No man ever will unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.

-   Thomas De Quincey

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

-   Walter Bagehot

The outward work will never be puny if the inward work is great.
     - Meister Eckhart

In solitude one finds only what he carries there with him.

     - Juan Ramon Jimenez, Selected Writings Of Juan Ramon Jimenez (Jimenez received the Nobel Price For Literature in 1956).

The necessary thing is great, inner solitude. What goes on inwardly is worthy of your life.
     - Rainer Maria Rilke

As the conversation turned to waiting, Brother Anthony leaned forward in his chair. “Contemplative waiting is consenting to be where we really are,” he explained. “People recoil from it because they don’t want to be present to themselves. Such waiting causes a deep existential loneliness to surface, a feeling of being disconnected from oneself and God. At the depths there is fear, fear of the dark chaos within ourselves.”
Brother Anthony was exactly right. Ultimately, we are fleeing our own dark chaos. We are fleeing ourselves.
- Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits

It is a paradox that we encounter so much internal noise when we first try to sit in silence.

     - Gunilla Norris

When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.
      - Wordsworth, The Prelude

Penserosa

 Soulless is all humanity to me
To-night. My keenest longing is to be
Alone, alone with God’s grey earth that seems
Pulse of my pulse and consort of my dreams.

To-night my soul desires no fellowship,
Or fellow-being; crave I but to slip
Thro’ space on space, till flesh no more can bind,
And I may quit for aye my fellow kind.

Let me but feel athwart my cheek the lash
Of whipping wind, but hear the torrent dash
Adown the mountain steep, ’twere more my choice
Than touch of human hand, than human voice.

Let me but wander on the shore night-stilled,
Drinking its darkness till my soul is filled;
The breathing of the salt sea on my hair,
My outstretched hands but grasping empty air.

Let me but feel the pulse of Nature’s soul
Athrob on mine, let seas and thunders roll
O’er night and me; sands whirl; winds, waters beat;
For God’s grey earth has no cheap counterfeit.
-   From Flint and Feather: The Complete Poems of E. Pauline Johnson

The architect Sir John Soane made a Hermit’s Parlor in the basement of his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He filled it with Gothic oddments and sat there from time to time to write or muse. Most writers need solitude in order to concentrate; composers do too, though perhaps Mahler was extreme in requiring the cowbells to be muffled as he sat in his hut at the end of the garden in the Austrian Tyrol to write his Third Symphony.
     . . .In the modern Western world solitude is undervalued, and the need for it forgotten. To wish to be alone is thought odd, a sign of failure or neurosis; but it is in solitude that the self meets itself, or, if you like, its God, and from there that it goes out to join the communal dance. No amount of group therapy, study of interpersonal relationships, self-improvement exercises, personal training in the gym, can assuage the loneliness of those who cannot bear to be alone.
      - Isabel Colegate, from A Pelican in the Wilderness, Hermits and Solitaires

Forests and fields, sun and wind and sky, earth and water, all speak the same language: peace, solitude, silence.
     - Thomas Merton

Happiness is not a matter of intensity, but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
     - Thomas Merton

The following excerpts are from Dancing in the Water of Life: Seeking Peace in the Hermitage, The Journals of Thomas Merton: Volume Five 1963-1965. Edited by Robert E. Daggy. Merton was a Trappist monk and prolific author (The Seven Storey Mountain). He lived in a hermitage (see also this YouTube video) on the grounds of the Trappist monastery Gethsemane.

April 4, 1965. Passion Sunday

Light rain all night. The need to keep working at meditation – going to the root. Mere passivity won’t do at this point. But activism won’t do either. A time of wordless deepening, to grasp the inner reality of my nothingness in Him who is. Talking about it in these terms is absurd. Nothing to do with the concrete reality that is to be grasped. My prayer is peace and struggle in silence, to be aware and true, beyond myself. To go outside the door of myself, not because I will it but because I am called and must respond.

