SKETCHBOOK OF SOLITUDE
Sketchbook of Solitude, Listening Art
A New Zealand novel by Judith Deverell
A spiritual adventure journal of visionary solitude in the New Zealand wilderness with elements of the metaphysical.
Raef Andersen Springfield, a free-thinking independent journalist embarks upon a journey into new dimensions of living and learning. He takes time out from his work commitments to experience solitude to provide the material for his writing in his passionate endeavour to leave the world better off for his having entered it. His one year odyssey alone in a remote shepherd’s hut in the mountains of New Zealand yields unforeseen inner insight and unsolvable problems solved. Yet, who Raef is, is a mystery; his actual identity, a light kept flickering in the background, is ultimately revealed; but indirectly. Throughout the novel we are lifted to new levels: discovering a deeper ability within ourselves to interpret the living world around us, as we follow this one man’s journey into the wealth that can be found in solitude: listening in time alone.
‘A unique New Zealand wilderness experience; uplifting, compelling, transcendent in the fifth element….’
An article featuring a new Mind Body Spirit literary fiction novel
by Judith Deverell:
‘One man’s journey into the wealth that can be found in solitude: listening in time alone.’
A CLEARING in a wilderness of solitude. Through to the quintessence and the thinness of the veil between worlds. The narrowing place. The work the broadening of life. Desired. Deep calling unto deep. The longed-for lifting.
Comes rising in wildness the dark whispers of earth. Out of the silence a nearerland talking; a speaking, unspoken; but finding voice in solitude the air bearing skyward the lit hushlings of love.
Out of wings in the air the unwording of speech; falls on trees the lighted translation. The earth cannot understand her own sound; not till lifted shall she hear what she once knew. Finding without seeking the answer not sought.
In my time alone: a fire and a solace. I wait. The coals beneath the means of light and another sustenance being prepared. The first destroyed for life that life never die. Solitude, my companion, and I am well sustained.
An opening in a forest, breathing beneath a mountain. I am a felled tree: a stump, become a table for a book and pen. Shaken from my world, born of the crucible, I am cut down. My springs compressed, flow under find new rock to shatter. Ignited, stones of fire weigh down my flighted pages; for, even here, the wind finds joy, rifling his own inspirited leaves.
An opening in a gifted world. Where I am nothing I fit through the green door. The smallest particle of what I have and keep of me, a hindrance to what can be had and kept of one, who alone fits through, whose proportions, are infinite, who is all, all love, and in me, my only safe haven. A secluded place the needle’s eye. The land the mist enshrouds the most desired. Were it not concealed the door that no man finds the stone was seen that above the shadow cannot be grasped. I see and don’t see. I had too much. I’d bitten the apple. I die and blind in one life cyclic rending-death, a new realm wrought; love’s gift, only in the land of leaving to enter, and mine only in my loss, if it were written in the midst of me. And I knew it, because I listened. And I listened, because I had heard…
Wild Sourdough Buckwheat Bread
for fellow pioneers and explorers, and all lovers of Raef and his Sketchbook of Solitude, it would be nice to think he made this sort of bread at Monk’s Hut!….
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Regular posts of the latest projects on the way. Sharing original artwork sketches and jotting down thoughts as they come.
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