*Full confession, I use the free version of Claude AI to suggest the titles for videos, edit the transcripts that I include here, and create the social media posts that I share in the Be Love, Be Honest, Be Useful Facebook Group. I am conflicted about this AND amazed and appreciative of what AI can do.
Well, it finally happened. It’s my Sabbath day, and I am alone in my house.
Can you hear the quiet?
It’s a gift to be alone, I think especially for women. I’ve been thinking a lot about Virginia Woolf and A Room of One’s Own: what it is to have space and autonomy, to fill a space with only our own thoughts, our own energy, our own preferences, our own curiosities and whims.
I loved having my own room when I was a teenager. It was a sanctuary. I often retreated there and spent many hours in my own company. Since becoming a mother and a wife, with a family of my own, it has sometimes been harder to take that space. I recognize that I have fallen into patterns of enmeshment and hypervigilance, a constant sense of responsibility for all of the people in my space (my children, my husband) and I’ve been noticing how that affects me day to day. I’ve become aware of the effort it takes to claim that time and space, to make aloneness a priority.
I wonder if you struggle with that too.
What I sense is that at the core of this challenge is a spiritual wound of sorts. From what I have come to understand, it sits at the heart of my regeneration, the heart of my joy, my opportunity to be renewed and to be free. All the conditioning in me that would keep me from choosing aloneness, claiming it, prioritizing time with myself: all of that conditioning is part of my alienation from life, from the Divine, from God, from myself. It is a kind of spiritual sickness that, as best I can tell, we are all suffering from.
It keeps me in a state of needing to be vigilant, to be attuned, to be on call, to be prepared to respond. It keeps me constantly looking for something I need in order to be fulfilled, or safe, or worthy, or okay. All of that seeking, all of that striving, all of that being on duty and actively working.
But when I finally take the time to claim that space for myself, something changes. Sometimes it’s the physical space of being in my house alone while my husband takes one son out and the other is at school. Sometimes it’s just a moment to close my eyes in the middle of a difficult interaction, or to go sit in my car. (I think it’s interesting that so many women YouTubers film in their car. Perhaps that’s the place you have to claim your aloneness.)
When I allow myself that aloneness, I touch into what is just fine right now. And not only what is just fine right now, but what is longing to emerge in and through me. That coming home to myself, making space for myself, is what empowers me to be a more effective, capable, loving, creative, useful human in the world.
When I don’t take that time, and I’m constantly responding to other people’s needs, I wonder how useful that really is.
From one perspective, it’s very useful, because I am constantly needed. That part of me, infused with a sense of responsibility for everyone and hypervigilant, can always come up with something to do. She’s cleaning, she’s cooking, she’s responding to her kids’ needs, checking in on her husband and how he’s feeling, checking email, taking phone calls. She’s so busy, and from one perspective she certainly feels she is being incredibly useful. She’s taking care of so much.
But it’s never done. She’s never finished. The need is endless, and the frenzy often builds.
It’s hard not to see the same pattern at this moment in history: the amount of stuff being created on this planet, the waste that has no place to go, the energy and resources we are gobbling up, the noise, the stress and strain, the mental illness, the addiction. There is so much to do. When we’re in that phase of doing, and especially if we’re on the side of helping, it can feel as though we’re helping with all of it, and perhaps on some level we are.
But I’m coming to believe that a more effective path, a Divine path laid out for us through sacred scriptures and stories, is a path of healing this alienation from our aloneness. It means coming back to ourselves, back to the quietness and the joy and the bliss of life that’s simply here without our having to do anything. And then living from here, moment to moment, step by step, following whatever longing we touch when we get still with ourselves.
This, I believe, is a path to rebuilding our world: not from a place of constant fixing and frenzy, but from small, subtle, joyful, present steps.
I’m really grateful for this moment of aloneness, and for my growing capacity to claim this sacred time with myself. I’m glad to be sharing it, because the longing I am coming to know inside is a longing for a world, for a community of fellow humans who are also making the time to be alone. To be still, to come to know themselves, to listen to themselves. A community where we’re not constantly looking outside for solutions or trying to fix all the problems of the world, but are building something new from this steady, slow, quiet, sacred place within.
So I share my journey, and this growing understanding and orientation toward life, in the hope of connecting with others. And I am connecting with you. I’m so grateful to those of you who reached out after last week’s video, offering help, or just a word to say that you share this inner longing.
It is my faith that life moves through us from the inside out, from what we call the spiritual realm, whatever life and beingness is in its totality. The only place we have any real power to affect our reality is on the inside: in how we see, perceive, and receive this life. So to take time alone and check in on how that’s going is, I think, the most useful thing we can do.
And I think it becomes even more useful when we share what we’re learning and experiencing with other people in living relationships. Living, growing, real relationships, with the potential of co-creating new things: new opportunities, new networks, new ways of worshiping, new ways of learning, new ways of caring for our children. Not through frenzy, not through overwork, but through still, small steps, one quiet moment at a time.
Thank you for joining me in this quiet moment. I look forward to all the quiet moments to come, and to the different configurations of human community I might get to co-create with.
Many blessings, friends.
