[White1]

I stole solitude then as everyone so placed steals it: escaping into chores, driving alone to work, standing alone at the hockey ring appearing to watch my son's team, listening to the house creak and the wind moan through the darkness of the hours of the wolf. Still the uncanny nature of the silence, still the power. And new thoughts began to grow in their own dark soil: maybe these silent spaces where ordinary things become numinous, where feelings become spruce boughs and scattered stars- maybe this, not relationship, is where i should find my place. Where any one should, if they had enough longing for the deepest reality and enough courage to pursue it.

A severe inner voice would observe coldly:

This poor creature fills his bleak impoverished world with phantasms as a desperate substitute for the real relationships every human needs. A sick life, a tragic life! What he has here are illusory engagements with shadow-people, and yet he has somehow managed to deceive himself into thinking that this is the deepest reality in which a human might live! Solitude has gotten the best of him.