This is what a winter of solitude looks like

Love, death & beauty in the bubble of self

Words & images © Paul Ransom

TRIGGER WARNING: What follows is a piecemeal ‘journal’ I kept across a 10 week period of self-imposed isolation. It is unedited, save for spelling, etc. Rather than events it focuses on thoughts and feelings. At times, it is a record of extremes, a number of them nihilistic and destructive. Some will think this symptomatic of deep depression and/or suicidal tendency. Still others will be tempted to reach out and ask if I am okay. Please, do not overreact. I set out on this ‘psycho-spiritual’ adventure with deliberate intent, accepting that dark days might dawn; and I wrote the following in an attempt to episodically capture something of the felt experience. It may not be rational – or entertaining – but it is true, and it was worth it.

Context

A few years back, after graduating from a mid-life crisis, I stumbled upon the idea of sustainable solitude.¹

Having lived through an extroverted young adulthood, I found myself drifting towards late-40s introversion. A once gregarious and sociable default was trending towards misanthropy. Tellingly, I realised I felt more comfortable – and liked myself more – when I was alone. The company of others was becoming more endurance than enjoyment. I hosted one last party, just for confirmation, and thereafter vowed: never again.

All of which brings me to the present. June 10, 2023. 12.53pm. The house feels crowded; but my friends will leave tomorrow and two and half months of solitude will open out in front of me. It will be cold, and for the most part I will be relatively isolated. Only cats, dogs, and chickens will require my regular attention. Humans will be kept at a manageable distance.

Welcome to a southern hemisphere winter of house sitting. While the various owners travel north to warmer climes, I plan to embrace the medicinal chill of vacated rooms and solitary hours.

• For more insights into the life of a house sitter, (and the perils therein), check out my missing cat disaster from November 2022.

However, my intention here is not so much to indulge an aversion as to explore a space. What lies in quietness? What happens when the theatre of self is largely unattended? How will the echoes reveal themselves, and in what form? 

This afternoon, I cannot say. Perhaps it will be nothing. Or simply boring. I am about to find out…I think.

Sigh

Solitude begins as a kind of lifting. An exhalation. An unwinding of coils. Time seems to stretch, prairie like; a soft undulating horizon that invites me to step into its latitude.

Now, after three days, the air feels fresher. Crisp and clean, salt scented and sharp. The brisk edge of a clear morning by the sea. I breathe it in and feel its chilled relief. It airs me out, like a room with the shutters thrown open. Dust floats, illuminated in slanted sunshine. Hovering in slow mo.

This is how I feel – or want to feel. A speck in the beauty of light. Nothing to hold onto. No need for holding on. I am sighing. Gratitude. Freedom. Possibility.

Vastness

Today was one of those bright, sunlit winter days, the blue so cool and translucent it draws you out. Thus, lured, I followed the light along a short dirt road to a small, enclosed bay. Down on the sand, looking south, with craggy cliffs around my shoulders, I could have been anywhere. Any time.

Sliver of beach, eternal outlook. I could have drowned in the cerulean immensity. A solitary grain adrift.

Hours later – pleasant afternoon having turned into refrigerated evening – I picture myself again on the shore of such vastness, and I wonder if this is a metaphor for solitude. Atomic self, oceanic other, with no distracting clutter in the way. Maybe this is why I have sought such distance; and why I find it so liberating.

Metropolis  

Winter solstice. Central city. Minimalist cubicle. Five nights in a cheap room between house sits. A burst of vertical metro between weeks of wide, quiet environs. A different kind of solitariness; that of crowds. Pavements, cafes, laneways, noodle bars.

The mid-winter morning light has a soft, almost surreal quality, as it bounces between glass clad towers and lands in diffuse pools on cool grey ground. Yet, even here, birds talk and flit. Pigeons, starlings, gulls. Picking up the crumbs we brush from jumpers and jackets.

In a nearby café, groovy baristas speak of single origin and call out the names of well-dressed office workers, who huddle politely with their phones waiting for another shot of caffeine. The gears of the day clicking up to full speed. 

Through this riot, I glide. Rubbing shoulders, sharing glances. Chance encounters. A fellow house sitter at a train station, a fellow author at a cosy ristorante. We share serendipitous vignettes, then move on. Like traffic at the lights.

All is movement. Even the buildings, which seem so solid, are slowly wearing down. In our skins, we rush. In theirs, they resemble the quieter unfolding of glaciers. In a thousand years – less – we will all be gone. The pacific majesty of time. The lone walker, whose steps fall like breath.

