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LONELY?!
Come to me; I’ll entertain and engage

To say the truth, human beings never fail to intrigue and surprise me.  Disappointed at times, celebrating and applauding at other times.  With six to seven billion human beings around, how come loneliness is such a wide spread indisposition experienced by millions or billions among those billions.

And, I am not speaking about being alone.  No.  Alone doesn’t mean being lonely, Being in company of others or living with others doesn’t always mean that one is not lonely.  At this instant, recalling the popular song that survived through the decades: “Lonely Is the Man Without Love”.  You may substitute the human or the individual for the man in the song, but for lyrics and tune is keep man where he is, at least in the song.  Yes, love.  As Rumi said, (translated) love is the water of life.  The essence of love is the absence of otherness.  Barriers gone, ego slain or forgotten, hubris done with, fierce ambition subdued, fear extinguished or downsized and greed reduced or forgotten, at least for a while.

You are lonely whenever you are confined within the perimeter of your cell; cell meaning the confines of yourself, even if you happen to be in company of five or five thousand others.  The key is sharing, empathy and mutual dependency.

Many – including myself – are practically never lonely.  My experience is not unique.  So I feel easy recalling it.  It gave – still gives – me joy and company.  I hike the parks and meadows, almost always alone but never lonely.  I bear witness to her majesty the tree sending branches to the sky, exhaling oxygen for your lung and my lung to process and do the vital work.  I make note and mention, spend time on and with my all time friend the crow who taught Cain how to bury the body of his slain brother Able into the belly of the earth.  I connect with the squirrels these snoopy, tree-dwelling clamorous rodents, ever playing, arguing, and never refusing an almond or a walnut.  I salute children playing and ardently pray that they will grow to be peace-makers, builders of good institutions, acquiring benevolent knowledge and putting it into practice and great works for survival and enhancement of life on earth.  As I stroll, I pay tribute to earth; after all from the same dough, differentiated clay we evolved after millions and millions of other creatures did.  We are late comers.  And I pay tribute to fallen leaves, blooming flowers, pebbles, sand dunes, hills and mountains.

As I walk I hear a familiar whisper.   Ah! that of a creek.  And I like the whisper and the creek; So, I come closer and whisper my secrets to the creek.  My secrets are little, so it is only natural to confide them to a little creek.  Rivers, seas and oceans are louder, they reach very far and intermingle.  My little secrets, I prefer not to have them divulged.  There is nothing special about them, but they are my little secrets.  However if the creek grows to be a river and tells on me, I let go.  I accept transformation and metamorphosis of living entities.  I’ll probably send an E-mail congratulating the creek for its ascendancy.

With others I share and talk about different things.  I philosophies, theorize and rhapsodize; always have my jokes to tell.  People laugh and tell me to my face that I make good jokes. Hah!  Hah!  I grin.   Whether this is true or a mere passing social courtesy, it doesn’t matter.  They are my jokes anyway, fresh from the oven, just baked I don’t retell jokes of others.  They sprout on their own addressing the event, the occasion and participants.  And if nobody laughs, I laugh.  You see, I don’t take myself too seriously.

Friend, there is no excuse to be lonely.  Connect, reach out, penetrate the barrier of self confinement and the seclusion of a cage nicknamed the self.

We will meet again in Heart to Heart Dialogues for they evolve, transform, and flow, just like a river.  They energize themselves, pushing one another to the surface, yearning to live on a page or a website or a listening ear or a heart adorned with empathy and sanctified by Love.  Our dialogues are heart beats.