that we are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach; the step between not understanding that and understanding that is as close as we get to happiness.

Creating a state of aloneness in the besieged everyday may be one of the bravest things individual men and women can do for themselves.

Besieged or left alone, we seem to live best at the crossroad between irretrievable aloneness and irretrievable belonging,

Beauty is an achieved state of both deep attention and self-forgetting: the self-forgetting of seeing, hearing, smelling or touching that erases our separation, our distance, our fear of the other.

It may be that time away from a work, an idea of ourselves, or a committed partner is the very essence of appreciation for the other, for the work and for the life of another; to be able to let them alone as we let ourselves alone, to live something that feels like a choice again, to find ourselves alone as a looked-for achievement, not a state to

Even in company, a sense of imminent aloneness is a quality that can be cultivated. Aloneness does not need a desert, or a broad ocean, or a quiet mountain;

Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.

a beautiful and difficult sense of being solitary is always the ground from which we step into a contemplative intimacy with the unknown,

We are neither what we think we are nor entirely what we are about to become, we are neither purely individual nor fully a creature of our community, but an act of becoming that can never be held in place by a false form of nomenclature. No matter our need to find a place to stand amidst the onward flow of the world, the real foundation of the self