“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
Lois Lowry, The Giver
Category Archives: LONELINESS
Though I roam a minstrel lonely All through the night My true harp shall praise sing only All through the night
My friend the Angel climb’d up from his station into the mill; I remain’d alone, & then this appearance was no more, but I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight hearing a harper who sung to the harp, & his theme was, The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind.
WILLIAM BLAKE.
i long for you in your absence and in your presence just the same, endlessly.
WILLIAM C HANNAN
Sarah Rice
Absence
Funny how our anthropomorphis,
makes us read even empty benches in the park
as gathering, huddled, grouped together.The metal stairs we used to sit on
are honeycombed in structure,
rigid and unyielding, they hold their emptyhexagons apart.
Once we wove the in-between,
spinning the cobwebbed lines across the gaps
in a crazy railway network map.Funny how you leave a trace on space.
The silver, flattened grass whispers
that here (not long ago) someone lay.
“Bou you gwai gwai. Bou you gwai gwai,” which meant, “My poor red legs. My poor red legs.”
“A well-developed sense of humour is the pole that adds balance to your step as you walk the tightrope of life.” William A Ward
“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
Anaïs Nin
FOTO – IZZY FOREAL IN MALLACOOTA 2013
The savage loves his native shore.
Les Murray: “Stone statues of ancient waves, tongue like dingoes on shore”.
On the Shore.
R.K. WEEKS.
HERE many a time she must have walked,
The dull sand brightening ‘neath her feet,
The cool air quivering as she talked,
Or laughed, or warbled sweet.
The shifting sand no trace of her,
No sound the wandering wind retains,
But, breaking where the footprints were.
Loudly the sea complains.
1880 ‘On the Shore.’, The Queenslander(Brisbane, Qld. : 1866 – 1939), 28 February, p. 265, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article20331530
Walking a solitary road
A young boy or girl knows that if they want to be part of a group that drinks, they have to drink. If they want to be part of a group that parties, they have to party. If they want to be part of a group that uses bad language, they have to use bad language. If they want to be part of a group that engages in a certain kind of behavior, they have to participate in that behavior. If they want to be accepted by some particular group they have to participate in that group's behavior. They know all that by instinct. They know what they must do to be liked and accepted. They must conform to the attitudes, outlooks and values of the group they wish to be accepted into. If a young person looks around and sees that everyone is drinking, partying and using bad language he knows he has a choice. He can either join them or walk a lonely road. The young person who decides within himself that he will not drink, that he will be a total abstainer, knows there will be a price for that, there will be consequences for himself. The teetotaler is aware that he has freely chosen a path that necessarily makes him a loner, an outcast, an object of ridicule and scorn, to a large portion of society. The young person who has determined within himself to take the route of never using low, profane or bad language knows there will be consequences. He knows he cannot ever be really accepted by that large portion of society that does these things. He knows he will walk a lonely road. The young person with scruples, high personal standards, integrity who looks at the crowd and has moral objections to their behavior has a choice: he can maintain his standards and principles and walk a lonely road or he can give them up and join the crowd. A young person knows that one must either go with the crowd and be one of them or have the courage and strength to stand alone. The young person who chooses a path of strict principle in regard to drinking, smoking, low language, etc. knows what he is doing. He knows he has chosen to buck the crowd rather than go with it. He knows he has chosen a lonely path, a solitary path. He knows he has freely chosen a way that will bring upon himself ridicule and rejection and ostracism. He knows that you cannot have both the approval of the crowd and of God. You have to choose. You have to have the strength to stand alone, to walk alone. You have to be willing to accept ostricism and rejection. The crowd doesn't like the person who doesn't go along with it. The drinkers and partying don't want a non- drinker around when they are partying. He is a wet blanket, a kill-joy. Those whose minds and language are gutter don't like those who don't accept their language, mind and humour. The person of integrity, the person of moral standards who objects to the moral depravity of the crowd walks a solitary road. He lives on a different wavelength. He is a different species, a creature from another planet, a creature from an alien culture. What induces a person to walk a solitary road? Well, conscience, fear of God, love of God. But yet it is not really a solitary road. God is with him. God is his friend. And he is his own friend. He has two true friends: God and himself. May 2008 http://www.solitaryroad.com/a961.html
Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney, NSW : 1870 – 1907), Saturday 3 January 1891,
Basho: Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.
