When Leslie Marmon Silko spoke about her memoir, The Turquoise Ledge, at our local independent bookstore last week, she underlined the value of solitude to her work as a writer. Paradoxically, she has also found it very easy to slip into getting busy with chores (like dishes, laundry, or housecleaning) that steal away quiet time alone.
Living in the Tuscon Mountains of Arizona, she claims time for solitary escapades that take her into the Sonoran Desert where she walks early each morning to the cadence of nature. She read to us from her book, shared electrifying stories of personal encounters with the rattlesnake, and explained what this maligned reptile and other desert animals have taught her about creature intelligence. She contrasted natural rhythms of wild open space with the phrenetic pulse of modern city life.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in her classic book Gift From The Sea, devotes a full chapter (“Moon Shell”) to the importance of solitude:
Every person, especially every woman, should be alone sometime during the year, some part of each week, and each day. How revolutionary that sounds and how impossible of attainment. To many women such a program seems quite out of reach … Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone. The artist know he must be alone to create; the writer to work out his thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray. But women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves: that firm strand which will be the indispensable center of the whole web of human relationships.
In solitude we learn to listen carefully to the sounds all around us. We learn to hear what our heart and our intuition are telling us.
Solitude is a gift to ourselves, a gift offering silver times of reflection and golden moments when we enter into the part of the revolving axis of life that is motionless and free.
Image ~ above right ~ Desert of Baja California Sur.
Thumbnail image ~ Volcan Las Tres Virgenes (bw. San Ignacio and Santa Rosalia in Baja California Sur, Mexico).
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Ahh, your quote recalls to mind an old, long-cherished friend: Gift From the Sea! And our ever-fresh friend: solitude!