     Joy in the Masses of the past week, especially some of the second tone melodies – the introit “Laetitur cor quaerentium Dominum” [The heart of joy is sought in the Lord”] – seriousness, humility and hope. Will these things ever be equaled? And of course I was again deeply moved by the Vexilla Regis at Vespers last night. Everything that I love about the world I grew up in came back: Romanesque churches, the landscape of Raverque, Languedoc, etc., etc. Useless to cling to all that, but I am humanly rooted in it.   P.224

April 15, 1965. Holy Thursday

The rain is slowing down now (7:15). The valley is dark and beautifully wet and you can almost see the grass growing and the leaves pushing out of the poplars. There are small flowers on my redbuds and the dogwood buds are beginning to swell.

     There is no question for me that my one job as monk is to live the hermit life in simple direct contact with nature, primitively, quietly, doing some writing, maintaining such contacts as are willed by God, and bearing witness to the value and goodness of simple things and ways, and loving God in it all. I am more convinced of this than of anything contingent on my life and I am sure it is what He asks of me. Yet I do not always respond with simplicity. P 229

April 18, 1965. Easter Sunday

Peace and beauty of Easter morning: sunrise, deep green grass, soft winds, the woods turning green on the hills across the valley (and here too). I got up and said the old office of Lauds, and there was a wood thrush singing fourth-tone mysteries in the deep ringing pine wood (the “unconscious” wood) behind the hermitage. (The “unconscious” wood has a long moment of perfect clarity at dawn, and from being dark and confused, lit from the east it is all clarity, all distinct, seen to be a place of silence and peace with its own order in disorder – the fallen trees don’t matter, they are all part of it!)

     Last night went down to the offices of the Easter Vigil by full moonlight and came back also by full moonlight, the woods being perfectly silent, and the moon so strong one could hardly see any stars. I sat on the porch to make my thanksgiving, after communion. (I did not concelebrate.)

     I wonder if I have not said ill-considered things about Christian tradition – things that will only add to the present confusion, and motivated by some obscure desire to protect my own heart against wounds by inflicting them myself – (i.e. the wounds of loss and separation). . .     pp 231-232

May 1965

I live in the woods out of necessity. I get out of bed in the middle of the night because it is imperative that I hear the silence of the night, alone, and, with my face on the floor, say psalms, alone, in the silence of the night.

     It is necessary for me to live here alone without a woman, for the silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love, and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world. I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves. I cultivate this plant silently in the middle of the night and water it with psalms and prophecies in silence. It becomes the most beautiful of all the trees in the garden, at once the primordial paradise tree, the axis mundi, the cosmic axle, and the Cross. Nulla silva talem profert. [No tree brings forth such.]  . . .

In the heat of noon I return through the cornfield, past the barn under the oaks, up the hill, under the pines, to the hot cabin. Larks rise out of the long grass singing. A bumblebee hums under the wide shady eaves.
  I sit in the cool back room, where words cease to resound, where all meanings are absorbed in the consonantia of heat, fragrant pine, quiet wind, bird song and one central tonic note that is unheard and unuttered. Not the meditation of books, or of pieties, or of systematic trifles. In the silence of the afternoon all is present and all is inscrutable. One central tonic note to which every other sound ascends or descends, to which every other meaning aspires, in order to find its true fulfillment. To ask when the note will sound is to lose the afternoon: it has sounded and all things now hum with resonance of its sounding.
    I sweep. I spread a blanket out in the sun. I cut grass behind the cabin. Soon I will bring the blanket in again and make the bed. The sun is over-clouded. Perhaps there will be rain. A bell rings in the monastery. A tractor growls in the valley. Soon I will cut bread, eat supper, say psalms, sit in the back room as the sun sets, as the birds sing outside the window, as silence descends on the valley, as night descends. As night descends on a nation intent upon ruin, upon destruction, blind, deaf to protest, crafty, powerful, unintelligent. It is necessary to be alone, to be not part of this, to be in the exile of silence, to be in a manner of speaking a political prisoner. No matter where in the world he may be, no matter what may be his power of protest, or his means of expression, the poet finds himself ultimately where I am. Alone, silent, with the obligation of being very careful not to say what he does not mean, not to let himself be persuaded to say merely what another wants him to say, not to say what his own past work has led others to expect him to say.

