Quotation Saturday ~ Loneliness

Job 13:13 "Hold your peace, let me alone, that I may speak, and let come on me what will."

SILENCE

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing 
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.” 
― Jalaluddin Rumi

“The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.” 
― Edgar Allan Poe

“I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.” 
― Chaim Potok

“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.”
~ Henry Miller

LONELINESS

“Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.” 
― Jodi Picoult

“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.” 
― Maya Angelou

“All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.” 
― Tahereh Mafi

“The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.” 
― Mother Teresa

ISOLATION

“Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”
~ Haruki Murakami

“The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.” 
― David Foster Wallace

“We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.” 
― Rudyard Kipling

“When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.” 
― Criss Jami

SOLITUDE

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” 
― Charlotte Brontë

“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” 
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

I love not man the less, but Nature more” 

― George Gordon Byron

The Tunnel Season

Job 6:11 “What is my strength, that I should hope? and what is mine end, that I should prolong my life?”

The Tunnel Season

I’m calling this the tunnel season because this is the season of my life I trek through a long dark tunnel. I don’t know if any of you have ever been in an underwater tunnel that gets you from one side of the city to the other side but back home, we had TWO. The Harbor tunnel was a long stretch, dimly lit four-lane tunnel, two lanes in and two out. I remember when I was a kid my mother always dreaded driving through that tunnel as fear and claustrophobia gripped her. She would often choose the route through the congested city to get to my aunt’s house instead of putting herself through the trauma. The tunnel runs 1.45 miles under the Inner Harbor.

When I began this journey of a lifetime back in January, I thought the walk through the tunnel would be difficult but definitely doable. I’m about two or three city blocks into the tunnel and the end is not in sight yet and I’m feeling my own claustrophobia rattle my brain. I chose to walk through the tunnel and not go through the city streets to reach my destination; I chose to take the hard, isolated, lonely way.

You see, to me, the chemo slice and dice method is taking the route through the city. There are benches placed at bus stops for you to rest, there are blinking crosswalk signs to get you safely across the street, there are even garbage cans along the route for you to dump any extra baggage you might be carrying. Me, in the tunnel of solitude, I don’t have those luxuries. I have gas emissions from the cars (toxins) to inhale; I have dim lighting (people for me and against my choice); I’ve chosen to walk the walk as opposed to driving, and thus far, it feels as if I’m walking on my hands.

My life has been turned upside down and there is no dispute about it, this is the challenging route. I’m a quarter of a mile in the tunnel and it seems one of the cars broke down up ahead. It started out an empty tunnel, a car here, a car there but now as I look ahead, I see the backed up cars. This journey isn’t getting any easier or lighter to bear, no this is getting more difficult and heavier than expected. I expected ups and downs, stops and starts, but I wasn’t expecting a traffic jam where everything comes to halt and looks as if the jam is not a jam it’s a crash that emergency crew help is having trouble getting to the scene. They’re not here for me anyway.

I’ve been a little depressed lately as my three illnesses battle each other with each one individually wanting to take front and center. With my arthritis, I have a swelled typing finger and a right knee that is pained feeling what little weight I have left bearing down. My psoriasis gets inflamed with sun exposure and this other crud I’m carrying NEEDS the sun as a vitamin D natural source. Then my neck started in with its seething pain. I believe it to be from sleeping wrong but the pain won’t let up and I’m not willing to take pain medication.

Then the eclipse happened and things took a weird turn. Just weird things started happening and I want to attribute it to the eclipse but the reality is, crud happens. Besides the spectacular orbs in the sky shadowing each other, then there's the echoing posts on Facebook and the other day my trusty laptop stopped connecting to the modem. It’s been fine for eight months but suddenly just stopped working and my tech savvy man is finding it difficult to fix. Then there’s the concern that in January when my vitamin supplements run out, the funds are depleted, I will battle on empty handed. That’s just the way my life is, drag me behind a fast moving car and let’s see if I live. Never a dull moment. This is it. I hope I can climb out of this funk because as it looks right now…it’s gonna be awhile.

Then I feel SO petty with my mundane complaints when thousands are out there struggling through the Storm of the Century, Hurricane Harvey hitting Houston! I pray, I meditate and I cry, all stress that is not doing me any good. 

Everyone pretending to be happy shakes my faith in society as a whole. Now some people are finally starting to see what I’ve been seeing for months now how we are basically under a governing regime. From food, water, to medical needs the government turning a blind eye except where their money is concerned. I am left to wonder…

Thank you to all who stood stoically by my side. And to the ones who don’t give a flying fig but pretend you do…. I got nothing.

Job 7:6 “My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without hope.”

Poetry Sunday ~ Alone Am I

Pss. 102:7 I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.

Alone Am I

Alone am I in the confines of my mind

Left for no one but me to see

Running along in these empty halls

As an echo sounds as sanity calls.

Forsaken am I can anyone bear

The care and love of life

Amnesty airs forgiveness of lies

Solitude speaks silence of eyes.

I dared to go where lightning glared

Its fingertip on my soul

Searing a hole in loneliness cold

Breaking the mold if truth be told.

Seclusion aims an arrow set free

On me it callously claims.

Alone am I in the confines of free

Left for no one but me to see.

 

 

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