Embracing Wisdom Through Solitude

At the bottom of the hill on our half acre land was a dirt patch. As a young girl of nine years old, I would often sit there and play with the pebbles. Perhaps I felt closer to the earth and gently guided by our land's invitation to lean in. I listened to the calls of parents summoning their children to return home, lawn mowers distinctive humming and the encircling of light winds. I was surrounded by familiar neighborhood buzz yet enveloped in solitude.

There are some that are genuinely drawn to solitude. Within it lives independence, inspiration, happiness and higher power. Like many things, our states of being have a makeup that extracts the comfortable and the uncomfortable. But solitude, while breathing through pain, can be a companion that holds the deepest reflection of our self. Solitude invites an unobtrusive hand to guide discomfort to a place of recovery. Solitude is where I reached down into the depths of my soul pleading for answers to unimaginable questions while being a caregiver. It is where I lived while grieving the loss of my father. It asked me to go on an expedition with mortality and not sprint my way to the result we name death, but uncover how the dying process and my witnessing of it was informing my every action and step.

One of the most valuable aspects of solitude is the wisdom that can be accumulated during the moments of despair, exhaustion, suffering and unpredictability. It was through the act of making complicated decisions (by ways of capturing, evaluating and discerning through all information available) that I discovered an untapped wisdom within me. I realize now that any enlightenment of knowledge I acquired was through a worship of the questions, not the attainment of any answers. As a beholder of my own inquiry, I feel liberated.

Fervently stating his awakening of knowledge, my father one day said to me, "please always remember to let go of the noise within and around you." His impassioned desire for his daughter was to simply have wonder in this world, sitting on the dirt patches of our land, dreaming of magic.

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