Exhale. Solstice.

Now, once more, we incline towards the light.

*

In the brightly illuminated night, the hum of people in crowded canteens, mostly East Asian students. I eat my Lanzhou beef noodles in a corner as the aromatic buzz swirls about me. I might as well be invisible.

Later, turning a corner, I shiver in a quiet street of office towers, as the emptied buildings create a wind tunnel. Drizzle slickens sidewalks, urban surfaces glossed. People pass, nestled into heavy coats. Collars turned up, chins down.

I linger in the cold, staring into the strange and angular loneliness of vacant foyers. Hard white light pours through glass doors into the glistening darkness. My breath is a gaseous presence, somehow amplified in this geometric gallery of departure.

It feels good to be so small. Silhouette in modernist landscape. Ego evaporating, a plume of steamy breathing, rising into the damp embrace of night.

*

Strangely, the mind is sometimes quieter in the city than it is in the country. As if the buzzing network of inner self were somehow externalised.

Voices

Out here…away from city buzz and other distractions…it does not take long for the voices to amplify. With no one to talk to but myself and the household pets, the room soon fills with endogenous chatter.

Friends and former cohabitants will attest to my long-standing habit of self-talk. More than a vocalised internal monologue, it is a multi-character dialogue performed out loud. With extended solitude, these voices flex their muscles. I notice it most when I am out walking or wandering supermarket aisles, where it contrasts with the more taciturn social norm.

This week, I have already been the mad-seeming guy commentating on the mundane actions of selecting the best apples and avoiding puddles.   

NB: I have lately observed that the process of writing appears to double as a mute button. Interpret this as you may.

If all that seems amiable and eccentric, there is also, now unsheathed, a glinting, serrated edge. Self-critical voices emboldened. Catastrophising whispers more audible. Old scars, ready to smart anew. Solitude may well offer an unobstructed view of starry skies, but the space is replete with dark matter.

Before I agreed to this solitary winter, I considered the likelihood of such demons. Although, of late, I have come upon the deepest peace and richest contentment I have ever known, part of that beautiful equanimity rests on an understanding that the black dog and its army are not done. Indeed, that light and dark do not battle, but dance.

Solitude is a choreography. No move is censored. No voice silenced. In our aloneness we permit all things.

This does not make it easy. The part of me that wants to destroy me is tenacious. Cool, well spoken, confident in its position. Mostly, I counter it with flimsy notions. An instinctive faith. The aesthetic and philosophical choice to stay alive.

And yet, to calmly contemplate nihilation is to behold the wonder of nothingness. To sense the divine absence. The quintessential solitude.

To dance alone with shadows is to move in the ecstasy of light.

I realise this sounds crazy – like the unchallenged monologue of someone extracted from the anchoring of others – but this is what lies beyond the hard borders of good/bad, happy/sad. (Sane/mad.) It is a terrain of pure witnessing; what the Hindus call Atman. This is this.

Therefore, the voices will have their say. I will mouth their words, likely out loud…yet also hear them. In this way, I tell myself, the cacophony of the crowd will resolve to a simple utterance. Maybe even silence.

*

Fast forward a week and a half and the hubbub has died down. The critical drone less pointed. Now more pantomime villain than self-hating saboteur.

Along with the sea of voices, the gentler art of listening. I am starting to witness self with a slow and dawning clarity. Calmy. Perhaps soon without comment.

Already…incessant chat devolving to cloudy hush, like a warm distorted guitar riff…a wave/wall of super-positional allowance.

Unchained from the reductive clunk of words, what language may emerge…and to what may it allude?

Ritual

We tend to love our daily routines, and in this I am no exception. Yet now, after more than a month adrift from close company, I am sensing a deeper love of private ritual. It appears to have slowed. I linger at the stovetop while the coffee percolates, warming my hands of a cold morning. I play my current faves² louder, with more relish, knowing there is no one around to tire of them, or ask me to turn them down. In the evenings I offer armchair therapy (out loud) to the characters of ‘bingeworthy romantic K-Dramas’.³

Simple things, somehow magnified. As if, in solitude, there were more details. (My suspicion is that these normally unspectacular acts are being supercharged with the energy and attention I would normally spare for other people.)

Maybe, if the resident pets could speak, they would affirm this, suggesting that I have become increasingly attentive. 😊

Then again, I could be deep in rehearsal for the durational performance of lonely old age. This might be my future, not just a semi-rural winter. Talking to dogs and televisions. Using the stove to stay warm. Dancing alone to the soundtrack of another conversation-free day.

