Solitude

My friend Lewis Griggs had a near-death experience.  On a rafting trip, a tree fell from the river’s edge and cracked his skull sending him into a coma for quite some time.  Medical experts said there was a good chance he would die.  When, instead, he returned to consciousness, he didn’t know who he was, nor recognize anyone else.  Not his wife, not his children, no one.  He also couldn’t read or write.  Fortunately, over the following three years, he rediscovered his so-called former self.  The most important lesson Lewis learned from this experience is what he did know when he awoke from his coma.  Regardless of everything haywire with his mind and body, his True Self floated in the deepest possible calm.  Silence.  Peace.  Oneness.

That calm is the mark of solitude.  

I know this because I was born there.  I wonder if we all were.  It is the center of me.  The place where my essence and the essence of all that exists merge.  I knew that union so intimately for a brief period.  Life is just school, it taught, a way to grow my attunement with this unconditional love.  Its presence didn’t exactly disappear.  It just waned as the juju of ego consciousness became more of a habit, a preference, an addiction. 

I’ve been attempting ever since to stir up that sacred fire.  Given the matter-world’s priorities––country, society, family, possessions––it’s been the equivalent of fighting for my life.

As a kid, however, I was blessed.  I had a wise grandmother.  

Not a relative.  The earth.  

I lived on a lake amid vineyards, streams, ravines, waterfalls, wheat fields, woods, orchards.  No neighbors close enough to matter.  My closest playmate a mile overland.  

I’d lay on my back and watch clouds tell me stories the way some kids today watch a video game.  Years were spent contemplating stuff like an ancient tree on the hilltop behind our house, wondering how it got its shape.  Or feeling the spirit of the Iroquois who for centuries roamed where I did.  Or why a passing car or tractor was designed the way it was.  You’d frequently hear, “What’s the lake like today?”  A natural question in the presence of a timeless repository with 60 miles of shoreline holding tenderly and expressing every conceivable emotion––revealing all that resides within me and, I presume, everyone else.

There were moments it seemed I no longer needed to breathe.  The mother was breathing for me.  And for sure her spirit guided me to win all those World Series games for the Yankees pitching a Pinky rubber ball against the barn door.  

Bill Monroe, considered the Father of Bluegrass, is kin of a kind.  When asked how he felt about being such a prolific, creative force, responsible for most of the Bluegrass classics, he said something like: “I feel all those songs already existed in the ether, and I was just the radio antenna they happened to land on.”

We don’t create; we discover, the wise tell us. 

The ways I’m privileged to serve others 60 years later––do what I can to put a finger on what’s essential, reframe a situation from a larger perspective, take action guided by kindness, be fanatically positive some might say––are rooted in universal principles that seeped into my being from the earth during that formative time.  

My preferred approach to addressing most things is to dial down the thought rpm’s, soften my consciousness, and wait for intuition to present an answer.  Hiking, napping, meditating, chewing on the wisdom of others, writing, attempting to see everything as a gift, finding the humor that’s always there, the cultivation of penetrating questions––these are some of the essential elements of whatever antenna I’ve got going.  

All grounded in solitude: the calm, peaceful silence at the heart of existence.  

Learning to live in that solitude seems to be my life’s work.  I wonder if it is for all of us.

❦

To hear Lewis speak of his near-death experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi_QsbnrTXo