     The poet has to be free from everyone else, and first of all from himself, because it is through this “self” that he is captured by others. Freedom is found under the dark tree that springs up in the center of the night and of silence, the paradise tree, the axis mundi, which is also the Cross. (p 240

May 23, 1965. Fifth Sunday after Easter

One lovely dawn after another. Such peace! Meditation with fireflies, mist in the valley, last quarter of the moon, distant owls – gradual inner awakening and centering in peace and harmony of love and gratitude. Yesterday I wrote to the man at McGill [University] who thought all contemplation was a manifestation of narcissistic regression! That is just what it is not. A complete awakening of identity and of rapport! It implies an awareness and acceptance of one’s place in the whole, first the whole of creation, then the whole plan of Redemption – to find oneself in the great mystery of fulfillment which is the Mystery of Christ. Consonantia [harmony] and not confusio [confusion]. P 250

June 18, 1965

“Solitude” becomes for me less and less of a specialty, and simply “life” itself. I do not seek to “be a solitary” or anything else, for “being anything’ is a distraction. It is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with only hunger and sleep, one’s cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off (two last night. It is cold for June!). Making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditation, working (ought to get on to the article on symbolism(3) today), praying. I live as my fathers have lived on this earth, until eventually I die. Amen. There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially to assert it as MINE, though it is doubtless not somebody else’s. I must learn to gradually forget program and artifice. I know this at least in my mind and want it in my heart, but my other habits of awareness remain strong. P. 257

October 14, 1965

“When he comes toward the end he will suddenly perceive a beauty of wondrous nature . . . not fair in the likeness of face or hands or any other part of the bodily frame . . . but beauty absolute, separate, simple and everlasting . . . are you not certain that it will then be given him to become a friend of God? Plato – Symposium. How little we think of the beauty of the Divine Light – and how drab life is in consequence. We do not let the beauty of earth remind us where we are to go. As a consequence, not even the earth is beautiful to us, or as beautiful as it might be. P 303.

October 30, 1965

I find more and more the power – the dangerous power – of solitude working on me. The easiness of wide error. The power of one’s own inner ambivalence, the pull of inner contradiction. How little I know myself really. How weak and tepid I am. I need to work hard, and I don’t know how -– hence I work at the wrong things. I see that in the first two months I got off to a nearly false start with too much excited reading of too many things, and my life has been grossly overstimulated for a solitary (in community, all right). Especially I worked too hard, too obsessively on the book, too frantic a pace for a solitary (again, in community solitude seems crowded and hopped up to me). Everything has meaning, dire meaning, in solitude. And one can easily lose it all in following the habits one has brought out of common life (the daily round). One has to start over and receive (in meekness) a new awareness of work, time, prayer, oneself. A new tempo –- it has to be in one’s very system (and is not in mine I see). P. 310

November 1, 1965. All Saints.

A brilliant, cool afternoon. I climbed the Lake Knob then went down into that quiet, pine-filled hollow I have always liked, read a little, sat in the sun, meditated, chewed. The woods were half bare, but the last maples were splendid. Everything was very silent, and I saw no one whatever except a novice in the distance, on the road, as I came back past the waterworks and cut back into the woods to the empty, very silent hermitage. P 311.

November 7, 1965

I went out on the porch before dawn to think of these things, and of the words of Ezekiel (22:30). “And I sought among them for a man that might set up a hedge and stand in the gap before me in favor of the land that I might not destroy it, and I found none.” And while I was standing there quails began to whistle all over the field and in the wood. I had not heard any for weeks and thought sure they were all dead, for there have been hunters everywhere. No, there they are! Signs of life, of gentleness, of helplessness, of providence, of love. They just keep on existing and loving and making more quails and whistling in the bushes. P. 313

The above excerpts are from Dancing in the Water of Life: Seeking Peace in the Hermitage. The Journals of Thomas Merton: Volume Five 1963-1965. Edited by Robert E. Daggy. See also this Heron Dance page devoted to Merton’s classic essay on solitude, The Rain and the Rhinoceros.

