Loneliness

   I read some of my old note pads the other day.  Tonight I was given a cd to listen to.  It had a good bit about loneliness.  It reminded me of the notepad.
   I took a writing class my first year of college.  I enjoyed it.  One book I read for it was, Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg.

   -Last night I was sitting with a very old friend in my living room.  "You know, Natalie, I know you've talked about being lonely, but last week when I was really lonely, I felt that I was the only person in the world who ever felt it."  That's what loneliness is about.  If we felt connected to people, even other lonely people, we wouldn't feel alone anymore.
   When I was separated from my husband, Katagiri Roshi said to me, "You should live alone.  You should learn about that.  It is the terminal abode."
   "Roshi, will I get used to loneliness?"
   "No, you don't get used to it.  I take a cold shower every morning and every morning it shocks me, but I continue to stand up in the shower.  Loneliness always has a bite, but learn to stand up to it and not be tossed away."
   Later that year I went to Roshi again: "It's really hard.  I come home and I'm alone and I get panicky."  He asked me what I did when I was alone.  Suddenly, it had a fascination.  "Well, I wash the dishes, I daydream and doodle on pieces of paper, draw hearts and color them in.  I pick the dead leaves off the plants and I listen to music a lot."  I began to study my own desolation and I became interested in it.  I stopped fighting it.-

That's the beginning of this chapter.  The assignment I had was to pick a few paragraphs and write about them.  Here is what I picked and wrote:

-Writing can be very lonely.  Who's going to read it, who cares about it?  A student asked me, "Do you write for yourself or do you write for an audience?"  Think of sharing your need to talk with someone else when you write.  Reach out of the deep chasm of loneliness and express yourself to another human being.  "This is how it was for me when I lived in the Midwest."  Write so they understand.  Art is communication.  Taste the bitterness of isolation, and from that place feel a kinship and compassion for all people who have been alone.  Then in your writing lead yourself out of it by thinking of someone and wanting to express your life to him.  Reach out in your writing to another lonely soul.  "This is how I felt when I drove across Nebraska, late August, early evening alone in my blue car."
   Use loneliness.  Its ache creates urgency to reconnect with the world.  Take that aching and use it to propel you deeper into your need for expression--to speak, to say who you are and how you care about light and rooms and lullabies.-

   Excuse any of my fluff in this next part please.  : p
   "I'm thinking that Golberg's point is to help show how loneliness can benefit writing.  Most people usually experience it at some time, and it can be a very interesting topic to read about.  I think it's important because it not only seems true to me, but I kind of like the idea of loneliness.  I think it can be a pretty helpful thing for people to experience.  I also like that it can really help to relate with others, which is a good thing when writing, since it gets more readers usually.
   It relates to me personally because I like to think about loneliness.  I'm not a super lonely  person, but when I feel lonely, I try to think of it in a good way.  It helps me see myself more clearly.  I'm not around other people, so I can't be trying to please them; it's just me at those times."

   I used to overly care about who would read what I wrote.  I've made a number of blog-type things in my past that have been posted privately, only for my viewing.  As a kid, when an adult reads something unhealthy about you, "they're supposed to tell your parents," who then "are supposed to try to get you fixed."  That was always a fear for me.  But as an adult, when an adult reads something unhealthy about you, they talk to you personally.  Fear or sharing through writing has been taken away from me for some time.  If I try to conjure any bad possible outcomes of people reading what I've written, I just see each of those ideas as fruitless.

   Without a doubt, I know I become much more pensive when I'm sad, and often times loneliness brings me to sadness.  With this, I become so much more aware of God, others, and myself.  I should look to God at all times, but it's so much easier for me when I have no one else to look to.  When times seem badly, I'm usually at my best.  This idea has been a great encouragement to me recently.  If I take any big risks, the very worst thing that I can see happening is acquiring this beneficial lonely feeling.  When I'm sad, I care, and then notice much more about other people.  I have a greater concern for their hurts then, because I'm so  aware of that same unhappy feeling, and would rather that they didn't have to feel it.

   He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
   Surely he has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

   That's about Jesus.  He's the one who's been the closest there ever was to God, and he's been the loneliest person there ever was, I'd say.  As he was giving up his life he cried out, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?"
   My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?