In praise of solitude

Monthly newsletter, March 2025

Dear friends

Well, I’m not going to write here about dark times and our messy world. I’m going to write, as I always have, about our messy lives and messy hearts, and how we might heal them. This happens for me in two ways: by immersing myself in myth and story, and by spending time alone down by the river, or up in the hills.

A couple of decades ago, I was asked to contribute to an interesting new project run by a big international organisation. The idea was that a dozen or so ‘influential’ people would take several long weekends together in the serious wilds of western Scotland, over the course of a few months, to creatively explore ‘the relationship humans have with wilderness and wellbeing’. I was to be the writer in the project. As a result of the time that we would spend doing this, we would communicate our experiences to a wider audience in a variety of different ways, combining all our different skills and worldviews. Sounded fascinating, sounded worthwhile, even though the organisation in question was asking for a substantial unpaid time commitment.

The deal-breaker? It was deemed to be essential to the functioning of the group (and I guess, by extension, the project itself) that we should all split into couples and share rooms i.e. sleep together. I found that perplexing, because the whole point of the project seemed to be to practice our relationship with the wild, and my relationship with the wild has always been about being in relationship with the wild, not with other humans who happen to be populating the wild. Otherwise, see, I’m in relationship with other-humans-in-the-wild, not the wild. Ruskin would’ve been with me; he wrote about the joy that he found in nature in the following way: ‘I could only feel this when I was alone; and then it would often make me shiver from head to foot with the joy and fear of it ...’ This is one of the reasons why I hate walking with other people. I just don’t want to talk to other people when I’m walking; it takes me out of my body-in-nature and back into the human space. Talking to other humans and being with other humans always means that my attention must be turned to them (otherwise I’m perceived to be unfriendly), when I really probably just want to be in conversation with a limestone outcrop for a while.

One of the baby limestone outcrops near home that I’m especially fond of chatting to.

I never did receive a good explanation of why room-sharing was necessary for that particular project, because it didn’t seem to have anything to do with logistics on the ground. I could easily have slept alone there, albeit not in a great deal of comfort. But I couldn’t conceivably do what was required. Never could, never will. Put me in a bed in a room with someone I don’t know – or even, actually, someone I do know – and I can’t relax for a moment. It’s utter torture. What made me quite cross in this situation was the implicit assumption by the leader of the project when I tried to explain this to him that, if I couldn’t do sharing a bedroom with a complete stranger, I must at a minimum be psychologically incapable of fully integrating into a group and so undesirable for a project like this, or at a maximum I must be actively sociophobic. Either way, I must be seriously weird, and must be expunged from the project because somehow or other the ‘group dynamic’ would be ruined if I wasn’t willing to sleep with one of them.

This is nonsense, of course. For a number of years, in a former life as a chartered psychologist, I worked with all kinds of groups in all kinds of settings. I’ve also led a number of weeklong retreats over the years. Whether or not the participants slept together has never, in my experience, had anything to do with the cohesiveness of the group (and in fact, not sleeping together has almost certainly enhanced it on many occasions! I remember quite vividly the experience of one poor woman at an Arvon writing course many moons ago who was forced to take a sleeping bag to the back of her car so she could escape the snorings, mutterings and compulsive tossings and turnings of the complete stranger she was packed into a tiny bedroom with. She didn’t sleep especially comfortably there, but at least she got to do it in peace). When there have been people in these groups who have chosen to sleep separately where that option was offered to them, they were neither raving lunatics nor misanthropes. They were simply normal people who needed deeply, while spending time in the midst of group, to have some space to find themselves again. To be able to be comfortable within themselves at that most vulnerable time of the day: when they submit themselves to the dark and go to sleep.

It’s interesting how we can differ in this regard, and how people who have no issues with sharing rooms often privately imagine that those who can’t are seriously weird. My husband was stuffed into a dormitory with a handful of other kids at a boy’s boarding school from the age of nine; this was followed by twenty-five years in the RAF during which period, as you can imagine, he learned to sleep on a meat-hook. Any place, any time, any circumstances; it was a question of survival. He values his solitude more than almost anyone else I know, and yet he can’t see why sleeping in a room with strangers would ever be a problem, and finds it all a bit … odd. On the other hand, at the time of the experience I’m writing about, I had a neighbour who was a mother of three, grandmother of at least six, surrounded by family all the time, one of the most sociable people I’ve ever known. The idea of sleeping in somebody else’s house, let alone in the same room with somebody else, struck horror into her heart. ‘I’d go quite mad,’ she told me when I was complaining to her about all this at the time. ‘I wouldn’t know who I was any more.’ Like me, she was an only child, and maybe that early experience is too formative ever to overcome.

I’m banging on about all this now partly because time alone out there in the natural world, when the world that humans have made seems constantly to be breaking and in so many varying ways, is the only thing that keeps me on the straight and narrow, and it irritates me when people imagine it to be a luxury or a ‘privilege’. It isn’t. It’s the only thing that keeps me sane. And also because I still face disapproval when I’m invited to an event and have to tell the organisers that I either need to have a single room or I’ll be off sleeping elsewhere, thank you very much. And that a ‘free bed for the night’ isn’t very much of a draw when that bed is surrounded by other beds containing a bunch of snoring others that I don’t know. It still completely perplexes me that the energy that always comes back to me from whoever I’m trying to nicely explain this to is that I must either be way too full of myself or seriously messed up in undetermined and maybe indeterminate ways. But why is it that, so often, the need for privacy and solitude is deemed to be in some way transgressive to others who don’t need it? Why is it perceived to be some kind of bizarre aberration that needs careful management? As Ann Morrow Lindbergh said, ‘What a commentary on civilization, when being alone is being suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it – like a secret vice.’

