Unfurling Thoughts

I enjoy the sort of mental space this kind of isolation affords. There are no intrusions here, no unexpected inquiries or announcements. One can unfurl a thought without fear of interruption, unfurl it until one decides he's finished with it. No phone rings. No doorbell, pager, or intercom sounds. No one knocks.

Barry Lopez

Lopez wrote this from a camp at Graves Nunataks, a mountain peak on Antarctica. His reflections leave me with a feeling akin to both longing and sadness. I often wish for more of this kind of isolation - one not characterised primarily by a desire for solitude, but as an isolation "...geographically...also cut off electronically from the outer world" (Lopez, Horizon, 2019).

His thoughts bring to mind days spent hiking along coastlines or in the mountains, places without cellphone signal, and childhood holidays before the advent of wifi and near-uninterrupted connectivity. They remind me too of the delight of travel, of being unavailable simply because you are not at home, set adrift from the expectations and demands of everyday connections and responsibilities. I feel hungry for this kind of isolation.

I love that image of an unfurling thought - something deliberate and beautiful, like the slow opening of the fiddleheads on the tree fern at my gate. I am conscious of thoughts and feelings tightly wound, yearning for the space to unravel. I think about the expression without fear of interruption. Fear is a familiar companion for me, and not too strong a word to express what I often feel as I try to carve out time to enter a spacious awareness outside the confines of schedules, deadlines and appointments. I am constrained not only by the needs of life and relationship, but by a whirring, anxious cacophony of my own internal shoulds and expectations.

I look again at Lopez's words, his choice of cut off in reference to being disconnected electronically. I use the words carve out time to speak of attempts to create space for this kind of quiet thought. The image is of a knife - something steely, sharp, decisive. To step into the space of generous presence is to step out of that of distraction, agitation and urgency. It requires something almost surgical, a determined and sustained effort to slice blocks of time from the busyness of my days, blocks in which to allow thoughts to wander.

The clock on my laptop counts out the minutes. I have places to be, and important things to do. But for now it is enough to simply sit and listen to the birds in the tree over the fence, my dog's quiet breathing. Everything else can wait.