Hiding Places

Secret Places

Matt Quarterman

You stumble upon them without trying
to find where they are.
There is no code to break or signal to find.
They are often out of the way.
Usually you must go in daylight,
when the weather is not bad.
You must go alone.
There are rules for these things, you know.
They might be a wall on a walkway,
shrouded by trees.
They might be a low-hanging branch
near a man-sized fence.
They might be a seat of stone.
They are sacred because you find them to be
and because you make them so.
You must walk there, because in a pilgrimage
the journey is most of the point.
You cannot go too often.
You must need it.
Be prepared to bring something to leave,
an offering to prove you were there.
It can be small, something you burn or inscribe.
Observe the details closely, or you leave with nothing.
Then pick among the pieces, the scattered bones,
the tender inner parts, the sticks and stones
dropped with portents on the ground.
The meaning will come to you.

I wrote this on a walk, which is where I seem to write most of what I do. I started to think about solitude, about purposefully being alone. And it seemed like a powerful thing.

I've always found places to be by myself, even before I was old enough for school. And I think this poem helped me wrestle with why. Every creative person I know needs to be alone some of the time. Why? A need for focus and concentration? Freedom to fail? A spiritual practice? I'm sure there's room for combinations and more alternatives I haven't thought of.

But there's something living and necessary about being by yourself. It's not a physical state: I'm a big-city kid, I can be alone anyplace. To me there's an element of otherness, of distance from your surroundings that lets you look without having to be a part of things.

Maybe it's because I spent most of my early life in cultures that weren't mine and languages I didn't speak. I got to choose what I wanted, what I would or wouldn't accept from the culture. I wasn't indoctrinated, I had a certain remove that would give me perspective.

In Lisbon or Odessa, everything had a veil of mystery, everything seemed like it had a secret. That wasn't just a cornice of a building: some unknown person had thought it up, designed it, made it in a time and place I didn't really know. There was a shimmer around the edges of everything, a feeling that there was some hidden knowledge you might possess if you opened yourself.

I've been in the States more than a third of my life now, and it can get harder to keep that vision. It's much easier to take things for granted. Things become familiar, you assume you know more than you do. What you can't guess you can write off as unimportant. (In my case at least, contempt also breeds familiarity.)

You have to cultivate a sense of the hidden-ness of things or it gets lost. I try to work on that now, the ability to remove yourself from the surroundings without judgment.

So don't get me wrong: I like you guys. We have good times.

But I want to be alone.