude I find rest and peace in such presence who never comes or departs, and who brings Eden--that still can be so strange and wondrous within me.

Blessings…