It was Thomas Merton who first awakened me to the true meaning and benefit of loneliness and the gift of solitude.

“We do not go into the desert to escape people,” he wrote, “but to learn how to find them, we do not leave them to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good.

It is in loneliness, he wrote, that the most profound activities begin inside of us. There, someone like me can discover action without motion, labor that is rest, vision in obscurity and fog, and fulfillment without boundaries or limits. For much of our world, loneliness is a sacrilege, a taboo, something for the strange or the crazy.

You will never find a pundit on TV or TikTok who celebrates or talks about it. it is the billionaire’s worst nightmare. When I am alone, I can’t possible buy things.

Merton wrote that there should be at least a room or some corner where no one can find you, disturb you, notice you, or speak of you. You should be able to untether yourself from the world and set yourself free, losing all the strings and strands of tension that bind us by sight, sound, and thought to the presence of other people.

“Once you have found such a place,” Merton wrote,” be content with it and do not be disturbed if a good reason takes you out of i. Love it, return to it as soon as possible, and do not be too quick to change it for another.”

I took Merton’s writing to heart. Wherever I go, I have found such a place. The rewards have been enormous.

My first corner of solitude was in a New Jersey basement. My second was in a freezing tactic. My third was in a cabin on a mountop near where I live. The next was in a quiet and private room of the old farmhouse in Hebron, where I first lived in the country. I’ve said in solitude and learned to be alone and love it. Being alone is not the same as loneliness.

The spiritual being is, above all, an interior being. It is possible; I have learned, to live in the most profound and peaceful interior contemplation amid the material world and all of its distractions and confusion.

We live in a distracting, almost insanely frantic world. It alone has helped to teach me how to think instead of how to scramble and react. It has shown me how to be peaceful, how to be strong, and how to be true.

It grounds me and nourishes me.

Today, my corner is on one end of our living room. Usually, the dogs gather around me. I turn off all devices. It is not about the world but my soul.

I can hear the bleating and braying of the sheep and the donkeys. I can listen to trucks and speeding cards and, sometimes, the sirens of police cars and ambulances. But for loneliness to work in the real world – I’m not living on a mountain anymore – it takes practice, will, and commitment.

Most days, I play, Gregorian chant softly in the background. Sometimes I sleep, sometimes dream, and always soak up the silence like a cool drink on a hot summer day. The dogs, sensing my aloneness, go silent. They never intrude on me.

I love my corner; it s the place Merton writes about, where I can untether myself from the world and set myself free from its chaos, greed, suffering, and anger.

It is my sacred place, no one call me, texts me, call or visit me. It is my time to be alone with myself.

There I disconnected from the world around other people and me. There, I am learning to shed fear and find peace and the soft of being alone.

There I came to see that I could never find interior peace and solitude unless I made a conscious and continuous effort to separate myself from the desires, cares and attachments of time and the world beyond my window.

“Do everything you can to avoid the noise and the business of men,” Merton wrote. “Keep as far away as you can from where they gather to cheat and insult one another, to exploit one another, to laugh at one another, or to mock one another with their false gestures of friendship.”

I never allow politics or advertisements to enter into my aloneness.

A contemplative hour or a contemplative life doesn’t demand contempt for the habits and diversions of other people.

But me, the search for liberation and light in solitude has made it nearly impossible to yield to the appeals of politicians, ideologues, salespeople, advertisers,  billionaires, pundits, or the people whose lives I see consumed by the hatred, exploitations,  divisions, and greed of the outside world.

People tell me how to live every day in one way or another. I am almost free of them.

That is liberation to me.

I can’t tell anyone else what to do.

I give thanks every day for learning how to be alone and for the gifts that you have brought to me.