The great poets and contemplative minds have been thinking about the practice of solitude for a long time. Monks and yogis, solitaries and sages have gone out into various wildernesses of the world to seek out the needed and necessary quiet in order to let their minds and bodies settle and focus on the natural rhythms, the universal harmonies that set everything silently swinging in this great life of ours.

-   Thomas Rain Crowe from Zoro’s Field, My Life In the Appalachian Woods.

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
       - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Without great solitude no serious work is possible.
      - Pablo Picasso

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

 Talent is nurtured in solitude. Courage in the stormy billows of the world.
      - Johann von Goethe

When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others. How often, in a large city, shaking hands with my friends, I have felt the wilderness stretching between us. Both of us were wandering in arid wastes, having lost the springs that nourished us -- or having found them dry. Only when one is connected to one's own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover. And for me, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.
-   Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

 One of the great inner joys of sailing alone is how carefully and completely I can observe the world around me, totally free of the presence of others. Another person on a boat, even if out of sight and asleep, always fills much of my awareness. I cannot help but wonder if the other sees what I see, if the other will be awakened when I tack, if the other is hungry or wet, is afraid and needs reassuring, or is worried about me.    So I can't overlook another person's presence and sometimes I resent it. When sailing alone, I have no interruption in my view of the act at hand, and most important, the nature in her act. My view of the nature of things, I feel, is direct, clean and pure. I feel that I am closer to some universal truth. It is transcendental, spiritual feeling that brings the humbling recognition of how immense is nature, how incredibly insignificant is each of us in the realm of nature, and how enormous is our ignorance of nature.
      - Dodge Morgan, The Adventure of American Promise

 The real challenge of being in society is keeping your vision clear. I get distracted from myself, from my spirit. So we need time alone. We get so caught with other people's personalities. Sometimes, to know yourself, you just have to spend time alone.

. . . The first time I spent two months alone in the woods, I found out what my schedule was. It takes a while to get into your own rhythm. You have to let go of all of the shoulds, and find out who you are. And it hurts. Solitude hurts. Its lonely. For the first couple of weeks I am out there alone there are tears. Tears at mealtime. But then you get into it, and it feels comfortable. You know you are doing what you need to do.
-   Heron Dance interview of the Minnesota Outward Bound Instructor Sayward

I found that being alone made me very aware of myself. Very aware of my thinking, very aware of my body. That two mile an hour cadence that I had practiced on the way to the pole -- I had it down, I could feeeeeel it. I was very sensitive to my body, very sensitive to my thoughts. I really had a hold of my life. I had a hold of myself. I was in control. There was nothing to distract me -- no conversation, no bills to pay, no news, there was no hope of any news. No distractions.      There was me, out on that huge expanse of ice. Just me and Charlie (her dog). Just one on one.
       - Helen Thayer talking about her solo trek to the North Pole. Heron Dance interview.

To want to know who you are, you have to be motivated.   It may be a question of level of consciousness. There are a lot of people who are not motivated to know who they really are. Who have not really thought about it.
    Who are happy that way.
    If I am around people a lot, I lose touch with myself, with who I am. If you really want to know who you are, you have to spend a lot of time alone, being quiet. Meeting who you are without any distractions. That is very hard for most people to do. We have so many relationships and obligations that we don't get around to ourselves. It is very hard to find the time to explore who you are. You have to be able to be quiet. It’s a huge challenge. But once you do it, everything gets easier. Because everything comes from who you are. The things you do come from an understanding of yourself. It can only get better.

