THE SECRET WORLD OF LONELINESS

We have no rivers, we have no wells, we have no springs,
only a few cisterns - and these empty - that echo,
and we worship them.
A stagnant hollow sound, the same as our loneliness,
the same as our love, the same as our bodies.
-George Seferis
Mythistorema, X

All the lonely people, where do they all belong.
- Lennon & McCartney
Eleanor Rigby

You went online. For some reason you googled cbsmagic out of boredom and clicked the first site offered. You're brought to this site. You felt a certain degree of calmness, a feathery push on your previously restless soul that seemed to say, settle, please. You settled, but for one moment the title of the post carried you back, back, way back, to the royal dwelling of your dreams.

Like smoke in reverse you slowly dropped to the sweetness of your bed, laid down sideways to your favored side, curled your legs up with the knees attempting to meet the chest, reciprocated by the head attempting to welcome the knees - but anatomical considerations decided for a space in between them - to ensure the passage of the free hand through the available space, allowing the thumb to gain access to the mouth and thus achieve the full desired position.

And then you found happiness. And you felt free.

You were free.

You were free to assume this psychological pattern called regression, where man in his most desperate moments, in his loneliest times, regress to a foetal position and assume the same stance that a foetus naturally assume inside a mother's womb.

A foetus does not think but in the smallest degree of sensation that he was so blessed to acquire, he lived in the safest place in the world, under the care and protection of his mother.

A person who regresses refuses to think and assumes a world of womb in a place closest to a mother's sense of reassurance, a bed or even a closet.

That is the world of a regressor's loneliness. Though that, in large respects, is not a secret.

I remember Father F saying one Sunday, All you need to know you can find in yourself.

I knew that. I believed that. For in my utmost need to find the secret world of melancholia, I noticed all roads leading to the place I called myself, the world of myself which Wordsworth must have described as the silence that is in the starry sky, the sleep that is among the lonely hills.

If I sustained this feeling, if I maintained this notion, that despair is for those who have no trust in immortality, then I'll probably expound a truth about this, my revealed world.

In the meantime, let's warm our hearts to Tagore's prayer, in Gitanjali, 24:

If the day is done, if the birds sing no more, if the winds has flagged tired, then draw the veil of darkness thick upon me, even as thou hast wrapt the earth with the coverlet of sleep and tenderly closed the petals of the drooping lotus at dusk.

From the traveller, whose sack of provisions is empty before the voyage is ended, whose strength is exhausted, remove shame and poverty, and renew his life like a flower under the cover of thy kindly night.