At the empty nest turning point of middle age, something arose in me, and my journal became full of entries about being alone. I discovered that two entries written 10 years apart were almost identical. I had not yet learned to dignify "alone" with the name of Solitude, but I knew what I wanted, what I needed—as if my life was depriving me of something as essential as the air I breathed.
Anyone who has probed the inner life, who has sat in silence long enough to experience the stillness of the mind behind its
apparent noise is faced with a mystery. Apart from all the outer attractions of life in the world, there exists at the center
of human consciousness something quite satisfying and beautiful in itself, a beauty without features. The mystery is not so
much that these two dimensions exist – an outer world and the mystery of the inner world – but that we are suspended between them, as a space in which both worlds meet ... as if the human being is the meeting point, the threshold between two worlds.