On Solitude
Under the Capricorn Moon
I am 56 years old. Ever since I left my parents’ home in Connecticut at age 18 with $400 and a one-way ticket to Paris, I have lived most of my life alone.
I’m not a hermit. I’ve always had to work for a living, so I encountered people that way, and every now and then I shacked up with a romantic partner, or ended up in a group house with some roommates, but most of the time, at the end of the day, I went home to an empty house. I still do.
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I was lonely. It took me a long time to realize all the various dwellings I inhabited, all the housesits, boats, tents, buses, shacks, and yes, even some apartments, were empty for a reason. They were waiting for me to fill them. That’s when my loneliness shape-shifted. Became solitude.
Even then, I didn’t plan to live in solitude. When I was little, I thought I’d grow up, get married and have children. I honestly don’t know if those are dreams that didn’t come true, or if my desire for my own nuclear family was motivated because that’s what I saw modeled growing up. I have wonderful parents, married for over 50 years, an awesome brother, pets, cousins, friends that felt like family and still do.
I was encouraged and exposed to art, ideas, and fun. There was no reason I shouldn’t have wanted to grow up and get married and raise a family. But I didn’t. Every time I was offered a choice that would lead in that direction, I chose otherwise—the bear’s den, not the sable cloak.
People may have thought I was contrary. I may have even thought I was. But really, I was drawn by an unknown and unnamed emptiness calling out to be filled. Other ancestors besides my bloodline called me. I watched the back of Virginia Woolf walking into the River Ouse where she drowned. Picked up those heavy stones that fell out of her pockets. I squinted in the sun like Georgia O’Keefe in the New Mexico desert and kept walking toward the horizon until I consumed it.
I chose wintering on a seven-mile North Atlantic island for 20 years. I chose walking for hours without seeing another human. I chose nights that were so dark I thought I wouldn’t survive them, weeping under the eaves as the northeast wind rattled one of the houses that sheltered me as I moved from place to place over the years, because I couldn’t afford an apartment, even if I could have found one. Year round housing wasn’t for the likes of me, which I used to resent. Now, I am thankful for those years. They re-attuned me to nomadic rhythms. I remembered how to travel light, trusted the earth would provide, and how to value the good fellowship of fellow humans singing around a fire. I learned what it meant to be truly noble.
I always found shelter. Attic rooms with sloped ceilings, barns where the late afternoon sunlight poured through windows like golden honey, a tent where I slept above a molting snake who gifted me its skin when I packed up to move into a shingled house for the winter.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist, then a marine biologist. I thought, until recently, that those dreams didn’t come true, but I was wrong. I am an excavator and archivist of time, of culture, and of myself, and I have spent hours in the sea investigating and communing with the creatures who live beneath the surface. I see now those original dreams were a mis-translation of my calling. Good thing I was a disaster at math or I might have followed the false path and become a scientist instead of exploring the past and the ocean the way I was born to. I was born to share fun and wonder, not statistics.
My failure at advanced math may have doomed my scientific ambitions, but I might not have answered the calling in my own way, the way of the mystic, if I hadn’t chosen solitude.
In the beginning, it was so excruciating I couldn’t even talk about it when I did see people. That feeling of dread when the seasons changed, the fear I wouldn’t survive the winter. For years, I wished I wasn’t alive.
I sacrificed myself, over and over. On the outside, it may have looked like I was selfish. Some people even told me I was. I believed them and hated myself. Still, I persisted, went in deeper when my part of the earth turned away from the sun.
Without human mirrors, animals offered to show me who I was, and who I could become. Deer and dog, turtle and snake, honeybee and dragonfly, hawk and owl, seal and songbird. Eventually, my world expanded to another ocean where the mirrors were less opaque, more aquamarine than labradorite, and the reflections I saw looking back at me more unfamiliar: dolphin and whale, octopus and eel. Shark. After years of low light, often gray, I started to see in technicolor.
Plants also volunteered to help. Pokeweed, sprouting at my doorstep said, “You will survive this bitterness,” the years after my heart was crushed from a lover’s betrayal.