I lived in Spain for a while. I ran out of money. There was a problem with a check in the mail, that kind of thing. I had lots of friends. I could very easily have borrowed money. But I decided not to. I decided to live by my wits. I was housesitting in an old farm in a remote part of Spain. I had no car, no food, no money. No toilet paper. I had run out of everything. I decided to live by my wits. I did that for a couple of months. It was great. I was stealing corn in the fields. Which Spanish people won't eat. It is considered cow food. Figs from the trees. I had the time of my life. It was a real eye-opening experience. I saw how afraid I could be, and how alone, and how lonely and just simply pushed the envelope day after day. I was just waiting for myself to break down and call somebody, or go to visit somebody. Or hitchhike into the village and make contact. As time went by it got easier.
      - Lorry Nelson. Heron Dance interview.

I think that people are afraid of sitting and being quiet. They are afraid of confronting themselves and are uncomfortable with someone who does. It is a lot easier for many people to be busy in their lives so that they don't confront their life or who they are. Of course, somedays I am lonely. Some days you get bored. It is my relationship with natural places what sustains me; it is the positive constant in all aspects of my life.
      I seem to go through those changes about every three years. You gain some sense of your own growth, of understanding. You reach a point where you feel you have things so well understood, and then everything just falls all apart. You feel completely vulnerable and directionless and confused. Wild emotions. That is the period of hell that you go through. Anyone of wisdom has had some point where they went through that hell. You have to go through it if you want to achieve any sense of understanding yourself, if you want to achieve any sense of personal peace.

      I spent a few winters as off-season caretaker at Canaan, a remote yoga retreat. I didn't have to be normal there. I could pursue my own mind without the restraints of expected conventional behavior. I didn't have to live life with constant time restraints determined by others, thinking about whatever others wanted me to think about whenever they wanted it thought. I didn't have to assume the role of a 1970's college-educated scientist male. There is nothing wrong with that, unless, like myself, this is not one's natural role. I could let my mind turn to vanilla pudding -- which is what it did. And there it was okay.     My mind disengaged in the solitude. Time and conventionality had little significance. . . Internal peace has come from pursuing who I am.
      - Andy Coone, chef at an Outward Bound School. Heron Dance interview.

...you can see that basically our lives are, to a large extent, spent in avoiding confrontation with ourselves. And then you can begin to make sense of the enormous amount of clutter in our culture's daily activity, which distracts us from ourselves, from deep reflection, from deep thinking, from existential confrontation. There's a wonderful phrase by the philosopher Kierkegaard, "tranquilization by the trivial."  And I think our culture has mastered this better than any culture in history, simply because we have the wealth and means to do so.

-   Roy Walsh as quoted in the book The Search For Meaning by Phillip L. Berman 

 Some people are less interested in trying to understand or pursue or embrace their inner life. Every time I go on a solo canoe trip, I have to listen carefully to my thoughts and memories. If I go with other people, I end up caring for them. Wanting to take care of them. Letting them take care of me. We are always looking in each others eyes. If I am alone, I don't have that. Instead, I have the sights and the sounds of nature. Of other creatures. They become your companions.

      I try and allow myself to flow into the tundra around me. I try to hone my observation skills. Not only my eyes, but my ears; my whole body. I try and get sensitized to the creatures and the landscape. I have moved a long way into that world since I started. During my first journeys, I was clunky and jittery and even the wind hurt. Later, you come to the point when your body works well. Somewhere during a trip, when you aren't as consumed with your own thoughts and your own fears, you begin to sense other stuff. Things about the animals and the land.

      If you are with another person its twice as hard. With five people, it is five times as hard. You all try to do it together, but you are always referencing back to the other people. Are you alright?  Can I help?  Your mood is up. Mine is down. You have a more difficult time getting in touch with your own mood.

      Solitude is the deepest well that I have ever run across. I imagine it would be different if solitude was forced on you. But to choose it is to open a bank account that never runs out. It places a person in proper alignment, in their proper order. It’s the impact of stepping outside with a minimum of things and a great deal of landscape around you. A great deal of quiet. You listen to what is around you and also to what is going on inside of you.

