Solitude

draw a symbolic line in the sand somehow and truly expect things on the other side to be special, invitational, or even a kind of manifestation. It always works. On the other side of that log, or lawn, or “line in the sand,” we start beholding. Someone who is truly beholding is, first of all, silenced with the utter gratuity of a thing, a tree, a b

Philosopher George Santayana on why we follow the crowd:

“A man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body.

He may like to go alone for a walk,

but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.”

By solitude, the desert mystics didn’t mean mere privacy or protected space, although there is a need for that too. The desert mystics saw solitude, in Henri Nouwen’s words, as “the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born, the place where the emergence of the new man and the new woman occurs.”

we don’t have to have a cell, and we don’t have to run away from the responsibilities of an active life, to experience solitude and silence. Amma Syncletica said, “There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind while living in a crowd, a

Peace of mind is an oxymoron.

When we’re in our mind, we’re hardly ever at peace;

when we’re at peace, we’re never only in our mind.

The early Christian abbas and ammas knew this and first insisted on finding the inner rest and quiet necessary to tame the obsessive mind.