Shortly after a friend read my last post, he asked,  ‘Are you lonely, Susan?’  This quote at the end of my post had prompted the question:

'...it was just a few years ago that I finally realized that friendship is not a remedy for loneliness. Loneliness is a part of our experience and if we are looking for relief from loneliness in friendship, we are only going to frustrate the friendship. Friendship, camaraderie, intimacy, all those things, and loneliness live together in the same experience.'
Rich Mullins

My answer was this:

I suspect we are all lonely until we accept the fact that we are alone, that it's part of the human condition.  I suspect this order of things because it would explain a lot about human behavior.  Why so many seek importance, significance, fortune, fame or endless distraction.  Why we hope people will maybe even like us for our accomplishments, flock to our sundry stages and keep us company.  In the end, none of that assuages our sense of loneliness, the sense that we are disconnected from each other, even the ones we love.  But when we realize we’ve been groping at remedies for loneliness, we can get down to the business of living.

Desiring a soul mate, something I pondered yesterday, is just another urge to be loved completely.  Which is impossible, because each of us has to also have self love or we cannot love.  They stand side by side.  I don't see how there can be selfless love on a human scale.  Generous love, kind love, gracious love, sacrificial love - yes.  But if love were to be completely selfless, the lover (devoid of self interest or nurture) would cease to exist.  What good is it to be loved by a ghost of a person?

Loneliness is a vast canyon of desire that can only produce art of magnitude when the artist is willing to live there fully, no props, no misdirected yearnings.  This is why we need true friends.  For their kindness, their well meaning, their forgiveness.  Friendship has nothing to do with souls mating and everything to do with humans relinquishing control and being present at the same time, to ourselves and each other. I don't shy away from loneliness when I’m alone.  I'm only unhappy with my human condition when I tragically believe the world's sad promises.

After I wrote the above, a wonderful thing happened.  I read a comment by mccn, a reader of this blog.  The comment also referred to the loneliness quote in my last posting.  We’d both made the connection between loneliness and art.

I have known for a long time that no one can ever really be inside my head - that I can be as close as humanly possible to people I love, and connected with them - and yet, in some ways, I am still and always me, myself, separate. It's a hard part of being human. I wish that people could be supported to be braver on this front, to confront it... It might be part of what urges us to create - a way of sharing that inside-the-head with others, of forming a connection on the things that feel most unique, so that we feel less lonely.
mccn commenting on Subterranean soul mates

Lately I’ve felt braver on this front by simply identifying the semi-permeable membrane that both divides us from and connects us to each other.  It is formed of solitude and kindness; it pushes us to create unique expressions of self.

To wit, revel in your loneliness and know that you are loved.

Public Domain painting Jean-Jacques Henner, Solitude