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

Robert Kull

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1577316746 ISBN 13: 9781577316749

Publisher: New World Library, 2009

Synopsis

Years after losing his lower right leg in a motorcycle crash, Robert Kull traveled to a remote island in Patagonia's coastal wilderness with equipment and supplies to live alone for a year. He sought to explore the effects of deep solitude on the body and mind and to find the spiritual answers he'd been seeking all his life. With only a cat and his thoughts as companions, he wrestled with inner storms while the wild forces of nature raged around him. The physical challenges were immense, but the struggles of mind and spirit pushed him even further.

Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes is the diary of Kull's tumultuous year. Chronicling a life distilled to its essence, Solitude is also a philosophical meditation on the tensions between nature and technology, isolation and society. With humor and brutal honesty, Kull explores the pain and longing we typically avoid in our frantically busy lives as well as the peace and wonder that arise once we strip away our distractions. He describes the enormous Patagonia wilderness with poetic attention, transporting the reader directly into both his inner and outer experiences.

About this title

Review:

"Solitude lacks the bravado one might expect from such a tale, and Kull's honesty allows the writing to flow far beyond the territory navigated by typical egotistical adventurers. 'These have been rough days psychospiritually, ' he writes after one particularly trying set of storms. 'It's painful to feel I'm failing. When I leave here, I shouldn't say much to anyone about this year.' Thankfully, he changed his mind and published his moving story."
-- Audubon magazine

"There are echoes of Jack London here. Echoes of Thoreau, too....Very few of us will ever travel to the tip of Chile, let alone try to camp out there alone for a year. But what Bob really is writing about is a spiritual challenge as close as our own heartbeats."
-- David Crumm, ReadTheSpirit.com

"Bob Kull has done something relatively rare in the modern world: He has made a retreat/journey/pilgrimage that suits his own need and desire. He has learned essential lessons, and like a good spiritual adventurer, he is letting us in on the lessons he learned. Although his adventure is fascinating, it is his inner discoveries that appeal to me. It is worth everything for him to say that he is not a hero and his adventure is not heroic. That is just what we desperately need today: nonheroic adventures. This is an amazing story, worth reading and being inspired by. Bob is like a modern shaman, going out and coming back. And readers can take a good portion of Bob's experience into themselves and be changed by it."
-- Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul and Dark Nights of the Soul

"Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes opens the door, admitting the reader into the society of one man's soul. A visit is well worth the while."
-- American Psychological Association Review of Books

"Though grittier and more masculine than Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, it has something of the same appeal."
--The Vancouver Sun

Synopsis:

On September 11, 2001, reality changed for America and much of the world. But for one man alone in the wilderness, completely cut off from world events, the lessons of life and death were very different. Extreme adventurer Bob Kull may be the only educated Westerner to have missed 9/11 and the media blitz that followed. Alone on a remote island, Kull faced a different kind of crisis - a war between body, mind, and soul. Years after a motorcycle accident left him with one leg, Kull traveled into the wilderness with supplies to live alone for a year on a remote island in the Patagonian wilderness.He sought to explore the effects of deep solitude on the body and mind and to find answers to the spiritual questions that had plagued him his entire life. With only a cat and his thoughts as companions, he wrestled with inner storms while the wild forces of nature raged around him. The physical challenges were immense, but the struggles of mind and spirit pushed him to the limits of human endurance."Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes" is a diary of Kull's tumultuous year.

Filled with the details of a life distilled to its unadulterated essence - the struggle of staying alive with no outside help - Solitude is also a meditation on the tensions between nature and technology, isolation and society. Kull went into solitude fishing for enlightenment, seeking the answer, but came back empty handed. Wilderness, he found, is a place to clearly see the insanity of denying that the world is what it is. He discovered that life itself teaches us all we need to know - once we cultivate the awareness to truly listen.

About this edition

• Publisher: New World Library
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1577316746
• ISBN 13: 9781577316749
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384