Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes

By Robert Kull

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The trip to the glacier was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Not the actual trip, but facing the fear and uncertainty beforehand

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On February 5, 2001, I went to live on a small, remote island on the Pacific coast of southern Chile, just west of the Andes Mountains and more than a hundred miles by water from the nearest small town. It was a wild, stormy, uninhabited region of rain and windswept islands and fjords, with no boats or airplanes and only the occasional faint sign of distant human activity.  I took all the equipment and supplies I would need to build a camp and stay, completely alone, for a year. The experience was exciting, difficult, and fascinating, often painful, and sometimes filled with wonder. Physical adventures and the challenges of survival counterpointed emotional exploration, philosophical reflection, and spiritual awakening.

     Most stories have a beginning, middle, and end, and they draw us into some other time and place. This story is different; it’s all middle—no clear beginning, no definite end—and it slips out of time and into the eternal now. It’s a journey into one of the most remote places on the planet and into some of the darkest recesses and brightest openings of the human spirit.

     Solitude has the power to catalyze shifts in consciousness, so rather than write about my year alone, I have let the voice of solitude speak directly through the words and silences of my edited wilderness journal. Paradoxically, the voice of solitude must, in some sense, remain silent. As soon as the solitary begins to speak, even if by writing to an imagined reader, he (or she) is no longer truly alone.

Journal Entry, October 10, 2001

     Finally I could see the faint fractured line of the glacier far off to the southeast. I wove my way for half a mile through ten thousand smallish chunks of floating ice that filled the inlet where the glacier met the sea; looking for and following interconnected gaps to edge as close as possible to the glacier’s still distant wall. I was completely alone in an immense field of shattered ice as the glacier slowly slid into the sea. Through binoculars, I followed its sloping surface until it disappeared in the distance, and I sensed the massive weight of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, stretching for two hundred miles down the length of the Andes. This glacier, like the one high in the mountains near my camp, was part of that larger body. I felt I was beyond even “the middle of nowhere”; a landscape of drifting ice; otherworldly, yet also intensely real. I turned off the outboard and listened to the silence. Only the occasional faint call of a seagull punctuated and expanded the stillness. Movement among floes caught my eye, but when I focused, there was nothing but the endless mosaic of shining ice and indigo water. Then five dolphins surfaced to swim around the boat. Rising and diving, they created circles of slowly spreading ripples that caused the ice to undulate.

     Even with all the incredible beauty, something still lacked, and I felt a hollow ache, but for what I didn’t know. A black rock spire, lifting from the sea, seduced my eye but didn’t ease my heart. I lingered until I became formless, out of time, and simply there.

     The sky shifted and a hazy sun showed through the clouds to fall full on the floating ice. And there it was: intense blue glowed deep within the world around me. It didn’t shine from far away, but from intimate pockets in the surrounding floes. I remembered then what I’d forgotten. During these past months, beneath all the mental chatter about needing to face my fear, the mystic light of glacial ice had been calling to my heart. That luminous blue, created by massive weight through time, reflected an ancient quality within me so numinous I couldn’t describe it even to myself. I felt a shift as the fragmented parts of my being found peace in profound integration. Even “worry-mind” was welcomed and honored for bringing me there safely — and hopefully taking me back to camp again. Oddly, perhaps, images of scuba diving deep and alone drifted into my thoughts. When far beneath the surface, no matter how entranced by the underwater world, a dispassionate part of my mind always remains focused on survival. It monitors depth, time, and air supply. I often argue and plead for just a little longer in that shadowed otherworld, but finally I always give in and head back to the surface.

     The thought that the motor might fail and leave me stranded in that frigid seascape was troubling, so I put the thought away and continued to soak in the beauty. But the thought kept creeping back. I could also hear the faint hiss of air escaping from one of the boat’s pontoons. It was time to go.

The trip to the glacier was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Not the actual trip, which—because wind and sea remained calm—was smooth and easy, but facing the fear and uncertainty beforehand. One of the challenges of solitude is that potential or imagined danger can loom to fill the mind. Without other people to help maintain perspective, fear that would normally be manageable can overwhelm. I would challenge the fear, prepare everything for the trip, and at the last minute the wind would come raging in.

     Over and over, I imagined myself caught in a ferocious storm huddled for days on a wind-whipped, spray-soaked rock or as a small vulnerable speck lost and alone—drifting helplessly with a dead motor among an endless labyrinth of mountains, islands, and waterways. Then, the long hypnotic hours in the boat concentrated my mind as the droning outboard carried me further and further from the security of camp. The unreliability of the motor triggered hyper-vigilance as I constantly listened for increased knocking or other problems.

     I can see the trip to the glacier as a metaphor for my year here in solitude. Something called me to come, and I’ve had glimpses of that numinous Something. I’ve sensed it, but cannot put it into words. My time at the glacier was magical and profound; then the experience, like all experiences, becomes part of the ongoing rhythm of living. I sense, though, that it has left an indelible trace in me. I wonder what mark this year will leave.

Journal Entry, December 15, 2001

     Low-tide rock-sitting, listening for the Voice of God. Then the soft subtle shift: my whole being relaxed and I was listening (am now, and always have been) to the Voice of God in every sound.

     Such a small difference—from for to to—yet massive. In one I strain for what isn’t; in the other I find peace in the wonder of what is. Listening for the Voice of God implies duality, as though whatever I’m experiencing is somehow not the Voice of God.

     I spend so much time and energy listening for the Voice of God with my mind, but I listen to the Voice of God with my heart. My mind has definite ideas about what it wants God’s Voice to say; it wants answers, certainty, conceptual understanding. My heart hears God’s Voice saying, “I Am,” and it is peaceful and content.

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In February, 2001, Robert Kull traveled to a remote island in the Patagonia wilderness with enough supplies to live alone for a year. He sought to explore the effects of deep solitude on the body and mind, and to find the answers to the spiritual questions that had plagued him his entire life. Learn more about his story at www.bobkull.org.

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