Topic: excerpt from Alice Koller's "The Stations of Solitude."

[Jennifer-]

"You begin marking out your line of travel in the instant you recognize the extent to which you are alone; thoroughly, unremittingly, without other human beings. I call it 'being alone elementally'; as an element, unconnected. It is the essential human condition.

"Instead of calling it by name, you perhaps flee from it. For you, being alone is being achingly aware of the absence of other human beings, and only the presence of another person can salve it. Yet that fearsome being alone is merely the starting point in an exhilarating process, the first step along a continuum whose end point is so far from terrifying that it is beyond price... It is your solitude, your unending creation of the life you can choose to live. By aborting the process at its early harrowing appearance, by rushing toward surcease through other human beings, no matter whom, no matter at what cost now or later, you deprive yourself of the one gift you can give yourself that no one else can ever deprive you of: the person you wish to be, the life you wish to live.

"Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your own presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.

"To become genuinely solitary, to be alone well, you must first have been alone elementally. For that, no 'here' will do. An island is not necessary. Only be away from everything familiar; every person, every relationship, every circumstance.

"In that place, wherever it may be, where you will know no one, have no obligations to other persons to deflect you from your unbinding, you will learn two things:

"The first is that you are a ragtag assembly of relationships and of memories of events and hopes for the future, that their accretion is something you have more or less stumbled onto over the years, that you have patched together a life from the leavings of others. How you will go about discovering which parts of that ill-assorted collection to toss out, which to retain, if any of either, is a course of thinking, feeling, understanding, deciding, known only to you and that only you can devise.

"The second thing you will learn in that place is that your life is entirely within your own hands; to shape to you, to make fit you, as onl you know how best to do, how to do at all.

"That route toward yourself that you pursue by yourself is your reflective occupation in the first station of solitude. The journey is almost totally one of looking back. When you leave the station, you will probably never look back again. There will be no nostalgia for the life you used to live: it belongs to someone you no longer are."

[Firestarter]

Good snippet.

It sounds very toltec, very much like the first step one must take in order to recap their life. But evenso, one doesnt necessarily have to be solitary from others to untether old ties from others; it can be done if one can detach themselves from others, take time each day to meditate alone, cause thats how we can discover as she said, just how we're assembled based on other people's muck. Parents, friends, associates, and how when not solitary we can unnaturally and unconsciously cling to those behaviors. However, in meditation, if we take that time for self, which is critical then we can unwind. Facing the silence of the night, the quietness of a room, phones shut off, tv off, etc, even if have children they're asleep, then we can undo the many 'faces' we present to others and many roles without becoming lost in them, or thinking they're the core of who and what we are. Then we can get more grounded to who and what we are, of course my own process has led more to emptiness than any other. Others may be able to track the I Am factor but for my own its a state of emptiness that I come across when I do this. Then the aim for myself is to go beyond emptiness from that point. Is that all there is or is there more? Either way, good snip.

[Michael]

"To become genuinely solitary, to be alone well, you must first have been alone elementally. For that, no 'here' will do. An island is not necessary. Only be away from everything familiar; every person, every relationship, every circumstance.

"In that place, wherever it may be, where you will know no one, have no obligations to other persons to deflect you from your unbinding..."

person seem to know what it's about