Still Water Runs Deep

 When water courses through a narrow passage it speeds up. When the canyon opens into a wide valley, then an open meadow, the water slows to stillness – the river becomes a lake.

            So too when we rush about on our important errands, crushing our to-do lists like a boss, something is lost.

            The narrower and more constrained our lives become, the more turbulent the course of our thought-stream. Only in the stillness of contemplative prayer, meditation, or restful pause do we root back down into the ground of being, instead of skittering across life’s surface – unsure where we’ve been, unclear where we’re going, and never knowing why.

            Without periods of stillness, all movement becomes meaningless. As Mozart said, “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.”

            This is why, after over a year of pandemic quarantine, cooped up in our home offices and narrow routines, our morning and afternoon walks took on such sacred significance. To be out under a wide open sky, knowing that the stars arch over us like a jeweled lattice, obscured by the midday sun, then emerging one by one as night turns the sky indigo denim, then black velvet. So too the glare of busyness blinds us to the unfathomable beauty ever-present.

            Truth is never far away. We’re simply paying attention to the wrong things. We don’t have a proximity problem – we have a perception problem.

            It is time to recommit to our contemplative prayer and meditation practice. Taking our cue from nature, we see that all things turn through cycles of decay and regeneration, silence and sound, darkness and light. So too we spend long hours of each 24 hour cycle completely unconsciousness, unaware of our surroundings. And it is through the long, fallow night that our mind-body restores itself to newness. Following this model, may we learn to better step outside the stream of busyness that threatens to drown us in its lifeless undertow and instead, climbing out onto the warm, flat rocks midstream, rest in the sun, and simply be. Nothing less than heaven itself awaits in the gaps between each harried thought.

            I think we are simply afraid – afraid to fully trust ourselves. That’s why we rush about in search of the next answer, the next church, the next coach, or the next book. Fear drives us like a lash. Instead, coming into a rare and unrehearsed intimacy with our innermost depths, we find a rest so complete, so natural, and so healing that we wonder what we were ever afraid of. The mystics of all traditions tell of this inner space, this boundless realm beyond all doctrine, dogma, theology, and belief – a place of nameless wisdom and voiceless song. What we hear and know there can never be brought to the surface. The formless cannot take form. But we can be in-formed by it. It leaves a mark. We carry its scent into the activities of our ordinary lives. The only word that even comes close for this transformative knowing – love – sounds tinny and trite in the cacophony of the marketplace. Oh, that cliché, they say. We simply smile. Yeah, we know. So it’s better to say nothing at all, letting our actions do the talking. As Jesus told his disciples in the days before his death, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35 NRSV)

[This piece first appeared in my "A to Zen" column in the July/August edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproducted here with permission.]

The Lost Art

Plants and animals are really good at it. But somewhere along the way we forgot how to practice the lost art of stillness.

            All life-forms require periods of rest to reset and restore their natural processes. In winter plants pull energy back into their cores and wait for the cold to pass. Animals balance periods of intense exertion with periods of retreat and repose. Human beings, on the other hand, never stop engaging in a dangerous and debilitating experiment – living without rest.

            Sure we sleep at night. But not long enough. Most Americans are sleep-deprived. The results are devastating. When you are sleep-deprived you crave more fattening and sugar-laden food, hence gaining weight. Your risk for diabetes spikes. Then your sex drive plummets. Wounds and injuries take longer to heal, which is bad timing because you are far more likely to be hurt or injured. You look older. You feel older. You have trouble thinking and concentrating. Your mood plummets leaving you prone to anxiety, paranoia, and depression. Your memory falters. Your immune system weakens. And to make matters worse, all of this occurs simultaneously compounding your misery. Who knew pillow time was so life-saving. Literally.

            And this: 20% of the 35,000 Americans who die every year in auto accidents are killed by sleep-deprived drivers. That’s 20 people slaughtered every day because someone didn’t get enough sleep.

            But it goes beyond that. At heart, sleep-deprivation is a symptom, not a cause. It is a symptom of a delusion – the delusion that my self-worth is tied to my work-output; the idea that my value as a human being is measured by how busy I am. This lie drives us like a lash into feverish and often futile activity – activity for activity’s sake. I’m not sure what we’re running from, or toward for that matter. But I do know this: we have forgotten the virtues of idleness.

            To give ourselves over to idleness seems a sin. At least that’s the message we’ve received from the dominant culture. Let’s consider the alternative. What would happen if we embraced periods of absolutely unstructured, free-form idleness? Two hundred years ago the British Romantic poet William Wordsworth wondered the same thing. He explored the idea in this beautiful paean to idleness called “To My Sister.”

It is the first mild day of March:
Each minute sweeter than before
The redbreast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door.

There is a blessing in the air,
Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.

My sister! ('tis a wish of mine)
Now that our morning meal is done,
Make haste, your morning task resign;
Come forth and feel the sun.

Edward will come with you;--and, pray,
Put on with speed your woodland dress;
And bring no book: for this one day
We'll give to idleness.

No joyless forms shall regulate
Our living calendar:
We from to-day, my Friend, will date
The opening of the year.

Love, now a universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth:
--It is the hour of feeling.

One moment now may give us more
Than years of toiling reason:
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.

Some silent laws our hearts will make,
Which they shall long obey:
We for the year to come may take
Our temper from to-day.

And from the blessed power that rolls
About, below, above,
We'll frame the measure of our souls:
They shall be tuned to love.

Then come, my Sister! come, I pray,
With speed put on your woodland dress;
And bring no book: for this one day
We'll give to idleness.

            When you scratch beneath the surface of this poem you find the reason idleness matters: it is only in a state of idleness that our soul opens up to the Universal Soul. We are restored, fully, to our divine nature and reconnected to the divine source coursing through all things only when we stop this ceaseless activity and production. Sure, work and industry matter, obviously. This isn’t an either/or consideration. We’re talking about balance. Beautiful, sweet, restorative idleness sustains us every bit as much as our work does – one perishes without the other.

            My parents were born in the 1920s. They grew up in a world without television, commercial air travel, telephones, computers, or the internet. They were better at idleness than I am. When I was a boy growing up in Ventura, we would often drive up the Maricopa Highway and stop alongside the North Fork of Matilija Creek just outside Ojai to spend the day doing nothing. Just being. Letting the sound of the falling water wash away all of the busyness of the week. Opening. Releasing. Reorienting to the sacred rhythms of the natural order – our own natural order. Feeling the sun on our skin. Tracing the dappled shadows of sycamore and oak arching over the boulders, red-tailed hawks and condors spiraling in the cerulean blue above. The quiet thrum of wind through the grasses and the ghosts of Chumash keeping vigil in this chaparral cathedral under the warm dome of midday. You know, all of the important things you miss when you are busy.

            The ancient art of meditation is the intentional practice of idleness and stillness. In any moment, wherever we are, it is possible – in fact it is necessary – for us to shift into stillness and slip beneath the incessant waves of the thought stream to enter fully into this now moment, as it actually is, without judgment or conceptual clouding. It's what our cat spends most of his life doing. It's what trees do all the time. Stillness is the warp and woof of life. When we banish it from our lives, we are not yet fully, really alive. If we listen closely we are called, each of us, to our sacred source at the heart of every moment, revealed only in the lost art of stillness.