The endless review of my life reached a point of inflection recently when I found myself contemplating a shift from this quiet land to the city of Wellington. After the move to Wanaka in 2004, and as my journal will demonstrate should you wish to read back into its darker reaches, my love for, and congruence with, this place has grown and deepened. Contemplation of a shift in that was not an easy thing, yet it occurred. My life is here, I have my patient house, my embracing job, the sublime land and the heart in the community here. Why would I question any of this? Why would anyone?
A person alone would.
To reaffirm my existence here, I was forced to come face to face with my solitude. Even though I may have wrestled with this foe before, it has always returned. A grumbling on the horizon. A foreboding darkness just beyond perception yet undeniably present. A furrow on the brow. A pause after a brittle enthusiasm. I am alone. The only one of me.
I’m finding to my own surprise that I appear to like it this way. I’m choosing this state for myself. I’m becoming more and more deeply involved in my work. I’m becoming the image I hold of myself on a cold night in a white shirt chopping my firewood and leaving a mist of my breath on the still air.
I am letting go of the sense that to be alone is a state of ‘transition’ or a state of ‘hope’. It is becoming for me simply a state of being. I’m discovering a distaste for the urgency that people bring to this subject. That being solitary is made tolerable through an accompanying plastic optimism that intimate human connection is just over the horizon.
The maintenance of such hope is such an exhausting business.
I want to be alone. In the mountains and lake and indigo sky.