Frieda and I were close this weekend. We hung out.

  Loneliness is something that is rarely written about, or discussed, even compared to depression or other forms of anxiety. I think one reason people love dogs and cats so much is that many people in America are existentially lonely, disconnected from one another and from the natural world. And pressured by intense technologies, demands for money, scattered family, health care, secure jobs.
  I have been alone a lot in my life, and there is something sweet as well as painful about it. Frieda and I missed Maria, gone for the weekend. My perspective changed.
 It’s important to be alone sometimes, to think and get to know yourself. Someone sent me a poem by Merrit Malloy called “Mohawk Ridge.”
  “I used to think I went there because I wanted to be alone.
   Later I found I went there because I was alone.”

  I used to think I came to the farm because I wanted to be alone. Later I found that I came here because I was alone, a state if isolation I had lived in for much of my life. I had neglected to fill my life with some of its most important parts.
  Now I am with someone, and the world is different. I appreciate loneliness in a new and different way, and the odd thing is, no matter what happens, I will never feel it again in my life that way. When your soul is connected to another, it’s not really about geography or the very temporal notion of company. It’s a sense of being whole, complete, and it transcends many of the pressures and difficulties of life. It teaches what is important.
  It is shocking to love someone so much, and to not be alone anymore.