How to Be Alone

· by · in Soul Food. ·
Feathers&Wax

Photo via Pinterest


First, you must befriend the urge to resist. Let the stillness of sound wash over you, your skin saturated by the timeless echo of slow moving minutes. You must let the memories come. The ex lovers, the please forgive me flowers, the lingering connection with another that still reverberates inside of you. Your unwavering belief in that truth.
 
What you wished you’d done differently that time, what you wished had been done differently the next.
 
Snapshots of images lying awake at 2am, dressed in love and laughter, those imprints that run through your kaleidoscope mind. Though they may bring tears, let them come.
 
Afterall, you’ve learned over the years that the more you resist, the louder they will speak.

And are we crying only for what we’ve lost? Or could it also be for the profound dimensions of what we didn’t know we could ever become? All those things that we secretly already were.
 
So you sit in a brown herringbone couch, the one you took with you when you last moved out, and you let yourself sink down into its softness, that place where loneliness drifts into serenity of solitude. You gaze out the window onto an April city street. And you remember: the smell of Spring’s wet earth, color seeping its way back into grey. Small steps that will become the vibrant pink flowers and glowing oceans that sleep under the starlit skies of Summer’s June. 

You hear the quiet fridge hum, you see wisps of clouds sitting in a blue denim sky. You taste the wetness of water sitting peaceful in a transparent glass by your side. You let the pigment of saturated chlorophyll in the thriving leaves of your houseplant radiate along the windowsill in their city sun illumination.
 
 Reminding you of your own ivy soul.
 
Your eyes scan the room, and you notice, like the casual observer that lives within your atman Self, the artifacts you have collected along the way—the turquoise blue vase that makes you long for the expansiveness of the desert South West, those wide open skies of space that then rise up in your own chest.
 

The mélange of books sitting quietly on a black wooden bookshelf given to you by someone who replaced it with another, and the yellow spray roses now silently beginning to wilt, resting patient in the cranberry glass vases that used to be your grandmother’s.

Remember that there will come to be more people in this life who will freely give you things-like love, time, kindness and laughter. They too will feel gratitude in being able to give them to you. And in your being able to receive them. Notice.

The magazines and papers lying breathless around you on the floor, an anatomy book paused open on top of your sand colored light weight yoga mat because you were curious about the femur. You’ve stitched up the sense of loss over your heavier indigo blue one. You‘ve done some yoga by this point in your life, some writing, and maybe even both so you realize your mindfulness practice is calling. And you credit your ever growing awareness with helping you to realize that.
 
And you know either way, sand colored and lightweight, or deep blue and somewhat heavy, you still carry all of the memories of your skin against those surfaces.

Move into your relationship with your aloneness as something to be revered rather than run from. A different kind of closeness.

 
The vibrating stillness of it all, these thoughts, words, actions, objects, stories. They surround you here.
 

And so you soften into this casual authenticity, this feeling that the very experience of it all, feels more lived in than out of place.

“We rise in feathers and wax, child.” ~Vicktor Taiwo

4 responses to “How to Be Alone”

  2. I so needed to read this one! Thank you, as always, but most especially today for your tremendous way with words. I am feeling precisely what you have so eloquently wrote. Now, I just need to lean into it.

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