I don't know about you, but I find that miscommunications between others and myself are a persistent feature of life. Isn't it amazing how each of us inhabits a unique world - a world all its own? One of life's great tasks is not only to seek to understand where another person is coming from, but also to make our own perspectives and biases clearer. Often these are unconscious, and it takes a lot of work to clarify where we ourselves are coming from. Butting heads with others who have a different perspective is often the only way we come to know our own! In the meantime, I find that I have to do a lot of apologizing for my own communication errors, ask forgiveness, and begin once again.
During my hike yesterday in the silence of a snowstorm, I found myself reflecting on the fact that solitude is actually the TRUEST IDENTITY of each and every one of us. But this solitude is not the same as loneliness. For within it, we discover an ever-deepening communion with our Source - the Friend, the Beloved - who dwells within our core self as the "Beyond Within." In this place of depth, it turns out, we ALSO encounter the solitude of every other person living on this Earth! Thus, miscommunication with others on one level forces us to find them on a deeper level! As Thomas Merton so aptly puts it:
"A person is a person insofar as he has a secret and is a solitude of his own that cannot be communicated to anyone else. If I love a person, I will love that which most makes him a person: the secrecy, the hiddenness, the solitude of his own individual being. Compassion and respect enable us to know the solitude of another by finding him in the intimacy of our own interior solitude. It discovers his secrets in our own secrets. If I respect my brother's solitude, I will know his solitude by the reflection it casts, through love, upon the solitude of my own soul."
I ask this day that each of us might find - and relish - the solitude of every other sentient being within the solitude of our own apparent aloneness and uniqueness!
Photos: (Top) Cottonwood leaves and a snowstorm on Watson Lake, Bellvue, CO; (Middle) Canada Geese on Watson Lake; (Bottom) Cottonwood leaves and snowy cliffs on Bellvue Dome. All three photos were taken on November 11, 2014
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