In isolation

[vaneramos]

I'm supposed to be doing something else, but....

I'm trying to go headfirst into feelings, not push them away. Having dismantled the structure of habit, particularly those meaningless entertainments that typically fill my quiet weeknights at home, I encounter boredom.

And under the scratched surface of boredom, barely but carefully covered, something swells suddenly like an aneurysm to bursting. A feeling that used to dominate life terribly and unbearably. More recently I have come to terms with solitude, embraced it, recognized it's essential to my life and work. And I am well.

But tonight, having planned specific work (to start mailing poetry to journals), having nothing else to do because this schedule tears away false walls of avoidance, I find this thing lurking in the background.

Loneliness.

I used to fear it more than anything else. Now it's just a pang on a Monday evening. Sometimes I would rather see a familiar smile, hear a voice or movement in the next room.

The plant is Monotropa uniflora, Indian-pipe. It grows at the edge of my cottage garden, under some mountain maples. It's a wildflower adapted to deep woods. It has dispensed with chorophyll and cannot produce its own food. The old field guides call it saprophagic, meaning it lives on dead matter. Newer botanical understanding of plant communities would probably suggest a more complex reality, that the plant's roots are engaged symbiotically with certain fungi, connected in turn with tree roots. Forest ecosystems are intricately complex. The more we know about living organisms, the harder it become to separate discrete species. One isolated from those it depends on makes no sense.