      I like the tundra because you can see a long way. You get shrunk to the right proportion in the expansiveness, when you are by yourself. Especially on longer trips. Somewhere in the middle you can't reach backward and you can't yet reach to the end. And there you are--just in the present moment. That is so exciting.

      It doesn't matter what your concerns have been over the past year -- they just kind of boil off over the two months. Like maple syrup. You get down to some pretty fundamental, beautiful moments where you just catch yourself doing something. With no prior thought and no afterthought. You are just caught up in making a fire, cooking dinner or just paddling. Those are the moments that are the reason I do it. I just love those moments.

-   Robert Perkins, author, Into The Great Solitude, filmmaker. Heron Dance Interview.

I am really interested in knowing our ancestors. That is something that is really missing in this culture. We don't even know our own mothers and fathers and brothers. Past culture knew their ancestors -- they knew and respected the knowledge of the people that came before them. The best way to get to know the explorers is to start wandering. So I do these long walks. Sometimes in the arctic -- often by myself. It is interesting to do them by yourself because you get into a meditation. If there are others the meditation is broken by day-to-day relationships.

-   Don Gardner, arctic explorer, mountaineer. Heron Dance interview.

I have come to understand that the best way to travel is by oneself. You are just so much more open to change, and available to other people. People see you as being much more approachable. And it’s more challenging internally to travel day after day by yourself. I experienced the most incredible range of emotional highs and lows. Incredible existential loneliness. You stew in your own psyche. You are forced to look at yourself. To face yourself day after day. Why am I here? What am I doing? What is my purpose? To look... look inward. It’s the kind of awareness you don't get when you are distracted by living in the city. Day after day. Or in a relationship with someone who is co-dependent. Where you don't really ever have to face aspects of yourself.

-   Jeff Casebolt, Outward Bound Instructor who kayaked from Alaska to Vancouver and then cycled alone to the tip of South America. Heron Dance interview.

Being alone, in Africa, in a strange culture was a tremendous adjustment. I didn't know what was happening to me. There were people all around me. I wasn't alone. But there wasn't anybody to help me figure out what was wrong. It was culture shock. It was being alone and not predicting that. Not understanding how powerful aloneness is. How deep it can penetrate before you know it’s there. But once I finally found the word that identified what was going on with me -- I AM LONELY -- then it was much more manageable. Then I could begin to do things to disperse that.
When you go through the process of being alone, I think a grieving occurs. I have thought a lot about that and worked through it. I don't know that many people match the two, but I think that when you are grieving and you are in transition in your life, you become raw. So it’s like skin that doesn't have the top layer. It responds to air with a ting, with a sharpness. My whole body was like that. It’s not particularly pleasant but it’s very vibrant. Because I have experienced that in my life, even today, I see things differently. Because of those alone times.
      - Gruffie Clough, Outward Bound Instructor, community development consultant, Gruffie Clough And Associates. Heron Dance interview.

Solitude is almost an indulgence. I have two kids, I have things to do. It’s worth so much that I will trade off a whole lot just to get it. I need situations that are totally pruned of social considerations. Even on a buddy trip with a close friend or two, after a while it takes away from vital attentiveness. Any kind of social interaction or even consideration of social interaction. Without it, you can really tune your senses into the world around you. Get out of yourself. And really live in the moment.

      Going to the desert, or the Grizzly Hilton --things can really begin to happen. I'll just sit around for two or three or four days, and then all of the sudden things just start happening. About day four or five. My senses hone right in.
-   Doug Peacock, ex-Vietnam Green Beret, author, grizzly bear expert.

I am certainly not looking to get married. I really love my alone time. On some levels, being alone is more exciting than being with another person, for me. Not always, but most of the time I would prefer being alone. I enjoy travelling alone. I have travelled a couple of times with a girlfriend and it is not as exciting. When you travel as one, a lot more doors open up. Fewer decisions have to be made. There seems to be more of a natural flow of people taking you in. It just seems a lot more natural to travel as a single person.

