Perhaps it is one resolve that will somehow not dissolve

I'm thinking of setting up a spiritual group at Living Room Cardiff for all those suffering from what Eric Fromm describes as 'the unbearable burden of alonness'. I e-mailed my friend Jim McGovern in Philadelphia this morning just to seek out his opinion and to ask whether he had any literature that might be of any use to me. Below is his reply: Loneliness The cringing desire not to be alone. Loneliness can seem all pervasive. Behind it and next to it, everything else is subsidiary. We can talk the talk of Universal Oneness and God always being with us and so on and so forth…. But this Oneness does not sit across from us as we eat our meal. Sharing our joys or our sadness-es with it, seems terribly remote. We cannot reach out and touch it in the middle of the night…. The Enlightened speak of the illusory nature of our physical world - that reality is in our metaphysical unity with all of humanity and even nature Tell that to the child or woman or man curled up in a depress-ed ball because they have no real mortal human being to connect with or talk to. And thus we put up with the drama and pain and anguish and maybe even abuse of a partner with whom we just cannot get along…. We refuse to accept the abject discomfort of being alone. Stop in a nursing home and see human beings who’ve been shunted to the sidelines of life…folk that no one comes to see….or maybe they come on Christmas or Easter only…. Sitting in a corridor, in a wheelchair, staring at your eyes as you walk on by hoping, pleading, begging for even a glimmer of recognition, of connecting …of some kind of assurance they still are and that they still matter…. All the lonely people – they come from everywhere, from all walks of life… But like all people, lonely or not, they live, they live, they live and then they die…. And who is to know, but perhaps the field levels out then. Perhaps the escape from the mortal flesh brings with it the escape from the illusion of aloneness….and maybe even those that were so lonely, are even more enthralled with being an unencumbered part of the Universal One because it is so far away from the cold lonely corner of their mortal days. Perhaps. Perhaps I’ll make good on my idea to take a poetry group up to one of those nursing homes. Perhaps it is one resolve, that will somehow not dissolve. ----- i'll try again at that nursing home that keeps ignoring my calls my book is a kind of generic 12 step guide. i also have a 9 step program for berevement i'll send you when i write from home. peace always, jim mcgovern