I am fortunate to be spending this week in solitude (more or less) in a cabin above the ocean an hour drive south of Big Sur. It is truly a spiritual experience. As Martin Buber wrote:

“Solitude is the place of purification.”

Sunday morning I’ll have some thoughts on what solitude has meant to me and why it is an essential part of our journey. I’ll share my adventure of an accidental visit to a hermitage, a story I learned about Carl Jung, and the role of fog in our lives.

Here are some quotes on the subject:

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

A solitude is the audience-chamber of God.
Walter Savage Landor

Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.
Thomas Browne

Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.
Alice Koller

Converse with men makes sharp the glittering wit, but God to man doth speak in solitude.
John Stuart Blackie

Cultivate solitude and quiet and a few sincere friends, rather than mob merriment, noise and thousands of nodding acquaintances.
William Powell

Do your work for six years; but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers, so that the memory of your friends does not hinder you from being what you have become.
Leo Szilard

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Half the pleasure of solitude comes from having with us some friend to whom we can say how sweet solitude is.
William Jay

I don’t mind solitude. I love talking to other people, but I do need my space.
Iris Chang

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.
Henry David Thoreau

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
Rainer Maria Rilke

In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.
Laurence Sterne

In solitude, where we are least alone.
Lord Byron

IIt is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
Rainer Maria Rilke

It’s an interesting combination: Having a great fear of being alone, and having a desperate need for solitude and the solitary experience. That’s always been a tug of war for me.
Jodie Foster

It’s hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
Russell Banks

Language… has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.
Paul Tillich