Polar Privacy

There is solitude of space,
Solitude of death of sea,
Society shall be,
Compared with that profounder site,
That polar privacy,
A Soul admitted to Itself:
Finite Infinity.

Emily Dickinson, a 19th century poetic genius, spent a great deal of her time upstairs in her father’s house after she graduated from Amherst Institute and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. She died a recluse at the age of fifty five, but she lives on through the wisdom of her poetry.

Solitude can be a lonely and a remote place where there is no human activity, but solitude can also be a place filled with consciousness that expresses itself in other ways. There is solitude in space, but space is not alone, nor is it remote. Space is overflowing with energy and there are dimensions upon dimensions that interact with each other, but go unnoticed because we focus somewhere else. Solitude can be isolation or a retirement. It can be a state of separation and desertion. Solitude first and foremost is a state of mind that dangles on emotions and feelings of loneliness.

Emily does express the solitude of the soul. The infinity of the soul emerges and then dissipates in mental enzymes and is completely immersed in the action of being without form, but is filled with substance.

Like the sea, we move in rhythmic waves that touch the self in formlessness, as well as form. White caps of solitude create a mystical awakening that drench us in the sea of expression. Propelling the self to the shore of eternity, we reach and touch what we already have and retreat to be a wave again.