Solitude — from Refuge
I know the solitude my mother speaks of. It is what sustains me and protects me from my mind. It renders me fully present. I am desert. I am mountains. I am Great Salt Lake. There are other languages being spoken by wind, water, and wings. There are other lives to consider: avocets, stilts, and stones. Peace is the perspective found in patterns. When I see ring-billed gulls picking the flesh of decaying carp, I am less afraid of death. We are no more and no less than the life that surrounds us. My fears surface in my isolation. My serenity surfaces in my solitude.
Terry Tempest Williams
This bit is from Refuge. A story about a the author and her relationship to her dieing mother and their families multi-generation relationship to the The Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. The key phrase here, the one that so far best sumarize the book and speak most to myself is “Peace is the perspective found in patterns.” She plays this very well through the book, the water levels of the great salt lake start every chapter, the success and encroachments of the brid refuge, the quality of her mothers health as she under goes chemo, her own ability to deal with each of these fluctuations in her reality. But there is something more there, the statement pin points an underlying true in our own psyches, in fact to some degree I believe in all reality. I’ll leave it to you to figure what I mean by that, or you can just assume I’m nuts. The later of course just proves the point.