The Line Between Solitude and Loneliness Is Often Difficult to See

the line between us is so thin I might as well be you...
Robyn Hitchcock

We live as we dream, alone.
Joseph Conrad

...the line between solitude and loneliness is often difficult to see, and nearly impossible to map...in fact, it’s all too easy to spend much of a life stumbling and lurching along that line like a drunk pulled over at three in the morning, falling clumsily to one side or the other...

...kinda like the tug o’ war between belonging and standing out from the mass...the desire to fit in and the fear of denying, or even losing, parts of oneself, becoming smaller, or less than one could or wants to be....crammed into a narrow, proscribed mold for the sake of acceptance...like a puzzle piece, others pushing in on all sides, each in their own very narrow, form-fitted space, proscribed yet snug...no wiggle room, nowhere to move to...except, perhaps, for those along the edges, but they face the outside with straight, rigid borders...

...hmmm...not sure what I think of how that last metaphor ended up...don’t know if I agree with myself at all...

Any definition is a limit.
Wendell Berry

...yoga, they say, is something that encourages opening to every aspect of oneself...along with a radical acceptance of those around you....but any identity, including that of yogi can easily slide into only more dogmas and narrow roles...exclusive cliques based on brand names, beliefs, or hard butts...or the idea of being open and accepting...but that doesn’t mean it has to....words can have many definitions, some far more or less limiting than others...and maybe some can slip outside their definitions completely...


*this post started as a comment on Brooks’ aptly renamed Yogic Muse blog...and the artwork up there is by Liu Bolin...google 'im*

Angst! What Is It Good For?!

As the Buddha said, “All human beings are quite deluded.” The line between the staff and patients is sometimes frighteningly thin....It’s only a matter of degree.
Stephen Cope

Should I pursue a path so twisted?
Patti Smith

I’ve gone through a lot of these incredibly emotionally volatile periods (don’t worry—I’m not going through one right now)–generally when I’ve been getting really deeply into yoga, or therapy, or otherwise simply digging into those messy places inside my head on my own–which at times have led to strained relations, generally erratic behavior, and remarkably poor performance at anything practical I was trying to do at the time. So, for the most part, it’s not very pleasant, and I want it to end as soon as possible, but, at the same time, realize that, if I can navigate my way through the chaos I’ve unleashed and follow it to its source, there are amazing opportunities for change and growth…..

...from a depressed point of view, any situation and any life will look like crap. Not that I’m gonna throw any positive affirmations at you–if there’s one kinda situation that makes me depressed it’s when desperate positivity freaks start throwing positive affirmations at me....probably the most vile book ever written is the 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis De Sade...it’s about these four libertines who...you really don’t wanna know...but it’s an important book, I think...even though I couldn’t get through more than a hundred pages...and even that was enough to seriously screw with me....I was walking down the sidewalk in Rochester NY and had these unspeakable images stuck in my head...believe me, you don’t wanna know....there was a movie based on it called Salo, directed by Pasolini, best known for a movie about Jesus...which has been called unwatchable...though a guy I knew in grad. school loved it...along with a lot of other things...but it’s seriously tame compared to the book...which maps out those dark places Conrad hinted at like nothing before or since...

he feels that moving into the areas of society that he had rejected is the same as working with the parts of himself that he had rejected.
Pema Chodron (describing a Zen teacher named Bernard Glassman who works with the homeless)

So... what’s all this angst and mental distress good for? I have this extremely part time gig tutoring recovering addicts in reading, most of them from the kinds of backgrounds the nasty old Marquis would’ve taken way too much pleasure in writing about...and, a couple years ago, was a volunteer teaching college writing in a maximum security prison and publishing a now-defunct web-based magazine written and edited by those prisoners....I was there through the auspices of Cornell University, where I taught freshman writing for a year—for a while, I was teaching Ivy League kids in the afternoon, and men doing hard time for violent felonies in the evening...and man, did I prefer that second group....so, having done a lot of self-evaluation in the past year and a half or so, I’ve decided to expand my work with these populations, in terms of both quantity and depth, and am looking into getting the training and credentials necessary to use writing as therapy with them....I’m told that my interest in addicts, prisoners, and the dispossessed in general will be an advantage, in pragmatic terms, since they’re precisely the people most counselors and social workers try to get away from as soon as possible, preferring to work with middle class neurotics from the suburbs...not that I have anything against middle class neurotics from the suburbs...I mean I am one...and I have a lot of experience in the field of psychotherapy...even if it’s all been on the other side of the desk....

...and it's taught me that there are basically two kinds of therapists: (1) those who see themselves as residing on a lofty plateau of pristine normalcy and mental health, and are prepared to help their clients to be just like them, and (2) those who aren’t complete assholes....