This beautiful place in which I live is grand and beautiful and lonely. Lonely can be wonderful. For me it often is; I luxuriate in long expressive runs in the failing light of a long summer’s evening and I love when I don’t encounter another soul. My more difficult lonelinesses have always been underlined and reinforced when i’m in large groups of people. In those times my ‘tangent universe’ seems so palpable I wonder if I’m even visible to the others there on anything but a purely physical level.
Not so my lovely mate Bagley. The same mountains that I run amongst resound for her, at times, with a deafening empty silence. In it she hears the absense of the life and vigour of her home and the friends and connections she has left to be here.
Loneliness is said to be one of the most anti-social of afflictions. No-one talks about being lonely. So they say.
I have friends and strong connections too, but I’ve created such an island of myself that a physical dislocation can lead to an almost insoluble disconnection. Sometimes I can be so of the moment and the place in this way that it must be desperately difficult to care about me.
I was thinking about (and wrote below about) boys and the boy in me and I am also not ignorant of the job that women have in the life of we boys. If men hold the hope for boys, it is certain that women hold the heart. The women in my life have allowed me access to my heart in ways that are made of such deep levels of acceptance and love that I could never have fallen off the precipice at which most boys stand at some point in their growth.
But for these girls, these women. Who catches them should they fall?