-   Ethan Hubbard, author (First Light, Grandfather’s Gift)

I once spent three or four days by myself at a friends cabin. I found it very interesting. There were no distractions and I wouldn't allow myself to read a book or do anything. Wouldn't read a book, turn on the radio, wouldn't listen to music. I wanted to discover silence and I wanted to discover my own thought process. I did a little bit. It was like opening a little box and seeing this incredible treasure chest of riches and demons and all sorts of things. I would either be sleeping or sitting in front of the fire relaxing. You keep wanting to pick up a book. You just keep wanting to do something to distract you. Every five minutes I had to grab myself and say, "No, you are not going to read a book. No, you are not going to find a magazine. Sit. Just sit. No you are not going to write a letter. Just sit."  Eventually  I reached a point where I sat. I started watching the thoughts come through my mind. I started watching myself think. Exploring.
      - Chic Scott, mountaineer, author. Heron Dance interview.

For me, what has worked, has been to listen to my inner voice and to find enough quiet in my life to listen -- because it is not a very loud voice, for most people.
You can easily fill your life with input. And not let your mind work in a quiet, nonlinear kind of way. Things come over your shoulder. They don't often come sliding right in front of you a foot from your face.
The first thing that comes to mind is to go somewhere and be by yourself. Don't bring a radio, don't bring a television, don't have a phone. Just live for a few days. It doesn't have to be in the wilderness, but it at least has to be out of the city. Just be attuned to what it is that your heart is telling you that you want to do with your life. Be open to that.
      - Dave Olesen, Iditarod dog musher, bush pilot, author (North Of Reliance). Dave lives in a remote homestead he constructed on the north shore of Great Slave Lake. Heron Dance interview.

To truly experience wilderness, you have to go alone. When you are with other people, it is a distraction. It isolates you from the mood you are after. As much as I love hiking with Leslie, or with friends, it is not the same. When I am alone, I tend to get a lot more creativity flowing too. I write my songs. So I need that time alone in the back country, to tap into the wild. The real wild. It is hard for some people to grasp, but like anything, the more you do it them more comfortable you get.
-   Walkin’ Jim Stoltz, long distance trekker. Musician. Heron Dance interview. 

We go through life solo, so the way to get the ultimate mountaineering experience is alone. It can be a lot more dangerous because you have no technical backups. I solo without ropes -- with just two ice axes. It’s basically just you and the mountains. Nothing comes between you. But when you climb with other people the relationship is always between you, the other person and the mountain. Someone else is always between you and what you are doing. It is not a real pure adventure. Whereas by yourself, everything you do and everything you feel is simply between you and the mountain. The mountain is a physical thing, but it is also a spiritual thing. There is nothing more incredible than being up on a big face all by yourself. Being 100% in control with the potential for something to go 100% wrong.

Being alone, I can move faster, especially at altitude. You can zip up and down things. You can climb exactly the way you want. Some people like ice better, rock better, different kinds of cracks -- things I can't stand. You can paint your picture the way you want. No two people every painted a great painting or wrote a great book.
-   Robert Anderson, mountaineer, author (To Everest Via Antarctica).

I need time in the woods alone almost every day. Maybe only snowshoeing around for an hour. There are so many levels of perception. Part of the work I have done with natives--that is what I have really learned. For me, being out in the woods by myself is tremendously comforting. I feel like I belong there. If I don't get some time by myself in the woods, it starts to show up in terms of how I am, my energy. Our connection is really important. I think a lot of people are so unconnected with the land, and are so far removed. I think I am a really little part of nature.
They think of nature as something out there. They are the center of their world.
We have created this thing where we are not keeping our soul in the place we are. We really need wilderness. It is a place to go to learn about yourself. And learn about this world we live on. You can learn some lessons you can use every day.

