Category: Solitude - A Cottage by the Sea

Solitude is not synonymous with sedentary

5/17/2021

Solitude can be a challenge for ADHD type like me. I don’t/can’t sit still for long. Actually it’s only a challenge if I think I should sit still for a long time. As a kid I was sometimes told to sit still, or at least people comment on continual moving about, although they were always nice about it. Probably because I was a happy-go-lucky kid. I learned early that people are kinder to kids who smile. True for adults, too, but I think it’s harder for adults to catch onto that if they didn’t grow up acting happy. They have to work at it, that is if they are even aware of what they can get away with by smiling.
As a kid, even though I was social, I loved spending time by myself. Many memories, still vivid, are of playing alone in my room, or wandering in the woods checking out my forts. I was always on the move.
And so today, in my solitude, I move from post to post, from activity to activity. Solitude is not synonymous with sedentary.

Grateful for solitude

1/23/2021

Much has happened since I last wrote six days ago. To keep with New Years terms, the old has gone, the new has been ushered in. We have a new president sleeping in the White House. In my immediate life, two church members have died. Both lived long lives worth celebrating and passed away peacefully at home, surrounded by family members.
The comings and goings of life, the beginnings and endings, the births and deaths! Sometimes literal, other times symbolic; sometimes joyful, other times sorrowful; always nuanced for us as we pick ourselves up and move forward.
I am grateful that I have solitude to work with all these changes—grateful for the physical time and for the peace that I feel when I am alone.

Solitude memories during the pandemic

11/25/2020

Take by my dad during our trip. NOT a picture of me.

I am feeling deeply content with my solitude these days. The pandemic has taken away the need for a calendar, and I love that. Oh, I have things to do and people to keep up with, but most of these lend themselves to solitude. And so, I’ve been thinking about how I loved those cottage days, with weekday after weekday to be filled by my whim.
But a new memory has appeared, of me, age 19 riding a bike along a country road in Norway. My parents, sister, and I were staying at an inn somewhere in the countryside and my parents had agreed that I could rent a bike and take a ride by myself. Looking back, this may be my first memory as a ‘adult’ of taking off independently. For years my parents had let me bike all over town, both alone and with friends, so that wasn’t new, but biking alone in a foreign country was. I remember talking with my parents about it and then encouraging myself to actually get on the bike and take off. I recall biking on a flat road along a lake and after a half hour or so deciding I’d better turn back so no one would worry about me. I, however, was not worried or afraid, and that freedom has remained with me throughout all my solitary travel.
What brought this memory forth, this memory which is now so visceral? I’ve been reading The Storm Sister, the second in a series by Lucinda Riley, about a young woman who searches for her roots in Norway. This has led me to start rereading (slowly, one chapter a day) Astrid & Veronika, by my absolute favorite author, Linda Olsson, about two women, one young, one old, each living alone in rural Sweden, who develop a friendship. Why these books? I come back full circle for this love of solitude.

Tapping into solitude--walking

6/9/2020

Taking a walk has always been one of the most satisfying ways I have tapped into solitude. My intention is to stay present to what I am seeing and keep my mind clear of mental distractions (such as rehashing the past or planning for the future).
I developed this mindset during those five winters at the cottage when I walked every morning. It became the way I stepped into solitude while wandering the streets of Florence or strolling the grassy terrain of Iona.
These days, as I try to maintain a similar clarity of mind, I realize that walking is my go-to entry into solitude. Memories go with me.

Remembering Iona and Florence

Remembering last week's walk

Solitude v.v. being alone

5/4/2020

I love solitude, I love lots of time alone, days and days of it. That’s why I went to my cottage by the sea for five consecutive winters, spending the week days there alone. But I knew back then, and I know it now, that I loved that solitude because I had friends and family, and a husband, who kept the home fires burning, to return to each weekend.
Recently I have had contact with someone is desperately lonely during this pandemic. She told me that since she’d lived alone for so many years, she thought this isolation would be easy. But not so. All her ‘communities’ have been taken away--committees, professional clubs, church, luncheon gatherings, you name it. Her family lives far away, and they have busy lives, and don’t contact her as much as she’d like. She is alone with herself.
For me, being alone is not same as solitude. Being alone can connote loneliness in the midst of physical and emotional isolation. Solitude is a way of being with one’s self and with God.

