where you are going....

Art by Everett Ruess, Desert Light.

"I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

 I found these lines while reading a book about writing for the Fall group that starts in September. I have had some solitude lately with my husband gone helping one of our sons.The time on the porch in the cool morning perched in a wicker chair is wonderful. I stop reading to feel the breeze on my cheeks and think there are no better moments than these.

The words at the beginning were written by the American icon, Henry David Thoreau. I visited his grave once on an autumn day in New England. The memory is a happy one.We, my husband and I, were tired from the drive and the dogs that kept us awake the night before.We slogged through the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, looking for Poets Hill and I was ready to give up. John, however, kept at it because he knew how much it meant to me. Finally, there was the Thoreau family plot. Holy ground.

I noticed something right away that touched me.The stones just had the first names of Henry and his siblings.These are old stones and grey. But unlike the others, Henry's stone was white on the top and I immediately knew why. Pilgrims like myself feel compelled to stroke the top of his stone, to connect, and thus it is rendered almost clean. In front of the stone someone had left a small bright orange pumpkin.A gift for a poet, a solitary, that has touched something deep in me.

Alone, in the quiet, is the only place that I can hear the Voice, the lover, comforter, guide, the one who encourages. In the stillness , face turned away from everything, pen in hand, yesterday I heard this. I offer it in love to all who may need to hear:

"Once you were lost, hanging by a thread.You remember those times of pain and shame.
See where you are now. All the things that hurt can be looked back on and forgotten.Where you are going, nothing like that exists, even in memory."