It’s a challenge to experience solitude when the weekend is filled with visiting and being visited by family and friends. Just no way to slip into the solitude zone while carrying out my Camp Fisher duties as chef, baker of Sculpy, provider of supplies for terrariums, and field trip director to Dairy Joy. I wonder how Emily Dickinson felt when her family home was filled with activity? They say that she liked children and was very playful with them. She loved to bake and is known to have lowered some of her biscuits in a basket from her upstairs window to the neighborhood children waiting below. We all need the balance of social and solitude, and we all find our ways. I wouldn’t give any of it up. The gray exuded warmth and calm. If you live in the Boston area, I urge you to take a field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts in the next month or so and explore The Art of the Americas Wing. (Next best would be go on line on mfa.org.) I went yesterday with a group of long-time friends, one of whom organized a tour of the new wing given by a exceptional docent, who generously shared her love and knowledge of the MFA. As I sit in silence reflecting on the day, I’m am aware that the day wasn’t silent or simple, nor was I in solitude. And yet, the entire experience offered a balance to my time at the cottage when I sit in silence, solitude and simplicity. We conversed as friends do, and yet we were calm and thoughtful. Although we shared a common experience, we each absorbed it in our special solitary place. Learning about the space, (how to get from floor to floor, what was displayed where and why) at first seemed extremely complicated. And yet there was an immense order to the entire new wing and it’s relationship with the rest of the museum. I don’t want to live at the cottage all the time, and I certainly am grateful for situations when threads of silence and conversation, solitude and community, and simplicity and complexity weave a common cloth. Yesterday was one of those days. You'll have to imagine the mergansers. They're there, I promise. The mergansers were waiting for me when I arrived this afternoon. First there was one swimming around, but soon twenty or more joined her, paddling about among the rocks in front of the deck. “Do I want to be that lone merganser or do I want to join the group?” I asked myself. “Right now, I choose that lone merganser.” After spending the past week enjoying family and friends, I feel a little uncomfortable admitting to myself and to others my relief that I have four days of solitude before me. It’s a challenge to acknowledge this desire, for I am aware that most people don’t experience this need to be alone as much as I do. However, I presume that some of you reading this blog resonate with this dilemma-- choosing to be the lone merganser or part of the flock. Feel free to comment here or at Share your story. It was one thing to experience silence, solitude and simplicity at the cottage yesterday morning, but quite another to grasp it later in the day as I stood along the road near my house with an American flag in my hand paying respect to our town’s first casualty of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. People were lined along much of the same route that the Minutemen took two hundred and thirty five years ago in 1775 on their way to Concord. But this time it was to honor First Lieutenant Scott F. Milley as he traveled from Hanscom Air Force Base in Lincoln to his final resting place in Sudbury. As the cars with family members, and then the hearse went by, we were silent; we held our flags but didn’t wave them; we dispersed immediately afterwards and went our separate ways. It was a silent, solitary, simple act; but no one, not Scott, nor his family or friends, was alone. |
Contact me: bobbifisher.mac@mac.com
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