When the Children Come Home by Henry Lawson
On a lonely selection far out in the West
An old woman works all the day without rest,
And she croons, as she toils ‘neath the sky’s glassy dome,
`Sure I’ll keep the ould place till the childer come home.’
She mends all the fences, she grubs, and she ploughs,
She drives the old horse and she milks all the cows,
And she sings to herself as she thatches the stack,
`Sure I’ll keep the ould place till the childer come back.’
It is five weary years since her old husband died;
And oft as he lay on his deathbed he sighed
`Sure one man can bring up ten children, he can,
An’ it’s strange that ten sons cannot keep one old man.’
Whenever the scowling old sundowners come,
And cunningly ask if the master’s at home,
`Be off,’ she replies, `with your blarney and cant,
Or I’ll call my son Andy; he’s workin’ beyant.’
‘Git out,’ she replies, though she trembles with fear,
For she lives all alone and no neighbours are near;
But she says to herself, when she’s like to despond,
That the boys are at work in the paddock beyond.
Ah, none of her children need follow the plough,
And some have grown rich in the city ere now;
Yet she says: `They might come when the shearing is done,
And I’ll keep the ould place if it’s only for one.’
Standard (Frankston, Vic. : 1939 – 1949), Thursday 15 April 1948
Michael was a monkey, and a lonely chimpanzee, Trying hard to find a lady chimp to share his tree.
There was but one hiccup in this quest to soothe his heart:
Every time he talked to monkey girls he’d start to fart.
http://kingpoetry.com/monk.htm
Queensland Figaro (Brisbane, Qld. : 1901 – 1936), Saturday 4 October 1930,
The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married. Cyril Connolly
http://www.gadel.info/2011/08/feeling-lonely-and-loneliness-quotes.html
foto of raleigh rumblers in december 2013
The Lonely Crossing
A man on foot came down to the river,
A silent man, on the road alone,
And dropped his swag with a chill-born shiver,
And sat to rest on a wind-worn stone.
He slid then down to the long grass, bending
His arms above as the resting do,
And watched a snow-white chariot trending
Its wind-made way o’er the wedgewood blue.
In it sat one of the fairest ladies
That mind could mould, in a crown of white,
But close beside came a fiend from Hades
In a chariot black as the heart of night.
The man, he sighed as the fiend would clasp her,
Then smiled as the wind by a wise decree
Her white steeds turned to the streets of Jaspar,
And Satan drave to a sin-black sea.
The wattles waved, and their sweet reflection
In crystal fathoms responses made;
The sunlight silted each soft inflection
And fretted with silver the short’ning shade.
A restless fish made the thin reeds shiver,
A waking wind made the willows moan,
But the resting man by the noon-bright river
Lay dreaming on, in the long grass prone.
The bell-bird called to its tardy lover,
The grebe clouds all to the west had sped,
But the river of death had a soul crossed over,
The man with the swag on the bank was dead.
Lawson, Louisa (Dora Falconer)(1848-1920)
the slant of sun through six different windows. Paul Hetherington
http://www.australianpoetry.org/2013/10/09/a-slant-of-sun/
Isn’t it funny that at Christmas something in you gets so lonely for – I don’t know what exactly, but it’s something that you don’t mind so much not having at other times.
Kate L. Bosher
When the kookaburras bless the world because the world is good.
The Kookaburras by John O’Brien
http://www.instituteofaustralianculture.com/the-kookaburras-john-obrien/
FOTO of kookaburra at raleigh nsw
Could I Hear the Kookaburras Once Again
May a fading fancy hover round a gladness that is over?
May a dreamer in the silence rake the ashes of the past?
So a spirit might awaken in the best the years have taken,
And the Jove that left him lonely might be with him at the last.
While he searches in the by-ways, shall his heart forget the highways
Where the sunburnt arms are toiling in the sun-shine and the rain,
Where the simple things and lowly make their lives sublime and holy,
And the kookaburras chorus once again?
JOHN O’BRIEN
http://australianpoems.tripod.com/couldihearthekookaburrasonceagain.html
Trees like to have kids climb on them, but trees are much bigger than we are, and much more forgiving.
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
The Last of His Tribe
by Henry Kendall
He crouches, and buries his face on his knees,
And hides in the dark of his hair;
For he cannot look up to the storm-smitten trees,
Or think of the loneliness there-
Of the loss and the loneliness there.
When you are lonely or frightened, talk to your guardian angel.
