Cloistering.  We hear this word much these days.  For many, it has a become a term of pain, a pain of not being able to work or go outside.  For others, it has become a way of slowing down and finding new ways of spending one's time.  For still others, it has become a road to starvation.
     Although the lessons drawn from cloistering are many and, depending on one's starting point and material circumstances, starkly dark, light, and conditional, they remain relevant.  In some cases, cloistering births generosity; in others, selfishness.
     Yet the essential point remains.  Though we humans are made to interact with each other, to be moral and social beings, we all equally made to be, at certain points, alone.  There is a reason why the great religious sages spent time in solitude.
    As we move forward together, and as, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, spring continues  to "spring," we find solace in our humanity, that though we grow in solitude, we find who we are in community.
     For this we are grateful, very grateful for the fact of personality, a implicitly transcendent personality, at the core of the universe.