MERIWETHER VOLUME 1: SOLITUDE & COMPANIONSHIP

Solitude is a silent storm that breaks down all our dead branches. 
Yet it sends our living roots deeper into the living heart of the living earth. 
Man struggles to find life outside himself, unaware that the life he is seeking is within . . .

–Gibran Khalil Gibran

Wise men often speak about the need to be in the wild, about the need to appreciate its beauty, and to take in everything it has to teach you; about the world, about God and men, and most importantly about yourself. The wild cares not about right or wrong, knowing or unknowing, feelings or logic. Duality be damned. And yet, it never ceases to offer you an infinite number of opportunities to stop for a moment and widen your view. A chance to breathe between the trees and let your eyes wander down the streams. A chance for head and heart to aspire and catch sight of principles by which to live a proper life. A place where openness is paramount, learning is inevitable, and growth a necessity. This is the backbone of solitude.

Solitude has a way of making you take off the mask of normalcy we place on ourselves when on the hunt for outer values. Masks that help us maintain identity in a world that constantly forces us to redefine ourselves on a day-to-day basis, all for collective desire. There is a sense of madness that comes from thinking, speaking, and acting without this mask, a sense of madness that comes from being true to the self, of dwelling therein. A sense of madness that could also be identified as fear, the fear of misunderstanding, of not knowing what a journey inward may bring us. It is much harder to focus on things unknown and alone, than it is to focus on the outer values that reflect the perceived identity the world provides for us.

The wider the view, the more it appears that outer values have over saturated our existence. This is easy to see on the digital platform where the potential for such values are abundant; status updates, texts, tweets, photos, and the response we receive from such have become the reward from which we live by, allowing them to define the person we are. Being in the presence of those around us increasingly feels as though we are also in the presence of their technology. Our masks become harder to take off, our self continuously lost somewhere in the wild, in the depths of the well of truth waiting to be found, where peace can be felt over the power of social saturation.

The soft hand of solitude also has a way of making us ache with sorrow. The kind of ache that brings with it a longing for companionship. Traveling inward and holding hands with solitude not only makes one aware of self-realization and discovery, but also the need to share our inner world with those who will not reject, criticize, or expect to be different; our companions. The souls of those companions reach out to us with a hand of compassionate understanding, whispering to us that they also travel the same journey inward, so that they too can find truths to live by. Truth that only life seekers will catch a glimpse of, truth with no concern for outer values, or of dualities, or of ego.

We may never rid ourselves of the fear that the path of solitude brings us, and we may never have an answer for why we allow ourselves to be saturated by outer values. Perhaps we would be unable to live with the answers to those questions at this point in time, or possibly living the question brings us the amount of suffering that we choose to tuck away, hidden from everyone, to be available only in our loneliest moments when we are face-to-face with self. The companionship of solitude may be simply telling us to take it by the hand and continue walking our path, continue seeking out incomprehensible truths, so that we may never stop growing: emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually; and to find others who also seek, so that purpose can be experienced together, so that life itself can be shared, so that the heads and hearts of each of us never lose sight of our principles.