Somewhere deeply buried near the core of us all is a cavern of darkness and stillness, a silence warm and enveloping. It is there, a quiet hollow undefeatable and enduring despite our ignoring, despite our frenzied attempts to fill it with sound, with noise, with the din of our desperation. To be alone, to be soaked in solitude is to nurture this place, though we’ve forgotten it over the years in our frantic race through the chaos of our civilization. We do not nurture this place.
It is alone that we can uncover the hidden secrets that always seek to whisper out to our waiting ears, it is alone that the fires of creativity are lit, stoked, and strengthened. This is the kiln, though we neglect to put our clay inside it far too often, this is the beehive of bricks that hold the heat, that turns our mud to pot, to plate, to the mug that holds your tea. We are never alone, not anymore, and we feel the weight of all we’re missing every moment of every day.
Here a ping from a network we joined because we felt we must join, here the buzzing of a phone on tabletop, face down as we lie to ourselves that we cannot be tempted by what we cannot see. Be not alone, it says in the brrrrr brrrrr brrrrrr murmur as it shakes the glassware, turn from this stillness!
To write, to paint, to create, to invent, is to give a voice and texture to the quietest place within us, it is to allow it up and out after sitting within it for long enough to begin to understand its edges — for it takes much longer to dive beneath its surfaces. We cannot truly give shape to the truths sunken within us without this solitude, cannot begin to translate the voices within without pausing the noise long enough to listen, to truly hear.
In our connection we’re disconnected, in our loneliness we’re never truly alone.
This is the thing, this is the underlying force that we pretend does not exist as we scroll and stream, as we double tap or swipe left, this is the truth we hate to admit outloud lest it disrupt the dopamine injections we receive like intravenous drip on a daily basis. You can take my life, but you’ll never take my Instagram, we chant from the front lines of this battle, it’s not our phones, it’s not the internets, it’s not this hyperconnected reality we’ve carved from reticence and a softness we once celebrated.
“Give me solitude, give me again O Nature your primal sanities!” said Whitman on his trek back towards a life affording the space for creation, and in turn I wonder of him, of other artists littered throughout history. I wonder of Michelangelo, of the ceilings his hands painted, wonder if they would be empty this day should he have had what we now have. I picture him scrolling, doubting his brushstrokes as he stares at those of another, I imagine him lying on scaffolding that towers above the sacred halls he haunted, lost in device, the paint drying upon his palette.
I imagine Hemingway erasing pages on a MacBook as the quotes he shared didn’t receive enough likes, imagine Faulkner refusing to write As I Lay Dying for fear of offending those he borrowed personality traits from on Facebook. Here, now, I imagine Kerouac never getting lost on On The Road, as his GPS turned him each step at a time, I imagine the trains he did not ride, he and his Dharma Bums, as there was always another Uber waiting a few thumb taps away.
Please know it’s not all bad, it’s not all destruction and the thumping of massive speakers in our deep dark caves of silence, please know the world we’ve created has also given birth to a million benefits. This place would not be, if it never came, this community, this beautiful group of beautiful people scattered across a beautiful planet, would have never been born. We are able to find those that feel how we feel, understand the world as we do, and we grow in this, we feel less alone. Still though we run from it, still we avoid being alone like a plague a mask cannot stop, we fear it, don’t we? We fear it.
This is a call for more solitude, this is a call to find that stillness again. I believe solitude is the kiln of creativity, it is not the clay or the mud, the water or the wheel, it is not the paint on the palette nor the brush in our hand, it is the kiln, it is the soft warmth that allows what is in us to transform into something else, something new. Without this it withers, it turns back to earth and stains on our aprons, it transforms itself back into a hope and a fear and the feeling that we’re not making what we’re here to make, not creating what our souls were invented to create.
This is a plea for you to find that place within you, around you, again. This is your reminder to find the mountains, the valleys, the oceans, or seas. This is your reminder to set down the phone and lift your weary neck back to the sky, to count the clouds and find shapes hiding in their fullness. This is to turning off the noise for a time, this day, every day, and create a sacred altar around it. To honoring your creativity by adding more logs to the fire in its kiln. We cannot continue this way, cannot keep plugging into the matrices and downloading at fiber optic speeds the information we don’t truly need.
Unplug, take the red pill instead of the blue, see the trueness of the world we inhabit. Go another way, go deeper within, find the deep cavern that has never moved at the center of us, and never will. Like loving arms that cannot judge, they are open and waiting to embrace us.
We’re never alone anymore, not really, and I feel us suffering from it. Find it, protect it, and take it like vitamin each day.
I know we miss the silence, but we needn’t any longer.
Hush now, and make what you’re supposed to make.
We’re never alone,
always surrounded with noise.
We miss the silence.
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