the secret vice

I just learned 2 things that are really dismaying - Firstly, that there is illegal harvesting of salal happening on the B.C. west coast. Apparently, people are going into our forests and removing huge chunks of salal to sell to florists. It's becoming a big problem on the gulf islands, damaging the ecosystem. Honestly - is nothing sacred? There are few sights more lovely than a sea of salal under a tall canopy of evergreens. Do we have to hide in the trees with pellet guns now? Leave our undergrowth alone, you bastards!
Secondly, there is a majestic old fir at the front of our yard that has been put on death row by the property owners. Allegedly because it's blocking too much light. This should be illegal. Destructive idiots.

Ahem.
Letting my anger go now, I'm going to turn this over to some passages from a book I loved. A little while ago I read Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. I didn't realize it was such a famous classic, but it deserves to be. She wrote it in 1955 and it's not dated in the least. The topic: being alone. I've been wanting to write about aloneness vs. loneliness for a while, so I'll start with quoting Lindbergh, since she puts it all so well:
"How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it... We seem so frightened today of being alone that we never let it happen. Even if family, friends, and movies should fail, there is still the radio or television to fill up the void... Even day-dreaming was more creative than this; it demanded something of oneself and it fed the inner life. Now, instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we choke the space with continuous music, chatter, and companionship to which we do not even listen. It is simply there to fill the vacuum. When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place. We must re-learn to be alone. It is a difficult lesson to learn today - to leave one's friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour or a day or a week... And yet, once it is done...
Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before. It is as if in parting one did actually lose an arm. And then, like the star-fsh, one grows it anew; one is whole again, complete and round - more whole, even, than before, when the other people had pieces of one...
For it is not physical solitude that actually separates one from other men, not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation. It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts you from the people you love. It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger. When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. How often in a large city, shaking hands with my friends, I have felt the wilderness stretching between us. Both of us were wandering in arid wastes, having lost the springs that nourished us... The core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude.
...The world does not understand, in either man or woman, the need to be alone. How inexplicable it seems. Anything else will be accepted as a better excuse... If one says: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone, one is considered rude, egotistical or strange. What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it - like a secret vice! Actually these are among the most important times in one's life - when one is alone. Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone. The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer, to work out his thoughts, the musician, to compose, the saint, to pray. "
Aloneness brings about "that inner stillness which Charles Morgan describes as 'the stilling of the soul within the activities of mind and body so that it might be still as the axis of a revolving wheel is still.'"

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