“You can be food for butterflies,” milkweed assured me. “A winged seed, white and soft.”
And then I finally heard the ferns who’d been calling me since I stood next to a bank of maidenhair at 11 years old, dragging behind the other girls at camp trekking to dinner.
The first thing they taught me was that in order to properly grieve I had to let go.
And I did. I lay my long-carried wounds down. My losses became compost. Not just for my life, but for others through my art. I began to understand that my struggles had a purpose. Clearing my pain, could help others, even if they never met me. I started to feel grateful for all I’d suffered, grateful for my permeability and how it made me feel so deeply. Sometimes it hurt to have no borders, my skin felt raw and I thought my scars were ugly, but nobody else saw them that way. The more I revealed myself, the more beautiful I became. I didn’t close myself off. I am proud of that. I grew stronger. Kinder. Finally, I began to understand I didn’t have to be an open wound to be open.
The second thing they told me, was real compassion, began with compassion for myself. I’ll admit, I was so empathetic, so concerned with lessening the suffering of others, I’d skipped this step more than a few times. I went back to those neglected versions of myself and apologized. I told them I was here now. I gave myself my full presence. I didn’t make excuses. I soothed them.
Slowly, those old versions of myself, began to trust the me that was rubbing their back while they cried, the one who cradled them to sleep after all the tears were done. I began to understand what true safety was. I understood, for the first time, what it felt like to have faith.
Recently, the man who opened my ears to the ferns said that the purpose of solitude was for people to embody their own codes. I didn’t need him, or anyone else, to affirm my life path anymore, but I was delighted to have the words to clearly explain it.
I am long past the time of rueing my solitude. In fact, I prefer it. I do love people, and now that I can be around them, most of the time, without losing myself, I enjoy them even more. I will move out of solitude if I am called, but I will always carry it with me wherever I go. Solitude is my anchor. It holds me with the weight of gravity to the ocean floor no matter how tempestuous the storm.
Solitude ripened the gifts I was born with, gifts I am now ready to give to whoever answers my call. The Coracle, my latest offering, is a distillation of what I learned myself over years without guides. I can’t guarantee you will learn everything I did in the three month journey I’m proposing, nor would I want you to. Time must have its way with you, too, but I know the time of the lone wolf is over, at least not 30 years alone. I have faith that I can help you. It’s why I was born.
I see it in these photos taken this week by the visionary Tahiti Kulia. I resisted them at first, but I knew that my image is an important part of the story I am here to tell. Can you see it? I am at home in myself. Look—it’s no longer a secret.
I had so many glimpses of the person I am now. She was always with me, but veiled in gossamer or pollen, or just sweat and dirt. I’d get a glimpse of her paddling out to my mooring in the dark after dancing in a bar on a hot summer night, or looking in the rearview mirror of my old Jeep Cherokee after hours of being blown by the wind to the most remote corner of the island on foot, or when a deer didn’t run away when we came upon each other in a meadow of goldenrod. But I always put the mask back on, thought I couldn’t reveal my regality because the village would stone me. Who was I to think I was a queen? I made sandwiches and pulled weeds for a living. I lived in the back of a bus.
No more. And I’m not the only queen in town. You’re one, too. That includes readers of all genders.
Why was I so afraid? Nobody was really going to stone me or burn me as a witch. I lived in America as the 20th century dissolved into the 21st after all, but the feeling they would was bone-deep. Someone was crying out for my blood, so I kept to the shadows.
Now, I can see the fear was partially about being rejected for not conforming, but even more it was because of who I actually was, who I am. A tsunami. A wave of change that can’t be resisted. I don’t blame those who rejected me before I learned how to contain it. I apologize to those who never gave consent to being changed by my field when I couldn’t control it. You helped me become the clay vessel whose cracks are filled with gold.
Where will I be carried on Tahiti’s images? I don’t know yet, because others will be a part of this new journey. I commit to being prophetic, without making predictions.
