Solitude, Silence, Simplicity
The music your body, heart, and mind are craving is available — right now
They are the three sibilant sisters, the angels of awareness. The less you know you need them, the more you really do need them.
A lapsed Catholic with a mystical bent, I’ve often visited a Trappist monastery in Virginia nestled along the snaking Shenandoah River, to quench a thirst I didn’t even know I had.
My first retreat came as the applause and glamour of a Kennedy Center Honors event honoring Merce Cunningham — whose dance company I managed in the 1980s — was still reverberating in my ears. For all the joy of that event in Washington, I could not have imagined a more powerful, necessary contrast than the one I encountered for the next week in that beautiful place. The simple, austere rhythms of the monks’ daily life, grounded in silence, manual work, and contemplative prayer, were extraordinarily nourishing. The barely-adorned chapel, built from a barn, was a mecca of peace, open to all, from the first office at 3:30 am to the last, at 7:30 pm. To sit, absolutely alone, in the back of that tiny chapel, deep inside the sounds and the smells of a late summer night, was to experience an altered state of clarity.
That 1985 retreat launched a mystical adventure that has changed my life. Not only did it unshackle my creativity from (some of) the demands of my ego’s restless voice, it led me to the works of Thomas Merton — and from there, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama (both personal friends of Merton’s), Alan Watts, Henri Nouwen, and so many other lights. All pointing me to the place I had already stumbled into.
I’m sharing this with you now, because I’ve come to see that you don’t need the trappings of a monastery or a formal retreat to experience now what I experienced then. You only need three, interconnected ingredients. And you can have them almost anytime.
Solitude is the opposite of loneliness. It’s the water your anxious heart is dying to drink.
Solitude is the very best way to recalibrate yourself, find your balance again, hear the quiet pendulum inside that tells you how (and maybe why) you have gotten out of whack. For Thomas Merton, who lived the last several years of his life as a hermit in a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, solitude is a “shortcut to your soul.”
I shall lead you through the loneliness, the solitude you will not understand; but it is my shortcut to your soul.
— Thomas Merton
Silence is the deep music your ears are craving. As my former mentor John Cage would always remind us (he wrote an entire book about it) — silence is not the absence of sound. It is the presence of aural space, rich with possibility, rich with life, nourishing even.
No silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.
— John Cage
Simplicity is the key to clearing debris… the accumulated car wrecks of your life that are blocking the road to clarity. It’s also the most powerful way to communicate a deep message, clear as a bell — something Thich Nhat Hanh, who left this world only last week, demonstrated more strongly than any other writer I know.
In a crowded, hot, often brutally overstimulating world, solitude, silence, and simplicity are the cool lake your body, mind, heart and soul desperately need. Together, they have the power to penetrate to the heart of matter… of you.
The good news is that they’re available — right here, right now — no matter where you are or how you feel. Diving in requires discipline and subtlety. A slight adjustment, a turning inward. You need only make space for it, and it will be there.
Go there. In time, the curtain will part, and you will get a glimpse of infinity.