Careful what you wish for, Mister.

Brightening

Barely a month after solstice and already the first clear signs. Lighter mornings, later evenings. A gold that lingers, soft and burnished. The beginnings of a floral sweetness. Or perhaps I only dream it. Wanting it thus.

Today the sun was out. The light was clear. Cool, crystal blue. Now, after 5pm, the air sharpens. The chilblains on my fingers flare red and itchy.

Later, I will put the heater on; and dog, cat, and human will huddle in dry, electric warmth, while Korean melodramas play themselves out to a heart-rending denouement. The fur babies will sleep. I will permit myself a little tear.

Howling

Out here, the wind blows unobstructed. Its whistle lower. Not so much a painful howl, as a yawning groan. Today however, it is a blade. The cold penetrates. Stings.

I hunker indoors, man alone in cave. For one cold afternoon at least, my world contracts to a room. Intimate shelter. The rest is momentarily abstract – out there. On the other side of a freezing sou-easter. Behind screens and phones and sturdy doors.

In the solitary distance of winter, I am strangely warmed.

Vespers

Evening walks have long been my habit, even when the weather is forbidding. (I have already been soaked twice since taking up temporary residence in this house.)

Often, on these vespertine perambulations, I am accompanied by erstwhile loves. They emerge from beautiful vapours, from memory and longing. At times to haunt, at others to uplift. On various pavements – dirt roads, sandy beaches, forest paths – we have danced invisibly; and I have dashed home afterwards to pour out passion and revelation. Witness my love letter blog.

This winter, walking solo on semi-rural circuits, I have felt their footsteps beside me. Hers…and hers…and hers. One more present than her fellow alumnae. The lovely firestarter.

In the mist of her dusky return I breathe deep the bass notes of damp ground, and yearn to lay down in soft fields, there to be consumed. As if the soil were her embrace. Thereafter, from grateful bones, the tree of her. La flor di mi rendición. 

Perhaps such thoughts are madness – but at the golden hour I do not care for the cold consensus of okay. Instead, I recall the Latin: lucernarium. The lamp-lighting time. All shadow shall be rendered in light.

I shiver. Goosebumps. Euphoric deluge. I am alive. This is what it’s like to be me when you’re not around. Distant flame in the immensity of night. Flickering on the meniscus of everything and nothing.

Oh, glory. Hold me in your arms, that I may vanish into you.

Dolittle

Several weeks with limited human contact have yet to result in Trappist quiet. Talking to household pets and random bovines fills much of the conversational gap. Voicing their replies is the most interesting aspect of this habit.

However, our ‘exchange’ has become increasingly repetitive – a call & response pantomime that typically ends with ‘them’ delivering a good humoured, yet laser guided deconstruction of my beliefs and behaviours. In the absence of humans, it is as though my internal self-monitoring and critical voices have migrated to animal others. Even the chickens are calling me out.

Though amusing, and couched in lively banter, the core is naked. I do not believe myself. The ‘me’ act is diaphanous. A selfish fiction. An absurd ego-sham.

Or is it rather that, whenever I am with you, your attention tricks me? Is it you who makes me seem real? Are you the suspension of my disbelief?

Blind          

One of the advantages of my eyesight, (in Australia I am classified as legally blind), is the readily available soft focus effect. This is never more lovely than in the last hour of sunlight, especially in the relative quiet of the country.

Walking without the aid of contact lens allows the light to smudge even more, giving the scene a water colour look. Then, when you allow your gaze to unfocus even further, everything diffuses. In this yellow/gold haze you are afloat in space; all around you in blurred orbit, sitting at an indistinct remove.

Yesterday evening, in horizontal light, I walked to a muffled soundtrack of bird calls, of dogs and frogs and cows. It felt like time itself had slowed. Reality through a fuzz pedal. Before me, arrowing into a lustrous fog, the line of a long, straight road. 

I felt so free. So light I almost cried. But I breathed deep instead…and my heart was flooded with wonder.

Entropy

In the space evacuated by others, the amplification of slow ruin. Hands, red with chilblains. Skin, seeming drier. The revolving menu of small aches. A subtle kind of not bothering. Not caring.

The mirror…ruthless.

Cataloguing the signs, a catastrophising voice in my head speaks with blunt authority. You thought you were different, but here, look…you are falling apart.

For a few moments, a flare of dread. Then, a breath, a shrug. Ah, well. Mortality/banality. As though, unencumbered by the press of dialogue, the self can speak plainly of un-self.