I know I am a story of suffering and softening. I know I am a story of surviving, and I am proud of that, but surviving no longer defines me. My autonomic nervous system is taking care of my survival. I am here to bear fruit, to ripen, to be consumed. Over and over and over. As long as my heart keeps spiraling blood and my lungs receiving air, and the liquid light of God pulses up and down my spinal cord, all without my doing anything aside from my soul consenting to be incarnated in a human body. I see now I am part of so many stories, there is no end to the orbits. I am the eye in the center of the storm.
Will I sleep tonight, or will I lie awake in the silver light of the full moon in Capricorn streaming through my bedroom window? Will the dogs downhill howl at midnight, puncturing the coqui frogs’ drone? I used to lie awake on nights like this, worrying about my own future and the world’s. Some nights, I still lie awake for hours, but it’s not for worrying, it’s for witnessing. I embrace the night with all my senses, because the dark needs to be known, too.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. From earth we came, and to earth we shall return.
The world’s problems are not just going to go away. They’re not supposed to. They might someday, but right now our task is to know ourselves beyond the noise and terror; beyond the programming of family, society, and culture. Solitude is not a punishment. It is the wedding chamber where we marry ourselves, and everyone is invited to the banquet.
If—when—those weddings occur, we won’t need all these extreme polarities now threatening our existence, and the health of our host, Earth. It sounds too easy to be true, but it is. All we have to do is be ourselves.
I don’t want to be famous, or even remembered. I know the memory of all that has passed through me will be carried through time and beyond by the water for as long as earth exists, and when earth ends, I will journey with the water wherever it goes on currents I can feel, even though I can’t yet see them. I’m not in a rush. Urgency left me when I learned to truly grieve, letting go of all my losses once and for all. And I mean that—for all, means you. And every harm or loss you release, blesses me as well. For that, I thank you.
I hope I will create a lot more beauty because I love praising this world, but even if I don’t, I am enough.
I have a feeling I will settle even deeper into solitude as the years go on, though I may be surrounded by more people. It is what I was born for. It’s no longer a sacrifice. It’s my contentment. A gift, an offering I place on the altar of myself in the temple of Earth. I am enough. I belong.
Thank you deer
Thank you dragonfly
Thank you songbirds and hawks
Thank you owls
Thank you dolphins
Thank you sharks
Thank you turtles
Thank you all the humans I have loved
Thank you for all the dances and betrayals
Thank you failures
Thank you flowers
Thank you bees
I am honey
I am food for the winter
I am the gold cell
In the winters of my solitude, I found the colors of myself.
The Prayer of the Coracle
I receive rain from the moon.
I am the oracle of silence.
Mysteries pass through my skin
to be revealed as waves on the unimagined shore.
I am the safe passage over the dark ocean.
I will carry you where you need to go.
Private 1:1 mentorships with me via The Coracle, an online rites-of-passage container moved by folk tales, myth, and Mū Hawaiian magic, are now available.
Join me on a three month, custom journey into safety and belonging, open-hearted action, and the true affluence of being in flow with one’s purpose.
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Resources
Intuitive Facilitator, Multidimensional Creative, New Paradigm Visionary, and my photographer, Tahiti Kulia is a wonder. Check out her work at www.tahitikulia.com and on Instagram and Threads: @tahitikulia
Long-time readers of this publication will know that the man who helped me hear the ferns, and who translates them so impeccably as a gift to humanity, is Ke’oni Hanalei, of Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals. His website is a generous and fascinating fountain of Mū Hawaiian wisdom and epic goodness. Check him out at www.pohala.net or on Instagram: @pohala_hawaiian_botanicals.
I am so grateful to all those who’ve read my memoir, Piko: A Return to the Dreaming. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s available through all online platforms or can be ordered through your local bookstore. Here’s a link to purchase through Bookshop.org, a nonprofit that supports independent booksellers.
Piko: A Return to the Dreaming, by Jennifer Lighty
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Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light
There is such strength oozing from every word you have written here. What a life you have lived, I am so grateful to have been able to share in your words!
You speak of what I know but have yet to experience. Thank you.