Joan Wester Anderson
You can do it out loud or inside your head, your angel can hear you. Ask your angel to be near you, to put his or her hand on your shoulder, to give you courage and protect you.
We must not be forced to explore the universe in search of a new home
because we have made the Earth inhospitable, even uninhabitable.
For if we do not solve the environmental and related social problems
that beset us on Earth – pollution, toxic contamination,
resource depletion, prejudice, poverty, hunger
– those problems will surely accompany us to other worlds.
~ Donald G. Kaufman and Cecilia M. Franz
from ‘Biosphere 2000: Protecting Our Global Environment’ 1996 ~
http://www.sapphyr.net/smallgems/quotes-environment-nature.htm
The major work of the world is not done by geniuses. It is done by ordinary people, with balance in their lives, who have learned to work in an extraordinary manner.”
― Gordon B. Hinckley
“Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom.
Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace”
― Dean Koontz, The Good Guy
Just a puppet on a lonely string. Oh who would ever want to be king? Coldplay
“Mom,” said Peter, “nobody thinks you’re a lackwit, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Lackwit? In what musty drawer of some dead English professor’s dust-covered desk did you find that word? I assure you that never in my worst nightmares did I ever suppose that I was a lackwit.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadow Puppets
When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.”
― Chinua Achebe
“I’m lonely. And I’m lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Dry
Poverty is in want of much, avarice of everything.
http://masterrussian.com/proverbs/russian_proverbs.htm
As we became subjects of King Alcohol, shivering denizens of his mad realm, the chilling vapour that is loneliness settled down. It thickened, ever becoming blacker. Some of us sought out sordid places, hoping to find understanding companionship and approval. Momentarily we did — then would come oblivion and the awful awakening to face the hideous Four Horsemen — Terror, Bewilderment, Frustration, Despair.
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, The Big Book
most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
Safety is as simple as ABC – Always Be Careful.
http://www.quotegarden.com/safety.html
“I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Madman
“Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness.”
See more at: http://quotationsbook.com/quote/27243/#sthash.j4ppOX88.dpuf
Lowell, Amy –
“Oh how lovely it is!’ she kept saying. Look what a moon! Oh, how lovely!…I feel like squatting down on my heels, putting my arms round my knees like this, tight – as tight as can be – and flying away!” Prince Andrei, a serious man who thought he had given up on the pleasures of life, hears her from below, and “all at once such an unexpected turmoil of youthful thoughts and hopes, contrary to the whole tenor of his life, surged up in his heart.”
― Leo Tolstoy
A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
– Robert A. Heinlein
“Take for instance a man driven to incessant work by a sense of deep insecurity and loneliness; or another one driven by ambition, or greed for money. In all these cases the person is the slave of a passion, and his activity is in reality a “passivity” because he is driven; he is the sufferer, not the “actor”. On the other hand a man sitting quiet and contemplating, with no purpose or aim except that of experiencing himself and his oneness with the world, is considered to be “passive”, because he is not “doing” anything. In reality, this attitude of concentrated meditation is the highest activity there is, an activity of the soul, which is possible only under the condition of inner freedom and independence”
― Erich Fromm
Over time, any deception destroys intimacy, and without intimacy couples cannot have true and lasting love.”
― Bonnie Eaker Weil, Financial Infidelity: Seven Steps to Conquering the #1 Relationship Wrecker
“An intimate relationship does not banish loneliness. Only when we are comfortable with who we are can we truly function independently in a healthy way, can we truly function within a relationship. Two halves do not make a whole when it comes to a healthy relationship: it takes two wholes.”
-Patricia Fry
Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things; knows not the livid loneliness of fear.”
-Amelia Earhart
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“No matter how good things are, there will always be solitary nights you spend in your bedroom or car or in a party full of your closest friends when it feels like the walls are caving in.
Dan Campbell
Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them,
since you cannot even make yourself as you wish to be.
– T. A. Kempkis
You are the gull, Jo, strong and wild, fond of the storm and the wind, flying far out to sea, and happy all alone.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
“Today, Aaron decided, he would begin to grieve in earnest. He would walk the lonely beach, mocked by gulls, uncaring, his every step a stately rebuke to the malign forces that had blighted his fate. His was the tragedy of a man who couldn’t have his own way, and he intended to make known his anguish in the solemn solitude that only a stretch of sand, a suspiring sea, and a beetling cliff could provide.”
― Joseph Caldwell, The Pig Did It
THE OLD PROVERBIAL RECOVERY 