5 Sri Lanka (The High Hills)
June 3, 2022

73 Loneliness

Loneliness is a fact of everyone’s life, is it not? Some, maybe even most, have managed to evade it in one way or another, but I wonder whether that has ever made it go away, or if it doesn’t remain one of the more powerful driving forces of the unconscious, whereby people seek distraction on the one hand, and feel the need to belong to a group on the other. But for some it appears they find themselves lonely because no one cares enough to befriend them; maybe making friends with the person concerned is not an economic proposition, either materially or psychologically, they may have very little that they can give in return, and find themselves consequently neglected.

They of course are easily identified as the unwanted and lonely people in this world, but I wonder whether those who cannot give without demanding a return are any the less lonely, though the stark reality of their lives may lay hidden for a while. It is only love, freely given, that overcomes the gulf between people, and that is the result, not of the mind and its calculations, but of a heart that has opened in compassion.

Child of Light

I saw a child today
– a friend from long ago –
she looked so very sad
when I came through the door.

After some time had passed
she came and held my hand,
and we stood and talked for
for a while, speaking words

others cannot understand.
It was not very long
before we had to part –
she had her work to do.

I spoke that day to so
many others, but what
remains in my mind
is the look on the face

of that sad child of light
doomed to a life without love,
her eyes full of hope
and fear as we parted.

Living as a hermit can be a time when one comes to understand the depths of loneliness, and I think it’s even doubtful if this life can be lived without realising how profoundly isolated we have become one from the other. The danger is that one reacts to such a painful psychological reality by seeking a temporary abatement of it. But if you are prepared to live with it and to let the truth of it unfold itself eventually you go deeper, and you find that although on a superficial level we are separated, still in a deeper way we are all in communion, and it is at that point that prayer springs forth unaided, not as an attempt to avoid or control reality, but as a consequence of seeing it clearly, which results in a reaching out to others that destroys the boundaries that separate us. And this too is the birth of love into the world, though the people you touch in this way may not be able to understand it, and may never in fact even become aware of it.

74 In the Monastery