"Know Solitude"

So reads the simple prediction for today in Llewelyn's Witches' Almanac. Truly, it is worth experiencing from time to time throughout the year, whether prompted to do so or not. Honestly, I have known solitude, and, due to a wanderlust ingrained within my very soul crippled by a Libran affectation that makes decision-making excruciatingly difficult, I have paced rooms for hours. Literally. Alone. I spent the better part of a day this past spring in a Cambridge hotel room wrestling with the choices of what to do once I hit the street if I would just grab my things and step out of the room. In the end, I walked to a local grocery store shortly before closing time, grabbed cheese, crackers, and fruit, and returned to the room, utterly defeated by my ridiculousness. I am loathe to admit that, had my travelling companion not been otherwise occupied for the day, we would have found some great way to pass the time. Instead, my demons and I walked in circles from the bed, to the window, to the luggage, and back.
It all must sound borderline psychotic to others. "Why didn't you just go? Surely, you would have found something to do once you were out?" Seems logical enough when I am not in the situation. But, within my own head, spinning my internal web of solitary activities, I was actually overwhelmed. I think, in today's instance, knowing solitude, for me, is more akin to rest. I am not going forth to experience solitude among the masses. Nor am I abandoning the crowds for the lush rejuvenation of the woods. As it is still oppressive summer, and this is my last, true day off until the end of the semester, my chosen solitude lies in quiet physical rest. My body is exhausted from a season of demanding strangers and constant early mornings at work. As such, I slept in, went to my local café for breakfast, returned home to savor my treats, and have been merely lounging with low key entertainment and dreams of travel.
There is no pacing involved, here. My wanderlust has been satisfied for the day in tandem with my Libran indecisiveness - I have done a little research on a few possibilities for next year's vacation. One option, in which I found myself interested only recently is Finland.

About a week ago, I treated myself to a Past Life Regression. The guide was my previous Middle Eastern Dance and Culture teacher, Katrina Valenzuela, who boasts an impressive number of years of this type of spiritual practice in addition to other forms of guidance. While we only uncovered two lives in the nearly three-hour session (which truly only felt like an hour from arrival to driving away), the first stuck with me. With a little extra research based on responses during the session, I have come to know that I was once a young Finnish woman with a knack for natural, herbal healing. Delving into that lifetime brought tears to my eyes in remembrance of the old woman who taught me all I knew. In her acknowledgment, and retrieval of her effect on my soul, I feel that she is always with me. This wonderful woman must be one of my guides. And, only now, as I type this sentence, have I realized that she reached out to me about five or six years ago in a reading with a medium. At the time, and until now, I shrugged that experience off as an encounter with a charlatan, and I felt as if I had been taken in. The medium tried to convince me that the woman coming through must have been some sort of grandmother, but the person I assumed it to be only barely fit the description; she was the only person that even came close. Now I know; she was my Finnish teacher.

I don't want to bore anyone with the details of my past life discoveries. I do want to bring this post back to its original point, however. Both of those lives were filled with a great deal of isolation or solitude. My current North Node is in Gemini. Both of these realizations have driven home to me that I have been an incredibly solitary soul for a great many lifetimes. This is the life when I am to bring what I have learned to the people. This is my time to rejoin society. And so, I think perhaps that, while "knowing solitude" for some (perhaps many) is a shutting oneself up away from the world and being utterly alone, for me, I can "know solitude" wherever I may be, because by simply having lived it on such a deep level, solitary is a comparison; not a sentence or escape.