Silence

Coming up from the barn this morning I paused on the studio porch to look out at the intense green of my neighbor's pasture and the shapes of budding trees in the cold spring fog. In that pause I encountered the silence underlying all the sense impressions of chill and woodsmoke and greening spring. I love sitting in meditation because it allows me to rest in that fertile stillness but am aware that it is available always and that my life is a dance that is constantly emerging from it, sometimes difficult and sometimes graceful. It is my source and the source of all that is. I trip over words for it...God, The Great Mystery, The Divine. I treasure its ineffable quality. It is available so easily to children who do not have the annoying boundaries of reason and fact and intellect.  I can remember being a weird kid sitting in the tops of trees and lying under bushes on sweet warm days just being. I was a dreamy careless child, often late, losing and tripping over things. I still love to just wander and let my mind go. I forget to return calls, check email, buy eggs. I have a routine with the animals and fortunately do not forget them. I love just hanging out in my life so I guess I am emerging today as a dreamy, careless old woman but what a lovely gift those few minutes of unplanned meditation in the spring mist this morning.

Stopping By Woods

with a bow to Robert Frost..This morning silent snow falling as I walked up the hill from the barn. I stopped and looked out on the grayscale landscape, white hills punctuated by the various dark and darker shapes of buildings, trees and stone walls.  Something is so deeply beautiful in the lack of color. We live in a world of stunning visual stimulation. From bright clothes to HDTV, our eyes and brains are occupied constantly in a riot of red and yellow and green.  I love color. I love playing with it, living in it and the celebration of the senses that it provokes, but something in my soul is soothed and healed by the quiet monochromatic world that a snowy morning creates. I love music and the sound of voices, but the falling snow on a path in the woods is a prayer call to silence. Here in the mountains each season offers its messages. Spring brings the rising of energy, summer the steady lush growing, autumn the brilliant dance of gratitude.  Winter tells me to go inward and abide in what I experience as "the silence under silence" the ineffable ever present pure love that is experienced when my mind is at rest. When I stand on the snowy path I am reminded.

Soul Needs and Consequences

This morning I was looking at pictures on Facebook of a group of dearest old friends at a Christmas gathering and feeling love accompanied by a bleak sadness that I am not with them. I have always told my children that our lives are the result of our choices and I do believe that but, here alone on this mountain with ten inches of snow and many animals to feed, it is easy to feel pangs of loneliness and self pity. There is always a certain amount of fear before I start down the hill on ice cleats or, as today, snowshoes. I ask myself what a sixty eight year old woman is doing living alone in this life that can be cold and hard and even dangerous. The answer always is the beauty of this place and the mountain light. I cannot seem to live without those two things neither of which I can touch or capture but are necessities for the life of my soul.

I often wonder how we are each made with such different soul-needs. I have friends who thrive on contact and constant interaction with others, have good marriages to dear deep friends, give service to those who need what they can do.  They live in cities and neighborhoods and thrive on the closeness with friends and neighbors. I have done some of that happily in the past but am absolutely unable to make that choice today. There is some grief, however with the loss of that laughing and touching and loving that comes in daily contact with old friends and family who know my history and can be completely trusted with my unadorned self. I do have wonderful companions here in the mountains, most of whom moved here with the same passion and need for natural beauty and a preponderance of solitude.  I treasure them as well. We support each other through through the tough weather, whether it be physical or emotional. My choices have always had losses and blessings. I cling to the promise that my 12 step program gives me that I "will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it." I do know that I only truly have today and what I choose to cultivate in it. That will always color what adventures in love and life I have in the future. So sending love to my dear ones from all parts of my life, I will put on the longjohns and snowshoes and go off to continue living my (cold) mountain day.

     

A Holy Wandering

Reading a book by Rabbi Rami Shipiro on Ecclesiastes as a lesson in impermanence and how to live wisely in the flow of ever changing life where nothing stands still and nothing is guaranteed.  The title of this post is a quote from her book and challenges us to make of our lives "a holy wandering". I am reminded of my difficulty hiking with friends who plunge up hill and down at a great pace, never lingering to see what is beside the trail or wandering off to explore what is hidden. My damaged lungs from years of cigarettes force me to pause and breathe. I consequently tend to meander, stopping and starting.. noticing, wondering and wandering off track. Hiking with a group, I pretty quickly feel guilty for holding others up, lagging behind and being a burden. In my life I try to honor that pause and notice what is around me. "Try" is the operative word as it is so hard to do in our Calvinistic culture. The travelers ahead do not have to be flesh and blood folks.  I can conjure voices that tell me to hurry, to get-it-done, to accomplish everything on my list and then make a new list..and no one is really here at all. That urgency to get life under control, to get where I am going, so futile.  I am not going anywhere really except to the end of my life in this particular costume. I really want to wander, to loiter, to observe and explore each rich moment that I am allotted. That, I think, is what is meant by "practice".  

Long months since my last post.  I tell myself that this winter will be different. I will keep this journal to chronicle life here in the mountains as it is for an old woman who has finally found her home on this earth.  This morning I stood in the dark on my deck looking at the almost full moon shining below on the pond.  It is cold, that silent cold with no wind, deep and lovely.  I love being awake before the world starts its activity.  Even here in the country, the cars and trucks begin early on the road below.  As a child I felt so powerful waking and going outdoors before dawn..it was safe then in my Louisiana neighborhood for a little girl to wander in the early dark. Amazingly, after many unsafe places in my life, that sense of protected freedom is present here alone on this mountain in my old age.

Tomorrow is Solstice and a full moon.  Strange that the return of the light and the season of winter are simultaneous.  Mirroring nature, it always seems that our inner light is lit in the darkest times of  life.
Christmas and Solstice celebrations are the annual upwellings in which we humans try impossibly to express that return of of hope and love in the middle of challenges and difficulties. I have so often found that a loving Presence is holding my twisting and turnings in a kind of amused radiance. In the early morning dark and silence, I am most aware that I am never alone, always loved and held by the Great Mystery. What an adventure and a comfort.

Moving into winter and that feeling of being on an edge. I rake the dry leaves behind the house and stack wood, make applesauce and soups for the freezer, make grain mixes in big galvanized garbage cans for the farm animals. An instinct to gather and store that feels powerful and primitive.
In spite of the activity I experience a slow drawing inward toward the luminous silence of my winter soul. I love the season of Advent, the waiting for the birth of the Divine Child. This is not the conventional spirit with its reenactment of the birth in the manger..although I am delighted by the wonderful motley crew of our Sunday school children playing Mary, Joseph and the sheep, especially the sheep. This is the seasonal rebirth that is an indestructible hope contained in Holy Silence.
I am old now or at the leading edge of old age at least. I will be 67 this month and no longer able to pretend that I could, by just going to the gym more regularly, bring my body back into youthful control. That is over. I am forced to learn to love the wrinkles, spots and droops or spend precious time being dissatisfied with my physical self. My mental abilities seem to hold so far but I do lose thoughts and keys from time to time.
Yet, there is a fresh and pure consciousness that longs to be reborn in me in this season. I can get caught up in lists and gifts and menu anxiety, or I can welcome it by cultivating silence and pure awareness. I do this last in meditation but also in pausing as I climb the hill to the house and really looking out into the woods now bare and open or by stopping work in the kitchen to savor the brilliant orange of a squash as well as savoring its taste.
I have always found it difficult to slow down and have searched lifelong for practices that could help. All the drugs in the world could not do it. All the success in the world could not do it. All leisure in the world could not do it and this last surprised me. I find now that the simplicity of silence, regular chores done with attention, pausing to notice... these help me to wait for the birth of that Divine Child within in this season.