Why, I sometimes wonder, do I love being alone so much. And why, i wonder, do I need it so much. Today, Maria and I walked in the woods together for the first time in weeks – the summer was too hot, too many ticks, too many bugs.

The woods are beautiful and still again, and i am grateful to be back in them, walking with her and the dogs. Today, I was reflecting on being alone. In my life, it is necessary and wonderful to be all tied up in someone else, but being alone is still precious to me, a part of who I am.

Today, I was reading from a beautiful new book about Thomas Merton, it is a collection of his writings on nature, and it is called When The Trees Say Nothing, it explained being alone in nature and being alone for me in a beautiful way.

“Why do I live alone?…I don’t know. In a sometimes mysterious way,” Merton wrote, “I am condemned to it…I cannot have enough of the hours of silence when nothing happens. When the clouds go by. When the trees say nothing. When the birds sing. I am completely addicted to the realization that just being there is enough, and to add something else is to mess it all up..I can only desire this absurd business of trees that say nothing, of birds that sing, or a field in which nothing happens (except perhaps that a fox comes and plays, or a deer passes by. This is crazy, it is lamentable, I am flawed, I am nuts. I can’t help it. Here I am, now.”

I love the honesty and acceptance of Merton’s writing about being alone.

Merton makes no excuses for it, it is just who he is. He was a Trappist Monk, he spent much of his time alone in a hermitage behind his monastery. He said he had no choice.

This is how I feel about me. I am crazy and lamentable, but I am condemned to being alone, I can’t help it, here I am, now.

Today, walking in the woods with my partner in life, I listened closely to the trees, as they said nothing. It was loud and eloquent. I loved the hole above the canopy, it seemed a portal to me of another place, I felt at one moment I was about to be shot through that hole and up into the universe. Maybe one day.

I was happy there, I can’t explain it. It felt like freedom to me.

I love being alone, when the trees say nothing.

Audio: Being Alone