There is a need for balance. Being a whole human being. Part of what it is about is paying attention to everything. Balance is an ideal. As you go through life, you are on a journey. In a state of flux. The way you get balance is in the woods. The things that are important will show up. If I start to let a whole lot of other things run my life, people that are around me, career or bureaucracy, then it is easy to get out of balance. That takes you out of a place of harmony. That will show up in a whole lot of different ways. It will show up physically.
      - C.G. Stephens, director of Northwaters & Langskib Wilderness Programs. Heron Dance interview.

I go to great expense to go on some remote river to be alone, and yet when I find people there, and I am happy. Glad. I went to all of this trouble to get away from them, but the person that you find there is very likely a person who has a right to be there. He earned the right to get there. But the guy who paddled in under his own power are there because they want to be there and are willing to exert energy to get there.

On the MacKenzie River they experimented for a while with a tourist boat. A typical river boat with the people lined up on the deck. Those people had an experience of a lifetime, but it wasn't what I was experiencing. They were perhaps more rugged and far out tourists, but still tourists. I met some of them, talked to them a little bit...but we weren't in the same world. They were as friendly and curious as anyone else. But I guess I didn't equate them with the people I saw paddling also down the river.

-   Verlen Kruger, long distance canoeist. Heron Dance interview.

     ...I tend to write of walking as if it is something that must be done alone. Most people prefer company, and by all reasonable standards they are right. For efficiency and comfort and the rewards of sharing, and above all for safety, a walking party, like a political party, should consist of at least two or three members.

     But I like to walk alone. And therefore, when I am being honest, that is how I tend to write. It does not matter, though: if you choose, sensibly, to travel in twos or three's or twenties, just about everything I have to say still applies. You miss something, that's all. You never quite learn for instance that one of the riches a wilderness has to offer is prolonged and absolute silence.

     There is one notable exception to my rule. When you and your companion are newly in love, the two of you walk with minds interwoven, and the bond enriches everything you see. And that is the best walking of all.

-   Colin Fletcher, The Complete Walker

At three-thirty, when the sun was just drawing in behind the highest peaks, we came to a forestry hut at a place called Tuchila, about thirteen miles from Chambe.

     A very old native forester was in charge there. He was a memorable old gentleman, with beautiful manners and the most serene, resolved expression on his face that I have ever seen. He said that, apart from Vance, were the third group of Europeans he had welcomed in thirty years. He lived there entirely alone. He had long given up visiting his descendants in the plain below. They never came to see him. His values were fixed for the last time. According to Vance he hardly bothered about his wages anymore. Once in four or five months he would come over to Chambe to collect supplies. For the rest he stayed at Tuchila working in his garden, planting potatoes and being unreservedly content. That old man knew something really worth knowing, and I wished I had some way of showing him the respect I felt for him.
      - Laurens van der Post, Venture to the Interior

...as a writer i have to work with my imagination and my mind, and therefore I must lead a life that does not take my imagination away from my work -- which means that I must go away from people at times. I find that the most important part of working is not the period when I am actually writing, but the periods when I stop writing between one day and the next morning. That period is terribly important, and though I cannot write in it, it is one in which my imagination should not be caught up in other things since it is an instrument of my writing. That is the sort of incubation period, a time of vulnerable growth. Something goes on, and I like then to go on long walks in the country just by myself. I would love to write twenty-four hours a day, but words are so exacting, such hard work, that I cannot do more than three or, if I am lucky, four hours at a time, however much I long to push on. So, in between, I am anxious to get on to the next morning; I can hardly wait to get back to it.
      - Laurens van der Post, A Walk With A White Bushman.

True individuality is measured by this: how long or how far one can endure being alone without the understanding of others. The person who can endure being alone is poles apart from the social mixer. He is miles apart from the man-pleaser, the one who manages successfully with everyone -- he who possesses no sharp edges. God never uses such people. The true individual, anyone who is going to be directly involved with God, will not and cannot avoid the human bite. He will be thoroughly misunderstood. God is no friend of cozy human gathering.
     - True Individuality, Søren Kierkegaard