Sustainable Compromises: A Yurt, a Straw Bale House, and Ecological Living

15. Solitude

133 15 Solitude Although the intervening years have allowed me to romanticize the memories of living at the yurt, there is no denying the fact that I was never more alone than the time I spent there. A month would often pass without me seeing another human being. The solitary days marched by with my forced regime of habit and pattern , that therapeutic monotony broken only by occasional forays into the unexplored areas of the desert that surrounded me or by the rare visit from a friend. Since the main purpose of my sojourn in the desert was to write, I sat nearly every morning at my manual typewriter and beat on the keys for an hour or two. Trusting the muse of inspiration, I let my fingers fly where they would. I wrote poems, letters, lists of supplies to buy, and short stories that left me cold the instant I finished them. As I said, nothing I wrote while living at the yurt was any good. If my goal for living there had been to become a writer, then by any stretch of the imagination, I failed. Looking back at it, it seems odd to me that I would write so poorly , given the number of words I must have had pent up inside me. You would think, as I was bottled up there with nobody to talk to, my voice would go wild on the printed page. Not so, although I continued to try nearly every morning I was there. 134 Solitude When the day’s frustrating writing session ended, I would push my chair away from my desk and walk out into the glare of the desert sun. Then, no matter what I did—work on the roof, fiddle with my meager plants, get water from the well, or simply roam the desert —I confronted only the unsoiled natural world. Like the ants, snakes, rodents, birds, and other creatures of the desert, I would hide in the shade from the midday sun and then go back out again, roaming and working until the stars danced about. Aside from the dog, with whom I shared a good deal of my thoughts, there was no one to bounce my words off, to see if what I heard on the rebound sounded reasonably sane and cogent. Given that isolation, there wasn’t much difference between what I spoke to the dog and what I thought without speaking. No matter what else, solitude forces you to confront fundamental questions of the self, to be faced with constant reminders of how thin the veneers of ego and self-image really are. I was alone, but I was seldom lonely. Loneliness is different than solitude. Loneliness is being unhappy with yourself. Being caught up in doubt about your own worth, you can’t imagine how anyone else could find something of value in you. Before long that kind of thinking descends into self-pity and self-loathing. Soon enough you find yourself in a different kind of isolation, a loneliness of the spirit, where you create elaborate charades of false confidence and emotional justifications in an attempt to get on in a world full of people who seem to want to have nothing to do with you. It is possible to be lonely in the midst of a crowd, in the bosom of a family, or in a cabin in the desert. Loneliness is universal, but solitude is, well, solitary. It requires isolation. Thoreau said that once, shortly after coming to the woods at Walden Pond, he had felt lonesome “for an hour” and had started to think being alone was something unpleasant. “But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood.” That insane mood passed when 135 Solitude he began to contemplate the natural world all around him. He decided that “there can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.” For the most part we care only about the most trivial and transient things in our lives: our work, food, shopping, social obligations , gossip and rumors, television or internet or iPods, and phones. These distractions allow us to avoid contemplating the essential questions of existence. Just look into a starry night and consider the vast distances of time and space: by any kind of comparison , we are always close enough to a...