A Space of Retreat -- It's Not Just for Shamans

Does everyone have a place to which they can retreat, in order to recover from the world? For extreme extroverts, this may only be a place to get their requisite hours of undisturbed sleep, and then back out into the delightful social maelstrom for them! But for us introverts, the sacred, singular, private space is necessary to restore our sanity and sustain our sense of well-being. For the poorer members of the introvert tribe, this can be a challenge. Poverty is often the enemy of privacy and quietude, but if you can hop on a bus or put one foot in front of the other, you may be creating a prescription for mental health by putting some distance between you and the daily neighborhood harangue. Find a park. There is such a thing as public privacy. Some of our kind can find it at home, either in a sunlit room simply furnished for time alone, or a quiet shady corner of one's property outdoors, or a place in between, like a back-porch looking out into a pleasant backyard. Sometimes the refuge might be on the move: a winter's walk through the sound-muffling snow, or a spring stroll down a country lane with little traffic. In whatever place it is, spend a little time contemplating a corner of the universe that has no dependency on the noisy madness of humanity: the rustling leaves in the breeze, the society of fluttering birds, scampering squirrels, flitting chipmunks, bellowing frogs, whizzing bees and leaping fish. The flowering trees, the emergent greenery, the tinkling rivulet of Spring: these things have nothing superior to them in terms of tranquility, even in the most finely-designed homes of the wealthy. However and wherever you can find your space of healing and restoration, do it regularly, as the world takes quite a weekly toll on the psyche. We have inherited in the bodies we wear literally millions of years of having our brainwaves attuned by evolution to the relative quiet of Nature, the aural tapestry of birdsong being the most significant sonic transmission, and we now live in the incessant electronic chatter, automotive cacophony and mad media blather of Post-Modern Civilization. We must be kind to our minds, sweet to our souls, merciful to our emotional being. Walk away for a precious while from the anger, bombast, pomposity, nervous talk and fear-mongering. Think like a child, focus on color, become sensitized to the feel of the air, recall what made you happy when you first freely and hopefully contemplated your adult future. And go ahead: listen without distraction to the anciently patterned bird-calls of the spirited cardinal, just like your grandmother and grandfather did while gliding on the porch-swing, back in the days when people still realized the world could wait.