May Sarton

The modern American author describes everyday experiences and conveys her feelings of frustration and anger over her attempts to write in solitude

Journal of a Solitude

Maria Amaro

Fasiha🌺🐧

I WOKE to the meadow bright silver with frost, and brilliant sunlight through yellow leaves over the barn. What would I do without this calming open space to rest my eyes on? It is the mystical opening of the whole place. It is what I come back to when I have been away, as to a deeper breath. Each time I am gone, even for a weekend, I have to recover the house and the garden; something dies with absence and must be reconstructed.

I have time to think. That is the great, the greatest luxury. I have time to be. Therefore my responsibility is huge. To use time well and to be all that I can in whatever years are left to me.

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year. Somewhere in The Poet and the Donkey Andy speaks for me when he says "Do not deprive me of my age. As I have earned it"

Maybe patience is the last thing we learn. I remember Jean Dominique, old and blind, saying to me, "On attend toujours (we're still waiting)." I was under thirty then and she was over sixty and I was amazed to think that someone so old could still wait for someone so intensely. But now I know that one does so all one's life.

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become. It is necessary to be as exact as circumspect as possible in order to tell the truth.

kite

“If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.”

mayfly

That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened.

It may be outwardly silent here but in the back of my mind is a clamor of human voices, too many needs, hopes, fears.

That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?

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