I believe that what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly.

It is a difficult lesson to learn today-to leave one's friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour or a day or a week. And yet, once it is done, I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.

In the sheltered simplicity of the first days after a baby is born, one sees again the magical closed circle, the miraculous sense of two people existing only for each other.

It is only in solitude that I ever find my own core.

And if flying, like a glass-bottomed bucket, can give you that vision, that seeing eye, which peers down on the still world below the choppy waves - it will always remain magic.

Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.

Ideally, both members of a couple in love free each other to new and different worlds.