Diary of a COVID-19 hermit #1
Blog by Claire Henderson Davis. MitE Chaplain
I am an active person, often with many projects on the go, but I am also drawn to solitude.
I need times and places where I can be alone and silent – spaces of ‘being’ to balance all the ‘doing’ in my life. I long for the sea at these times, and go when I can – the wild, rough coastlines of North Wales. On one of these journeys I was introduced to Verena Schiller and her book, A Simplified Life[1], recounting her twenty-five years as a hermit in a small cottage at the tip of the Llyn Penninsula. That was nine years ago. I took the book off the shelf again the other day to see what wisdom it may offer during this time as a COVID-19 hermit.
“In everyone there is a solitary centre and a silent place that longs for attention.”
Our society is structured in such a way that it is often hard to give adequate space to such longing or to take the journey it invites us on.
“For most of us a journey involves travelling from place to place or country to country, for our work, for a holiday, or for whatever other reason takes us away from home. We enjoy exploring new landscapes or the culture of another land and people. The journey of a hermit stands in sharp contrast to this. Her travelling is not through an outer landscape but is an exploration of an inner landscape, that solitary place that lies within us all, known only to us; an inner space that no one else can fully share or claim to understand however close they may be to us.”
Those of us who are not key workers, who are being asked to stay at home on furlough during this crisis or who are unable to work from home are experiencing an enforced pause. This pause may not mean an end to responsibility – there may still be children to look after or anxiety about money – nevertheless, it offers us an opportunity to explore that place of solitude in each of us, so often neglected in our normal lives.
We may fantasise during periods of busyness, of what it would be like to have space with nothing to do, but in reality, such space can be scary, provoking a lot of anxiety. For as Schiller writes:
“As distractions, conversations with others and a multiplicity of demands in her life begin to fall away she soon comes face to face with herself and the deeper questions intrinsic to our universe.”
A lot of the busyness in our lives and in our society is, I would suggest, a defence against this face to face meeting. Another way we protect ourselves from such a meeting is by throwing ourselves into the task of helping others.
“Ours is a society so focused on the very real distress of many that ways of helping or of problem-solving have almost overtaken the way that we see life, so that we concentrate more on our woundedness than on the wonder of life in itself, let alone on the real contentment which we surely feel at times.”
The task of the hermit can perhaps be best described as simply being present; of slowing life down, and narrowing its physical circumference, in order to bring a quality of presence to every moment and every task. The world, in its moment by moment unfolding, then becomes an endless invitation to participate in the dance of divine revelation found even in the smallest and seemingly most insignificant happening.
Perhaps, during these days of enforced pause, we too may accept this invitation to presence, giving ourselves space to notice what may otherwise pass us by in our normally busy lives.
[1] Schiller, Verena (2010) A Simplified Life. London: Canterbury Press.