In the inconceivable vastness, the ego finally beholds itself in high contrast. In awesome smallness. Left alone for weeks on end, undistracted, I think every day of oblivion. Permanence is suffering. Entropy is ecstasy.

I am not anything…anyone…simply a process whirring to its end. Such brutal majesty. If I am here for a reason it is to bear witness to my own dissolution. Nihilation as apotheosis.

Noting this, the voice changes tone. Acceptance. Compassion.

Here, look…behold the infinite grace of your undoing.

In the existential mirror, I regard the spectacle of crumbling, knowing that, in turn, the rubble itself will be dust.

Solitude, fully embraced, is its own form of truth. And it speaks most loudly of silence.

Ordinary

To be clear, spending winter by myself has not just been about wandering down muddy roads thinking about old girlfriends and contemplating death. Amidst the ecstatic nihilism and self-prattle, there have been plenty of mundane pleasures. Most notably, the way the cute young barista with the nose ring greets me when I roll up to her counter for my long black. Add to that, siestas with the dog, and feeding seeds to the chickens. Hot baths too. And dancing badly in the kitchen while the veggies steam. In short, the gorgeous granularity of being here.

Structure

With the moderating (limiting, censoring) presence of others missing this winter, the routine practise that lays down the rhythm of my days, and regulates everything from diet and self-care to deadline management and internal monologue⁴, has been in quiet but careful overdrive. Rather than slacking off, my sense is that I have been more disciplined.  

NB: Good discipline structure is crucial for freelancers working to client briefs & timelines. It is also pivotal to sustainable solitude.¹ Indeed, I would argue that discipline is the key to freedom.

The biggest challenge to this has emerged in the last couple of days. My work – for magazines, clients, and self – has tapered off. Now, after just two quiet days, I feel the structure straining.

Today, on a rainy afternoon, starkly revealed, the distraction of busyness, and the unsettling nature of hours.

To slow, to down tools, to rest…what does this mean if we conflate our identity with activity?

I now have the opportunity, if only for a day or so more, to work out in the gym of stillness.

When our gaze is not fixed on what we are doing, on filling time with ‘interesting’ or ‘useful’ diversion, what will be revealed?  

Melancholia

It is upon me. The intoxicant sorrow, with its gentle caress. On a clear and unseasonably warm afternoon. The sound of Nina Simone⁵ mixed with the distant whir of a lawnmower. The nutty aroma of coffee in the foreground. A heaviness in my limbs. The gravity of approaching siesta. However, it will not be dreamt away; this ocean between us. Here on my blue sky island…scream as I might, it will be as a whisper.    

Extremity

As we inch towards the final week of this season of solitude, it is now clear that I have not merely observed but encouraged extreme emotion/ideation. Partly, I have wanted to push myself towards the bleeding edge, if only to confront the feeling that I am going through the motions. Treading water until death. The even keel longs for a storm.

To know calm, embrace turbulence.

Intellectually, the take-out is both obvious and profound. There is no single path. The oneness is divided. Everything is in a foundational dance with its opposite. 

Thus, the lovely, easy quiet of being alone contains the high drama of isolation, and the humbling, liberating, ecstatic proximity of oblivion.          

Yet, strange though it may seem, these extremes are serving to underscore a deeper balance. I can go the precipice – and be awed by the majesty of the formless – and then step back. Just like that.

Brutality

Confession: my moods have been dark and wild lately. I have verged on tears and reckless abandon. In my body, a heaviness, a druggy fuzz that both opiates and inflames. I flow between anguish and numbness. A deep rhythm, almost trance-like.

My response: to allow it, sit with it, drill down.

And so, this AM – in an unremarkable café, surrounded by oblivious mamas and their prams full of cherubs – I fell back on trusted process, the sanity-saving self-talk method that has served me so well over recent years.

I visit my inner shrink. (Today, she is a personal version of Orna Guralnik, of Couples Therapy fame.) I expound, she listens. Prompts me to unpack. And so it goes, until the core is brutally exposed. Not the intellectual reduction, but the emotional reality, and the stark choice it entails.

Invisible in my corner – long black steaming, mamas cooing – we return to the essence. Namely, the bargain I strike with futility. With irrelevance. With the persistent and oceanic sense of having failed.

I have this voice – some think it a gift, others a calling – yet it has not been heard. I feel as though I could shout at the top of my lungs and still fall on deaf ears.

In my vanity, I have sought to bring something beautiful and transformative into the world, to speak of compassion and love, and of the value of uncertainty and the many-sided perspective…but my saviour conceit has morphed into ironic damnation. The muted messiah. Nailed to a cross of hubris.

