we are solitary

Stay at Home Order … day 4 plus 14 seclusion retreat days

photo assignment: same lens (35mm) camera wide open (f/1.8) … 25th day

He never came —

the wind too tells

how the night has worn away,

while mournfully the cries of wild geese

approach and pass on ~Saigō (cited: B Watson, Poems of a Mountain Home)

“And to speak of solitude again, it becomes always clearer that this is at bottom not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act although this were not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assuming it. … A person removed from his own room, almost without preparation and transition, and set upon the height of a great mountain range, would feel something of the sort: an unparalleled insecurity, and abandonment to something inexpressible would almost annihilate him. He would think himself falling or hurled out into space, or exploded into a thousand pieces… So for him who becomes solitary all distances, all measures of change; of these changes many take place suddenly, and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, extraordinary imaginings and singular sensations arise that seem to grow out beyond all bearing. …” (cited Rainer Maria Rilke, Trans: M D Herter Norton, Letters to a Young Poet)