two things absolve me from loneliness:

holding those that I love, & walking alone in the woods.

Alone, in the woods, there is no loneliness. The life in the world is all around and through me and I am not but everything just is. This has been a truth for as far back as I can remember – as a child in the fields behind my house, in the trees and moss of the Adirondacks, in the gorges surrounding Ithaca, and even now on a frigid New Year’s Day. Especially in the cold, there is a solitude. Two bald eagles on the Hudson ice sharing a lunch seem comfortable with all that is there. The coyote sunning himself is less content, he itches, it seems, unbearably. Crunching through the crisp light snow on the trail there is only my breath and the thoughts of the coyote and the eagles. I appear and disappear for a time as the pace stays steady and my breath, the trees, the wind and my thoughts take turns leading to wholeness or to my disappearance. Never mind that – causality isn’t the point: there is wholeness and disappearance together.

Almost no people come out on a frigid winter day. And it is precisely that absence of others that takes away the self and opens it to the eagles on the ice, the wind on the face, the light through the trees.

The most lonely I ever felt was when I first moved to Manhattan and shared a one bedroom apartment. I was surrounded by people – a friend in the apartment, people 20 feet away in every direction, protectively sealed from me in their own cocoons that they carried with them outside and onto the subway and into work. The second most lonely place I know at this point in my life is the hospital, and it exists in the same way as the City: cocooned people defended against themselves enter and exit from one place or another, preventing vulnerability and connection at almost all costs. On the way to work there is armoring up, to protect the self from collateral damage in the struggle to get work done. This, of course, is the crushing metric that curses us: get work done. Work to be done leads to work done.

On the walk in the woods, there is no work to be done and no work done. There is just walking.

In the hospital there needs to be just working, but to do that we enter the danger zone. The working is caring, and caring is dangerous. Caring is listening, and bearing witness to the others’ suffering, and admitting the limitations of what can be done, and listening to the anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance along the way. Pressed up against a life in this way cannot be called “work”. It is being on the walk by the river with the eagles and the light through the woods on a frigid winter afternoon. It is holding those you love – the absence of loneliness.