I have a few of those little daily meditation books and read them regularly. This morning's meditation was about loneliness. About both allowing oneself to feel loneliness and not wallowing in it. I didn't bring loneliness upon myself as the wages of sin. It's not my dire punishment to be lonely for all eternity.

It's just an emotion, like anger, pain, fear, love, passion, silliness. It comes. And it passes.

The other thought the meditation raised is that loneliness has two purposes: both to drive us toward connection -- connection to others, to one person, to the Universe, to ourselves -- and to serve as a transition between states of connectedness. The Yin to connection's Yang.

This is a new idea for me. Loneliness has always been this gaping black hole to be avoided at all costs. The minute I feel the void, I want to fill it up, usually with food, since the void seems to be located in my stomach, just south of my diaphragm.

Filling up my stomach with food, however -- especially certain kinds of food -- just compounds the problem. Because the void exists even with a full belly. And the more food I try to pile into the void, the more likely I will pass out on a wave of intense blood sugar fluctuations. When I wake up from this futile exercise, I'm often alone, perhaps with hours missing, and may be too late/groggy/blech-feeling to attend an event that might have assuaged my loneliness and brought me back into a feeling of connectedness.

Constantly striving to spend time with other people will not assuage loneliness either. As most of us know, it's possible to be lonely in a crowd of people. In fact, most of my college years were spent feeling lonely in crowds of people, constantly feeling the press of cohabitation and shared space. Even the biggest extroverts among us require some alone time. And I am not an extrovert; I recharge my batteries by taking a nice long bubble bath, listening to Prairie Home Companion while cooking all by myself on a Saturday, puttering around the house. After a long week, these are the sorts of things I want to do, not head off to the "bah".

It is that moment of separation, however, that post-goodbye instant when my guest leaves my house or I leave the restaurant where I just spent a good two hours of conviviality, when loneliness comes rushing in again.

Nothing solves loneliness. Not membership in a church, not active involvement in sports or charity work, not a loving circle of friends and family, not sex. Definitely not food. It simply exists, and must be tolerated like any other form of discomfort. It is one of the forms of life's suffering.

The Buddhists say that life is suffering. As a pagan, I used to find this statement a bit too close to the Christian notion that the pleasures of the flesh are sinful and should be repudiated in favor of heaven's eternal rewards. Or I found it simply depressing. But its fundamental truth, like the fundamental truth of existentialism, is in fact liberating. Once you realize that something is inevitable and yet impermanent, you can relax into it and let it wash over you. It's akin to learning how to fall properly: you relax your body instead of tense it, allow the physics of inertia to carry you through and out the other side. Bruises happen, but they'll be less painful if you resist the pull of gravity.

I wandered over to technogoddesss's journal the other day and saw that she'd posted a passage from the Daily Dharma that directly relates to this notion of learning to fall:

We shield our heart with an armor woven out of very old habits of pushing away pain and grasping at pleasure. When we begin to breathe in the pain instead of pushing it away, we begin to open our hearts to whats unwanted. When we relate directly in this way to the unwanted areas of our lives, the airless room of ego begins to be ventilated. -Pema Chödrön, Start Where You Are From Everyday Mind, a Tricycle book edited by Jean Smith

She went on to say that her pain was gone, and for a moment I thought she might actually acknowledging the emotional pain of our breakup. But no, it was about her shoulder injury. Unless it was in fact a metaphor, a double layer of meaning. technogoddesss is a wonderful writer--her long, well-written emails initially won me over to her--so I'm sure she's quite capable of making a statement with layers of meaning. I hope she's stretching her heart as well as her shoulder.

When we first split, I decided that I wanted to spend 12 months celibate. This was sort of akin to one's wish to run a marathon -- something plenty of other people have done (but many have not), some sort of an accomplishment I wanted to achieve by choice at least once in my lifetime. Looking back on that decision now, though, I realize it was in fact a way for me to punish myself, to wallow in loneliness. Sure, I had (and still have) connections with friends and family that are not romantic or physical. And those are all well and good. In fact, they're more than well and good; they're vital to my well-being. But I'm also entitled to more physical, bunny-like connections. Just as I no longer follow the stringent regime that was necessary during my convalescence and recovery from a life-threatening illness, I no longer find celibacy necessary.

I don't think I'm cut out for celibacy anyway. After more than 20 years of "failed" relationships, I'm not sure I'm cut out for monogamy either. More than once I've dated multiple partners only to revert to monogamy under pressure covert or overt from a partner to do so. And yet at some point in every relationship I find myself craving variety, not because I lose interest in my partner or because I am any less in love, but because... well, because.

In her novel Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood's character Crake sums up this curse of the human condition: to be both imperfectly monogamous and jealous at the same time. Swans don't get the seven year itch. Bonobos don't unload a shotgun into their cheating spouses. But humans simultaneously want the security of monogamy and the excitement of new relationships. In most societies, this leads to open secrets and downright lies, like the wife-and-mistress paradigm in Western society. But if I could tolerate secrets and lies, I'd still be taking communion every week at the local Catholic parish. My name fits me very well: I am a frank and honest person.

What I've realized this time around, first by suspicion and then by empirical evidence, is that it is possible to choose a different relationship paradigm. It is possible to date casually -- and yes, even to sleep with these casual dates -- while still insisting that we treat one another with dignity and respect. It is perfectly okay to want to make connections with people even if the ultimate goal is not joint ownership of property and production of offspring. It is okay to ask for what I want and to lay the smackdown on unacceptable behavior. It is okay to ask to the Universe for exactly what I want.

The Universe has been more than forthcoming; It has been abundant in its response. Even in the face of this abundance, I constantly struggle with the challenge of choosing not to abandon my principles. Each time I tell someone it's not cool to flake out on plans, even if I have relatively little invested in the relationship, I take a huge risk. Each time I choose to spend some time recharging my batteries instead of meeting a new person, the old fears of ending up alone return. This is where the love and support and listening ears of my platonic friends is priceless. And this is where refusing to keep secrets and tell lies is absolutely essential.

And in spite of all these new ways of going about things, loneliness will still happen. It will happen just as surely as joy, connection, and mind-blowing orgasms. The Universe is abundant and has an infinite supply of all these and more -- it's up to me to ask for what I want.