Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes - A Year Alone in the Patagonia Wilderness

By Robert Kull
New World Library, 2008, $24.95

In his early 20s, Robert Kull lived in solitude in the northern wilderness of British Columbia, Canada. He almost didn’t survive, but at the moment when his terror was greatest, he turned within, called for help, and found himself floating in a pool of clear light, filled with a sense of aliveness so deep and strong that he knew, beyond any doubt, that there was no separation between him and the world. More than that, he knew that there was “something else out there, too; something nonphysical and beyond description” that he was part of, and it was of him.

It was the fading of that inner light that moved Kull — currently an interdisciplinary studies Ph.D. student, more than 40 years of age, and with a prosthetic right leg — to seek another, longer solitary wilderness experience. Although his intent was to explore his responses to solitude through a “purely secular lens,” as they were to be the basis for his Ph.D. dissertation, Kull found that he could not “fully live or write about what was happening without using spiritual terminology.” Living in solitude required “the capacity to experience with equanimity (or to ignore) whatever arises in the mind,” and he found the means to do this through the practice of meditation.

Kull offers his work as a means of guiding us into solitude with him. He leads us to reflect, as he did, on what it means to be alive, part of the greater whole, and to live with compassion and equanimity.