The truest solitude is not something outside of me, I think, not just the absence of men or sounds, it is different for me, it is an abyss opening up in the center of my soul, and I feel it most profoundly in the deep woods in which we often walk. Solitude is a kind of poverty, it empties me from the inside out.

It is in this loneliness that the deepest thoughts and actions begin. Thomas Merton said that only in solitude do you “discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.” Keep as far as you can, he says, from the places where men go to hurt, cheat and insult one another.

In the woods, I untether myself from the world and set myself free, loosing all the strings and stands of tension and fear and anger than bind me, by sight, by sound, by feeling, to the presence of other people, and their cares and quarrels.

The woods are a meditation all of their own. On our walks, we are enveloped by them. The joy of solitude washes over me, cleanses me, heals me.  I caught the sun touching the last leaf with the last light, and it seemed a holy moment to me. Sometimes, the big trees seem to be guarding me, protecting me from the chaos and cruelty of human beings, and of the turmoil that sometimes lives inside of me.

The trees cushion the sounds of the outside world, they reach for the sky in a way that can only be described as holy.

I remember Merton’s wisdom, about solitude. “Keep your eyes clean and your ears quiet and your mind serene. Breathe God’s air. Work, if you can, under His sky.”