The Solo Path of Meaning

Every morning this week, I have risen with the sun to find peace in movement. Sometimes I am more active, sometimes this is a slower, more mindful kind of energy, as today. This morning, I woke with dreams and thoughts heavy in my subconscious. Like a great purple curtain, I had to move aside these busy, dreamy thoughts and become me again. 

I am me when I am on the yoga mat. I am me when I am writing. Though, sometimes it takes a deeper contemplation to find this self. In times when I have been gone, my mind on a journey beyond my body, I must return with thoughts howling at my back as though they are in pursuit. I must quiet myself and my body and become one being. This was today. I sat on my yoga mat and was still. After an energizing practice, my body was cooling, my thoughts were awake but not as busy, and I paused to consider what I could learn from my own spirit. Inside, the walls are dark and there are no windows and you must be truly quiet to know what resides inside. But as I sat and waited for the answers, there was a voice from within me, quiet as a shivering wind stirring the branches of a willow. It said to me, Here you are. Finally. 

I’ve been pondering deep questions. I’ve been looking for the answers in the depths of my mind and then I am surprised when I come up gasping for air, no treasure in hand. Sometimes, the most important things are the simplest to find, but we overlook them in our rush to greatness. I am trying to relearn this. While I want to write some complex philosophical article about who I am, what I’ve been up to, what it means to be human, I find myself stumbling. It is in these moments that I must brainstorm, and during these brainstorms the things that feel the most important to me are the quieter moments, when I am not thinking so hard. 

For one thing, my winter walks restore me. I find that even in cold that seems to break your back with its punch, the walks I must take daily with my one-year-old black dog leave me feeling calmer than when I set out. Somewhere out there, my thoughts sort themselves. I’m worrying about commands like heel and wait, but my mind is doing deeper things while I’ve looked away. I’m sure there is a science behind this, and many great thinkers use walks in their daily lives to sort out what they’re trying to say. I suppose it doesn’t hurt to join this tradition. For Mary Oliver, walks were what generated so much of her poetry. What she found in the woods evoked words of wisdom, stewardship, and spirituality. For Annie Dillard, it was the walk she took daily in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley that conjured her Pulitzer prize winning narrative, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. And of course, they are preceded by older traditions. Thoreau was an original walking thinker, a nature writer and a Transcendentalist inspired, of course, by the things he found out and about and the simple life he lived in Walden. Jane Austen, too, found solace in long walks and puts fascinating, important walking scenes in many of her famous titles. 

So when I am lost and my thoughts are busy. I take a walk and invite what comes in.  

Another simple, important thing that I have found helpful is returning to a meditation practice. During this time, I allow myself space to not think. Space just to be. When I am quiet, there is a deep knowing within my body that I can access by becoming still. It is the closest thing I have experienced to a mystical encounter. It is a deeply spiritual and mindful act, a place of peace where the soul can rest. When I meditate, I care for myself and my whole being. But it is so easy to forget how nourishing this practice can be. As with most things that fulfill my higher purposes, I lose it and find it repeatedly in a dance of familiarity. For many months now, I have forgotten the practice of meditation, and coming back to it feels like jumping into a lake on a hot summer day. There is a cooling, quieting sensation that comes over my body, and finally I am just existing without the heat of busyness. 

So too with yoga. Not all my practices are like this, but at times, I can drop into a meditative state during my asana and create peace that radiates from my inner mind. The less I think, the more this state overcomes me and I am lost in a place of golden light and energetic space that shifts the form of my body through movement towards stillness. 

So descending through the levels of meditative actions, it seems that I can access a great knowledge simply by being without thinking. It is easy to forget because when we are looking for answers, not thinking seems counter intuitive. I must remind the resistant part of my mind what I can gain in walking and meditating and flowing through yoga. 

I am home now, currently feeling stuck, sometimes longing for the road, for freedom, sometimes facing what’s within me with a brave resolution. Today, in my state of meditation, I believe this is what my inner knowing was trying to convey. It was a reminder to that stubborn resistance: Here you are. Finally. Look here and listen. This is where you will find your answers. Do not go into the thinking mind. Let yourself be a body in this physical world. May we find our knowing in the stillness and the movement alike. 

During the moments when I seek peace and answers so desperately, I try to find what I am looking for in the outside world, asking others about their experiences, watching videos, reading articles. At times, when my thoughts become really active, it feels like I am on a treadmill going just a little too fast. I run desperately at this thing that I can’t see, constantly afraid that I will fall and lose what I am learning. There is no trust, there is no stillness. There is only a scramble to gain more, to fit the pieces together and find a key that will unlock all of my wondering. 

This search often turns outwards, towards the world, something that might be reflected in the travel that keeps pulling at me. This is the wanderlust that draws me from my hometown. My sense of adventure stems from the desire to know more about myself. It is a worthy desire, and at times, my hunger for travel is not misplaced. I have found so much in the places I have been. Sometimes, I even gain that sacred stillness that I seem to be looking for. But perhaps in finding stillness at home, there is a different kind of journey. Through the innerworld, we must access the answers within without distraction, without assistance. It is a journey we must go on alone. It may be braver. For me, it is certainly harder. But in the face of this challenge, I seek to document something new on this platform; I hope to track the movements of a journey that looks very different. This is still the solo wander, but its course is set through the inner world. This is the solo path of meaning. 

I do not know what this path will hold. I have wanted to write about this subject for as long as I’ve had a blog. Something stops me every time. I fear judgment. I fear exposing this inner self and watching the world laugh at who I am. The bravery required in this act of speaking out, the act of sharing what is within my own head, feels far scarier than any plane ride or journey that I have gone on physically. But in the vulnerability, I believe there might be some answers that I have been too afraid to find. 

All my life, I have heard writing professors encourage bravery in writing. Share that thing you are afraid to share, it will make your writing stronger. In one of my favorite writing guides, The Poet’s Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, they call it “writing the shadow.” Essentially, writing the shadow entails moving past what we believe to be “acceptable” things to write about and mining the subconscious for behaviors, thoughts, and emotions that somehow feel “forbidden.” For me, this inner journey is my shadow. I am afraid of sharing it, afraid of writing about it. And so I must. As is written in The Poet’s Companion, “It’s important not to censor yourself. Give yourself permission to explore wherever the writing takes you” (57). 

May my shadow teach me more about creativity, more about life, than I ever knew within the light. 

Be well, stay curious. 

Authentically yours,

Caroline