Solitude

It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest.

ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Taking my coffee alone for the first time in months. We are back in the panhandle for a couple days, so P can work in the operating room while I continue to practice law remotely, but right down the street from the office. It is August on the beach, and despite the hurricane that has the Gulf boiling outside my window, the place is alive with more people than I've been around in a while.

And yet, this is a far lonelier spot than the farm. Back at Wyldswood we are surrounded by family--when I say grace over our meals, I always thank God for the life of the place, and the friends who help make it what it is. Even as I write this, Allmon is probably pulling up in his old pickup to let the chickens and the guineas out of their pen, while George and his work crew continue the project of turning Splinters into a rustic guest house wedged between our irrigated field and the cattle pasture.

The creatures who populate the place have also become family. As I've written before, we raised most of the fowl who roam the place, except for the magnificently gangly, orange-billed whistling ducks who drop into the pond and occasionally show up in the yard outside my office window.

We didn't raise the cattle either, but they're family as well (and I promise to introduce them one day)--the huge, aloof Angus bull, the heifer who looks like Skeletor from the He Man cartoons, and another we've named Regina because her bright orange hair reminds me of my late grandmother.

I work alone in my office all day, but with the sound of the tractor outside the window, and the occasional visit from the guineas who stand outside my window in the afternoons and demand an audience at the top of their lungs, usually during a conference call.

Back here in civilization, we are surrounded by people and activity, traffic and music and the roar of life among the masses. So why is this loneliness rather than solitude? Maybe it's the pandemic, and this new normal of avoiding any venue where people are gathered. It certainly isn't the wearing of masks, which is the exception rather than the rule here in this reddest corner of Florida.

The last six months have seen the loss of our communities--of faith, of work, of leisure. It was our incredible good fortune as a couple to have the chance to drive through the gate at Wyldswood and build a community of our own, and learn a way of living my grandparents and great-granparents knew, but was as foreign to me as life on the Moon. And now I feel like an alien here in this place along the beach where I've spent most of my adult life, and can't wait to get back to our tribe and the rhythm of farm life.

The challenge from here, as the country haltingly tries to return to a life we all once considered normal, is whether and how we can preserve all of these lessons of what it means to live well while we are pressured to go back, to show up. These few months have proven that, at least for some of us who can work remotely, the home office model works fine. Are we obligated now to give that up, and if so why?

Eager to trade this loneliness for solitude back at the farm, but for now I will make the best of our brief incursion into the teeming, civilized world. Selah.