Like this…a rant that hardly anyone will read. That will reveal nothing. Change nothing.

To the concocted therapist I say, what’s the fucking point? And she replies, you tell me.    

Again, she nudges me towards the pith. The bargain. The ruthless binary. Keep speaking or adopt silence.

As I open the door and the dog greets me with undiluted delight, I understand once more what the challenge is. To speak without craving audience.  

Now…typing at the kitchen table…Orna reminds me: the truth is more often spoken quietly, if at all. 

Pranidhana

I went down to the well of darkness, and there I stumbled upon the light. Or, to be more prosaic, by diving into futility, I unearthed an emboldened sense of purpose. I think I might just fucking go for it now. See what happens when there’s no one to tell you no.

Sunny

Bright afternoon in mid-August. The light is crisp and lovely. The scent of spring is emerging in tufts of cool breeze. The coffee is percolating. Sometimes, solitude is the joy of simplicity. There is so much space in small moments.

Beauty

My bones are frozen. Hands cracked. Bleeding. The cold is like a razor in this frigid house. I shiver towards the end of my stay here, anticipating a return to the wider (hopefully warmer) world. I am ready.

Until then, a few more walks on dusty/muddy roads. Arrows drawn on the back the land. Unpaved metaphors.

Where am I going?

If I were a bucket lister, I would say that my desire is to move in beauty. And if such movement should have a destination, let it be the destination. The ultimate work of performance art. A beautiful death. The poetry of oblivion.

Therefore, rather than treasure or conquest, wisdom or acclaim, let it be the beauty of a long line of road, stretching dirty into the heart of a sun baked wilderness. Let there be distance and space, an ever receding horizon. Let me walk towards the vanishing point, and be liberated at last by the exonerating immensity.

There, in the embrace of vastness, I will exhale gladly, and let my guard drop. Like a lover in her arms. 

Today, the fruit of a lonely winter is ripe on the bough. Clarity and playful ambiguity. Simplicity and delicious complexity. Futility and renewed purpose.

Call it what you will – madness, nihilism, despair – but I will name her Beauty. And I will love her. And never be alone. 

• To dive further into the crazy-sounding bliss, check out my recent love letter to beauty.

Returning

Three days back in the realm of people. Dear friends, familiar faces, the swirl of randoms. No pets to feed.

Already…the energy. Higher tempo. The thrum and blur of the urban environment. But also, tellingly, the pentimenti.⁶ The ghostly falseness showing through. The undeniable uneasiness that comes with feeling that in almost all social circumstances I am somehow faking it.

There are many roles I routinely perform, multiple expectations I play into, the standard acts of charm and erudition; all of which people mistake for me. Yet I do not enjoy the sight of them. Solitude has its dangers; so too does company. Disbelief unsuspended.

However, even here…beauty. Find the right vantage point. Create the right frame. Be there for it. Like when we dance, and we allow the music to move us.  

Thus, right now, sustainable solitude does not feel that far from sustainable sociability. Both are about distance…and the tenor of the gaze. For what the eye sees, it sees.

Note lovely irony. Going blind, becoming aware of gaze.

Perhaps, as the world dissolves into colourful smudge before my eyes, it is time to witness the act of seeing.

As I sit in yet another temporary room, in a house I will briefly share with three humans and a trio of cats, I wonder if my winter of solitude was a ‘blind’ man’s experiment in the paradox of attention.

Q: With what was I alone? A: The way I see.

1: By sustainable solitude, I mean an ‘aloneness’ that does not lurch into bitterness, paranoia and/or messianic delusion. Living in mono has clear risks, and it these I plan to avoid. Whether I succeed remains to be seen. (Perhaps the above has offered a few clues.)

2: New releases from ANOHNI & The Johnsons, Arthur Russell, and Evoletah.

3: Amongst others, Melancholia, Encounter, and When My Love Blooms. (Over the last year I have indulged a thriving fetish for Korean melodramas. For someone of my reputed ‘taste’ it is perhaps a surprising development. The therapist in my head finds it all very intriguing.)

4: Monitoring, (but not censoring or pathologising), self-talk is something I have practised for many years. Indeed, during the aforementioned mid-life crisis, I evolved a deliberate process of curbing its worst excesses and using it as a constructive tool. If you are curious, here are my 15 steps to better self-talk.  

5: Somewhat aptly, her version of Solitude. Thank you, shuffle play.

6: Pentimenti & pentimento (pl): meaning traces of a previous painting visible through the present layer. In other words, a kind of show through.