“Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Merton writes of solitaries that we are ‘a mute witness, a secret and even invisible expression of love which takes the form of their own option for solitude in preference to the acceptance of social fictions.’

And what love are we solitaries mute witnesses to? The omnipresence of the great Alone, the infinite possibilities of no duality, no separation between you and me, between the speaker and the spoken to, the dancer and his dance, the writer and her reader, people and our earth.”

At the Center of All Beauty – Solitude and the Creative Life – Fenton Johnson