The Blanket of Spiritual Solitude

Like millions of other children, I was always very excited for the Christmas season. At the time, all I really knew it meant was a time for family gatherings, good food, and receiving some presents I had handpicked from the Sears catalog. My immediate family was not a religious one, so there were no church-related activities that we attended. My cousins from across town were Catholics, so they always attended a Christmas Eve service which frustrated me to no end. We weren’t allowed to move forward with the festivities if they weren’t there. They always showed up though, and things got rolling.

First we unloaded all the presents from their house and put them under the tree. We had about 16 family members, and everyone got a present for each of the others, so we ended up staring down at a pile of around 240 wrapped gifts of various sizes that extended well out into the middle of the living room. It’s kind of materialistically embarrassing in retrospect, but it was what it was, and as a kid I was too swept up in the anticipation of the festivities to come to notice that.

After the presents were in position, it was time to play or chat with family until Christmas Eve dinner. There is a family-famous picture of me in an album somewhere sitting there with nothing more than a single slice of cheese, a pickle, and one olive on my plate because I was just too excited to eat.

Once the meal was concluded (which in my case was in about two minutes), we all formed a circle in front of the great “present pile,” and the youngest of us put on the Santa hat and started to individually distribute the gifts, reading from the taped-on gift tag who each was for and who it was from before placing it at the feet of the recipient. Once every one of those gifts was handed out, we designated someone to start, and that family member opened one of his or her 15 gifts in front of everyone so we could all share in their experience. As you can imagine, this whole ceremony took a while.

Once all the gifts had been opened, the wrapping paper put in the fireplace where a roaring fire consumed it, and all the dishes had been done, we said goodbye to our extended family until the next day when we would assemble at my cousins’ house for the Christmas Day festivities, usually involving football, a feast around 1:00 pm, endless pie, and board games. However, once all my family had departed and my parents had gone to bed exhausted, the most treasured moment of every Christmas Eve for me came to pass.

I would sneak out of my bedroom in my pajamas and go out to sit on our front porch. During most years, our town was buried in about five feet of snow on Christmas Eve. I would gaze up at the torrent of descending snowflakes and just listen to the world. The only sound there was to hear was the impact of the snow as it struck the ground; it made kind of a whispering sound, and I always imagined that that was the “spirit of the season,” for lack of a better moniker, speaking to me. I wasn’t really sure what it was saying. I just knew that it conveyed a sense of peace and serenity to my young self, and I was in awe of the power of it. I could always see the university clock tower across town, two of its four circular faces visible against the night sky, looking a lot like a giant, red-eyed owl.

One would think I would be freezing as I sat there on the porch in nothing but my pajamas. Strangely, I never noticed the temperature. It was like the joy of the moment was enveloping me in some sort of spiritual blanket that shielded me from any kind of external disturbance. I sat there for at least half an hour communing with what for me has always been the greatest source of serenity: sheer, undisturbed solitude. Don’t get me wrong–I love my family and took great joy in engaging in our yearly ritual with them. Yet it was my own ritual on that porch every year that held its own special place in my soul. I could not have been shared. It still can’t be.

It wasn’t just on Christmas Eve I sought out the spiritual blanket of solitude. As a teenager I would often sneak out of my house around 11:00 pm or so and go for a two or more hour walk around town–any season, any weather. My parents never locked their house so I never had to worry too much about making noise sneaking back in or getting locked out.  In the summer, they would leave the doors wide open at night to cool it down. Hey, it was the 1980’s in small-town America. It’s what you did (the leaving the doors open part; maybe not the night walking part).

I would wander the darkened streets alone, thinking my own thoughts, contemplating my destiny or place in the universe, sticking to the shadows so that I would never have to interact with anyone on the outside chance someone else had a similar ritual. I never met anyone who did. This was my spiritual time; it was not to be shared. No one else would probably understand anyway. I’m curious–do any of you?

Walks in the daylight are not the same (unless I am alone on an ocean beach during a storm–those conditions summon the blanket too; must be the Norse Viking in me).  Day walks are for physical, not spiritual, exercise. Whenever I try to put words to what I feel during night walks, lines from Robert Frost’s poem “Acquainted with the Night” always come to mind:

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain…

…And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

I have been one acquainted with the night. (poetryfoundation.org)

I sure have been. Actually, I even had a run-in once with the “watchman on his beat” that Frost describes. One night I was reminiscing about my childhood, walking the grounds of my old elementary school, when a police car came whipping into the school parking lot. I turned to try and melt back into the shadows when I heard a commanding “STOP RIGHT THERE!” come over his squad car’s loudspeaker. It turns out someone living near the school had called and reported some kind of “prowler” walking around the school. It also turns out that the policeman was the dad of a friend of mine (that’s a small town for you). I told him who I was, and he laughed and we just shot the night breeze for a while. Then I took a walk around the school with him, looking for the “prowler.” We never found him.

Our culture tends to celebrate the extrovert. We are told that humans are social creatures and we need to have tons of connections with others in order to lead truly happy and satisfying lives. I don’t necessarily believe this. There are no doubt readers of this who have a very large circle of friends, from whom they draw great spiritual energy. Then there will be readers with a small, intimate group of friends, those whom Polonius from Hamlet would say to “grapple to your soul with hoops of steel.” There are likely also those who have found how to balance the energies, valuing their experiences with friends but also in solitude. Lastly, there may be those who, like me, have no friends by standard definition at all, if they ever had any, but do not lament their absence.

This last state, understandably, is a difficult one for an extrovert or someone who has known the joys of friendship to comprehend. They may even misjudge this mindset, viewing it as pitiful or self-centered in some way. In some cases, there may be something to that. Not in my case. They may want to encourage me and those who may be like me to seek some sort of mental health counseling. That’s fine. I get it. I can only speak for myself, but I know that isn’t necessary. My hope is that, before passing judgment on those who prefer the companionship of solitude to that of others, people can just learn to respect that there are different paths to spiritual fulfillment. Someone’s path of solitude is not one you need to feel the need to change. If they are lonely and lament the fact, then yes, they would likely appreciate some intervention. The blanket of solitude and loneliness, however, are not the same.

I once saw a greeting card that said, “Those who hear not the music think the dancers mad.” There are those who dance in solitude. They wish you no harm. They do not hate you or purposely avoid you (unless they are walking at night–then it might look that way). They are happy to talk to you and spend time with you. They serve and support others in their own ways. They are not strange or in need of help. They are not “unfriendly.” They just hear a different music than the popular culture promotes, and feel a sacred reverence for the time spent in solitude.  They are seeking their destinies and truths in the ways that are the most meaningful to them. They are your neighbors, your colleagues…and maybe, someday, your friends too.

__________
Learn about Membership in the Spiritual Naturalist Society

The Spiritual Naturalist Society works to spread awareness of spiritual naturalism as a way of life, develop its thought and practice, and help bring together like-minded practitioners in fellowship.

SNS strives to include diverse voices within the spectrum of naturalistic spirituality. Authors will vary in their opinions, terms, and outlook. The views of no single author therefore necessarily reflect those of all Spiritual Naturalists or of SNS.
__________

Work Cited:

Frost, Robert. “Acquainted with the Night.” The Poetry Foundation, 2025, poetryfoundation.org. Accessed January 10, 2026.