Merton on the Truest Solitude
You do not find it by traveling but by standing still
Dear Friends and Family,
I offlined (is that a new verb?) alongside the Oconoluftee River these past few days. From mid-morning when the sun finally dapples through finger-laced tree limbs until dusk when the sky turns colors that have no name, young and old alike frolic and splash in the cobblestoned shallows of Smokey Mountain waters. Water this cold never fails to steal the breath.
Play has a joyful way of making the boundaries between us the shared flesh of belonging together again as humans. Surprise cannot be anticipated. Laughter knows no words.
Edward Abbey’s phrase pale green dawn echoes as I write, soft rays of hope rising since we were last together on this page.1
We could stop this letter here and with every good reason do the good work of nourishing hope. And we should.
And there’s more, which I do not hesitate to share knowing you did not come here absent an inner pull.
Wildfires are burning glaciers in Canada, the people of northern Yukon are under a heat advisory, and it’s snowing at Deadhorse Camp just a couple hundred miles north in Alaska. And that’s just one little circle of Earth.
Sweet Petunia is dry for the moment and awaiting parts and repairs. I’ll cover her with a tarp to ride out the next days of rain. Some grain of sand festers a pearl inside you, too.
On Wednesday, I’ll walk a long stretch of the French Broad River to the farmers’ market. Flavio, who will have baked this week’s bread, will be my first stop.2 I’ll see the focaccia that’s deliciously different every week and say I arrived hungry. I’ll tell him perhaps he should add a thick slice alongside the loaf I ordered. We’ll start talking. I’ll forget to take the focaccia. He’ll remind me, and I’ll tear into it as soon as I wander off. I’ll paw tomatoes still warm from yesterday’s sun until I come upon the right ones and, given the recent rains, hope someone has fresh greens.
You’ll do your version of this week’s same. Each of us will follow the fragrance of any sweet whiff of hope that may come on any given day. And we’ll ache even if we sniff it.
All of this, some would say, amounts to life in a time of metacrisis—the beyond and in-betweenness of the many crises of these times.3 We go about our day-to-day as if everything same is ok because it’s not. You buy milk. I buy bread. The world’s on fire. Today, there’s a sigh of relief. Tomorrow, who knows?
How are we to be?
We wonder together. And the intention in these series (solitude, silence, and so on) is to keep turning our conversation on this page and in our gatherings toward age-old wisdom traditions’ shared ways to steady and nurture the human soul in these in-between times; to say: we have help—not to use to willfully steady the status quo. We have help to see us as humanity through. Thomas Merton lends a hand today.
I will slowly come back online over the next week and look forward to returning to your reflections in comments and on Substack Notes. Thank you for your kindnesses these few weeks I’ve offlined.
With love,
Renée
PS. I have modified Merton’s words in the passage that follows for purposes of gender inclusivity. The passage was written seventy-five years ago.
Merton on The Truest Solitude
The truest solitude is not something outside you, not absence of [others] or of sound around you: it is an abyss opening up in the center of your soul.
And this abyss of interior solitude is created by a hunger that will never be satisfied with any created thing.
The only way to find solitude is by hunger and thirst and sorrow and poverty and desire, and the [person] who has found solitude is empty, as if [they] had been emptied by death.
. . .
There are no directions left in which to travel. And this is a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. You do not find it by traveling but by standing still.
. . .
You will never find interior solitude unless you make some conscious effort to deliver yourself from the desires and the cares and the interests of an existence in time and in the world.
. . .
And yet remember, if you seek escape for its own sake and run away from the world only because it is (as it must be) intensely unpleasant, you will not find peace and you will not find solitude. If you seek solitude merely because it is what you prefer, you will never escape from the world and its selfishness; you will never have the interior freedom that will keep you really alone. 4
Forthcoming
All are welcome at August’s Gathering in Silence followed by conversation on silence and solitude.
During our orientation, we will explore pathways into silence and silence as a companion presence.
Register by email: reneeeliphd@substack.com OR reply to this email.
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (New York: Touchstone, 1968), p. 4.
I was first introduced to
’s work while on retreat with Cynthia Bourgeault in November 2023. You can learn more at and .Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation (Norfolk, CT: New Directions Books, 1949), pp. 59–61.
Your grain of sand festering a pearl and Merton’s yawning hunger give me a paradox like a koan this morning: how the thing and the emptiness of things are the same, the fester and the solitude. Thank you for this lovely start to the day.
I hope Sweet Petunia stays dry in the coming rain.
Beautiful.