that speak a thousand words
"In the Shadow of the Tree"
This is not about a sunset. Neither is it wholly about a tree, but the word “tree” is in the title so I will commit to that.
This story is about solitude. This is a front-yard view of a tree on my Liberian property during my Peace Corps days. I have about 20 different photos of this view. This is the prize winner. It’s facing west toward the Atlantic Ocean maybe around six in the afternoon.
Volunteering for the Peace Corps is a serious matter. More than a year of applications, phone calls, questions and interviews. Responses in 1983 came through the U.S. mail. Every letter a possible denial. What if I was denied? How can someone be denied volunteering for something? Certainly, I would be branded with an upper-case “L” on my forehead. I kept my application a secret from family and friends. If I was denied, no one would be the wiser. The solitude started early.
I was accepted. No “L.”
Oh boy. I won. I committed to a two-year “Survivor” episode in Liberia. The applause was deafening.
Living alone is one thing. Living in solitude is something quite different. Jungle solitude brings perspective. Helps uncover otherwise hidden wisdom. I was not expecting wisdom when this journey began, though looking back now, there is ample evidence I was searching for something.
If you are lucky, living alone or living in solitude are choices. I would suggest one difference is that when living alone, you can still turn around and not be alone. Go to a movie, bar, maybe a beach, or if you are from Winnemucca, a rodeo. You can live alone and still choose to be a social creature.
When living in solitude, I opine there is little sustainable relief. No neighbors, no friends, no relatives, and in this case, no one of the same race, country, language. At night, there was no light, except from a candle or kerosene lamp. Granted, there was sound. Frogs, jungle bugs, monkeys.
I understand today the pros say a wee bit of solitude is healthy. Take a break. Seclude yourself for a few hours and calm your mind. Not to second guess myself, but I might have stretched the concept some with a two-year seclusion session. And yes, eventually, I understood what the monkeys were saying.
My first days, weeks and months of my new life in the bush were not about looking at sunsets or trees. Solitude was not on my mind. Food was. Landing the basics tend to focus your attention. Water, food, shelter. Then once that is sorted, you question your sanity for another month or so until at some point you realize you might just pull this off and you start to look around. Took me about six months. Most never got there.
I scored a house, then a roof for the house, then a concrete floor for the house, then a bed, then the biggest triumph of all, a gravity flush, indoor commode. I also bought a shortwave radio and with it came the BBC. In 1985, I listened to the final tennis match at Wimbledon between Boris Becker and Kevin Curren on a shortwave radio. It lasted four sets. Try radio tennis in a dark closet and then you might begin to understand solitude.
Shortly, I learned that during rainy season, the afternoon storms would pass through Khronowodoke and then at about four or five, the weather would settle. I would work in the mornings and hit the hammock before the rains poured down. I began to relax and look around. My hammock faced the front window and one day, I noticed the tree.
Though I write, I don’t consider myself a writer. That’s not yet a stage achieved. For someone who writes, however, solitude can be a friend. No distractions. You can think about things and as thoughts happen, you begin to speak them out loud to yourself. Bring them to the surface. Another way of saying that you become one who talks to himself.
Or herself.
I still talk to myself. Difference is that I don’t have to be in the jungle to do it. I can even do it in public now thanks to the iPhone. It’s true. I can walk around downtown everywhere all day talking to myself and no one notices because they’re all walking around, arms waving about, laughing, conversing, oblivious. I’m isolated in the center of social media. It’s a beautiful thing.
But back in the day, I did my talking alone, in my hammock looking out onto my front yard. And soon this mighty tree became my audience.
The tree became my anchor, my landmark. It was always there. I talked to the tree about my day, my family, my victories, my failures. I spoke to my past, my future, my present. I didn’t expect the tree to answer. That would be crazy. Like talking to yourself. Besides, my answers came from the monkeys. Perhaps it’s like mountain climbers talking to Everest or astronauts talking to the moon or fishermen talking to fish.
Or fisherwomen.
At the end of the day, or at the end of two years, I said goodbye to the tree but not to our discussions.
The tree gave me all the time I needed to understand how to be patient. Try watching a tree grow. Friends, that is patience.
It gave me all the time I needed to forgive myself. To recognize lessons learned and to let go of regrets. At some point during that first year, I no longer regretted the decision to move to Liberia.
And it gave me the vision to strive to do work that makes me happy. A good day in the jungle is rare but hard to beat the joy when it happens. Even after hard days, the tree remained, and I endured, knowing that while living under the shadow of the tree, solitude can be a very good thing.