One of the finest books I know on this subject is Anthony Storr’s book, Solitude, which was given to me a long time ago by a lovely man who knew me better than I’d imagined. Storr, a well-known psychiatrist, explores the crucial connection between solitude and the creative personality, and also examines the use that people make of necessary solitude in times of bereavement and depression, in escaping from the pressures of daily life, and ‘in finding and expressing their deepest selves.’ His conclusion is a very simple one: the need to be alone is a genuine human need, and a profoundly neglected one. ‘[H]uman beings are directed by Nature toward the impersonal as well as toward the personal, and this feature of the human condition is a valuable and important part of our adaptation ... If we were to listen only to the psychoanalytic “object relations” theorists, we should be driven to conclude that none of us have validity as isolated individuals. From their standpoint, it appears that we possess value only in so far as we fulfil some useful function vis-a-vis other people ... It follows that the justification for the individual’s existence is the existence of others.’

Isabel Colegate’s A Pelican in the Wilderness deals with an extreme: hermits, solitaries and recluses. She says: ‘... in the modern Western world solitude is undervalued, and the need for it forgotten. To wish to be alone is thought odd, a sign of failure or neurosis; but it is in solitude that the self meets itself, or, if you like, its God, and from there that it goes out to join the communal dance.’ Exactly so. For those of us who have a true need for solitude, the only way we can safely and happily ‘join the communal dance’ is to be allowed to retreat back out of it when we need to. And for all my determined focus on the importance of community, for some of us, this is the only way that we can become valuable participating members of a community.

Meanwhile, here in the Beauteous Vale, the oystercatchers have arrived – and perfectly on time, just as they are every February. So for a morning or two, everything has seemed right with the world. On the early February morning two years ago, when I rolled up here, ready to take possession of this old house – or have it take possession of me – the first thing that struck me when I half-fell out of the car after my five-hour drive was the sound of oystercatchers. But I couldn’t figure out what they were doing so far inland, here in the Pennines, the central spine of England. I’d always thought of them as coastal birds, so their presence here in the centre of the country adds to the air of otherworldliness that is always hovering over this beautiful valley. Once, when we lived on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, an oystercatcher took a dislike to Nell, our beautiful Border Collie sheepdog – and not surprisingly: in her young adult years she was intent on rounding up any creature she encountered, and that included any bird foolish enough to stand still on the headland as we approached. And so, each morning when we headed to the sea for our walk, that oystercatcher would take its revenge: as soon as it spotted her, it would dive-bomb her, screeching for all it was worth. It made for an anxious summer, but the most remarkable aspect of it all was that the following February, as soon as the oystercatchers had made their annual pilgrimage back to our wild western coast, one of them burst out of the skies and attacked an older (and now rather wiser) Nell. Oystercatchers are long-lived birds, and they have long memories, too. And you really shouldn’t mess with them: in the folklore of the Western Isles they’re St Brigid’s birds – gille-brìghde, the ‘servant of Bride’ – blessed by her after they saved her life.

Well, in whatever ways you approach it and find your way through it, I’m wishing you all, as always, all the joys of the season, wherever in this world you are.

Sharon

Last chance to join my ‘Finding Ourselves in Fairy Tales’ Graduate Certificate program

BEGINS MARCH 12

I’m delighted to be running my popular program 'Finding Ourselves in Fairy Tales: A Narrative Psychological Approach' for another year at Pacifica Graduate Institute; this will be the third cohort. This is an 8-month online Graduate Certificate (with CECs available, if you can use them). It consists of prerecorded lectures, monthly live 90-minute sessions with me, and an online forum for student discussions. The program is open to all, and is suitable both for clinicians and for individuals who are interested in deepening their personal work with fairy tales and the many forms of narrative and storytelling.

This unique program draws on my academic and professional background as a psychologist and folklorist/ mythologist, and offers an archetypal approach to understanding and working with fairy tales. We’ll use my conceptualisation of the Fairy-Tale Heroine’s Journey as a framework for exploring the archetypal feminine in fairy tales and the ways in which these stories can illuminate the process of individuation. We’ll excavate fairy tales to interrogate our self-narratives, identify problem-saturated stories and externalise them, and then learn to rewrite them so that we can more fully participate in the process of our own becoming.

Complete program details, registration and other info here: https://extension.pacifica.edu/graduate-certificate-finding-ourselves-in-fairytales-2025/.

Book news and events

This month, I don’t have much book news; I’m still quietly getting on with completing the next one, which is taking up most of my energy.

However … the WISE WOMEN ebook has been chosen by Amazon UK for a Kindle Monthly Deal, so it will be just 99p for the rest of March only. Get yours here.

And a reminder that I’m appearing at the ‘Words by the Water’ book festival, just down the road in beautiful Keswick, on March 13; I’ll be talking about Wise Women and you can find tickets and details here.

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