A blog about solitude

2/7/2020

A blog for those who are looking for silence, solitude, and simplicity, and who sometimes want to be alone.
That’s what I wrote over ten years ago on the home page of this blog, and the focus still stands. In fact, the home page hasn’t changed much except for biographical update (which I ought to again), the cover of Very Grateful: The Story of My Hundred Year Old Mother and Me, and the addition of three topics: A Solitary Traveler, Secrets of an Old Woman, and Compassionate Reading.
I began this blog when I began going to the cottage by the sea. It was there, for those five winters that I settled into solitude. My life now has a different rhythm with less extended days of solitude. I miss that, but I still have hours of solitude in each day, and I still travel alone for two weeks time.

No place like home for solitude~

4/23/2019

I’m home. Spring is here. The garden is bursting forth, especially after last night’s rain. In the tree outside my window, a goldfinch and redpoll wait to swoop down to my kitchen window bird feeder. Life was good in Italy; life is good back home. In fact, I feel I have more solitude here than when I travel. Although I search for solitude in different physical location, I know that it is wherever I let it in. That being said, I feel like Dorothy returning from Oz knowing that there’s no place like home.

Alone and silent among the icons

2/2/2019

I posted the following on ‘A Solitary Traveler,’ but I want to say a little more about the silence and solitude I experienced. Being the only person among the second floor icons was awesome. If I had come with a friend, that wouldn’t have happened; silence and solitude would have been compromised.
I understand that not everyone desires to travel alone the way I do, but if you long for silence, solitude, and simplicity, I suggest that you spend a morning by yourself at a museum. You may not have the floor to yourself, but you can wander about silently in your own little world.

Today I took a solitary trip to the Museum of Russian Icons, in Clinton, eighteen miles and thirty-five minutes from my house. I had planned to take pictures, but upon arriving I discovered I had left my phone at home. What good news that turned out to be; no distractions. I was free to look. And since I was alone, it was just me and the icons.
More good news: I had the entire second floor of the museum to myself for the entire visit.

Snow day in retirement

1/21/2019

Cold here: 12 degrees at mid-day. Our driveway is icy, although it was plowed. I’m enjoying my second snow day, recalling such respites when I was a teacher. Admittedly these current ones are more satisfying because I don’t need to make them up during the last, hot days in June. And, I was paid for them—no furlough.
In retirement I fill these snow days like any other day when I stay home in the winter. I read, cook, write, work on a jigsaw puzzle, and sit in the silence, solitude and simplicity. I stay in the house; taking is walk is not safe option.
Lately solitude has been taking center stage for me, pushing silence and simplicity to the role supporting cast. I prefer to do things alone—travel, go to museums, shop, eat, do a puzzle, walk. Perhaps I prefer solitude because I have family and friends as a balance. When I’m not alone, I visit people, which I certainly can’t do in solitude. Hmm, just thinking—the yin and yang of life.

Alone but not lonely in Florence~

12/3/2018

It is misty and cloudy this morning so I ought to be a little down, for that is what ‘they’ say is supposed to be one’s mood on such a day. But here I am, wandering about alone, feeling peaceful and very grateful that I made the trip.
     My usual café is packed with American students; not a seat in the place; so different from when I was here in 1959. I was one of the first of the junior year abroad students to walk the untried territory. How do I know this? Because I had no American friends the entire year I was here. My college and I were making it up as we went along.
    As a result, I learned to be on my own, to be independent, to not be lonely. Solitude became my preferred way of being, which may surprise those of you who know me because I can be extremely social and gregarious. Meyers-Briggs tells me I am right in the middle on the introvert-extrovert continuum.
     From time to time, especially when I come back to Florence, I ponder what effect that year so long ago had on me. Maybe that’s why I keep returning. I want the answer incised in my mind/body/spirit just as dates are chiseled into the stones of Florence.
    My answer on this misty, cloudy morning is the gift of being at peace with myself and very grateful for my life.