My walk this morning has been delayed. Rather than arriving at the lake path as the sun lights up the clouds from its position just below the eastern rim of my world, it is nearly halfway to its zenith now as I step onto the more rugged southern trail. A few minutes later, though, I realize I don't feel like taking my usual fast-paced exercise walk. My life has been supercharged of late, both busy-busy and emotionally intense. I recognize that I need something else today. I need stillness.
I slow my pace and search the edges of the path for the perfect spot. I find it, an elevation offering an unobstructed view of the lake below and the snow-capped mountains to the north and west. I step off the dirt track, walk the few yards up the incline, and sit atop last summer's dried grass, flattened to the ground by wind, snow and wildlife. The water below is calm, its surface peppered in places by dark specks I know to be ducks recently returned from their winter homes.
Yet as serene as this view is, I need more. I stretch out on my back and look up into a sky much more deeply hued than those of my east coast childhood. That sky-blue crayon in my box of 64 doesn't even come close. The immensity of what that blue holds, the infinity that stretches out within and beyond Wendell Berry's "day-blind stars", soothes me. I become as calm and as unruffled as the lake below, undisturbed by the metaphoric ducks of occasional thoughts that rise and fall like my breath.
Soon, though, my eyes close. Birds twitter in the bushes to my left, and the smell of vibrant life surrounds me. I breathe deeply of the clean mountain air, and on my exhale I imagine releasing that breath into the earth beneath me. Stillness descends. I have come home.
Modern life can be crazy busy, so busy that we often lose ourselves in attempts to respond to its many demands. How very important it is, then, to take time—to make time—to still ourselves and come home to what is. Psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach refers to such times as sacred pauses, temporary disengagements from our usual goal-driven lives. Luckily we don't need to be surrounded by mountain vistas to pause in this way.
As I type these words to you now, I still my fingers for a few seconds, recognize my shoulders have become tight, allow them to relax. Through the window, I see prayer flags dancing in the strong westerly wind, and hear its rushing sound. And when this paragraph is complete, you can pause in your own world, noticing what comes. Perhaps its the way light falls onto the floor, or a sound, or the feel of your body in your seat, or the quality of emotion that fills you. You might choose to pause now and open to what is.
Brach identifies this sacred pause as one wing of Radical Acceptance, the title of her 2003 classic that applies Buddhist philosophy to modern life. The other wing is that of opening the heart and holding with compassion our experience, simply as it is. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that this human life is not all beautiful mountain vistas and clear skies. It includes loss and fear and anger and a host of other intensities. If we want to live fully, then finding a way to feel all of it and hold it with love is our task.
Wendell Berry's poem, The Peace of Wild Things, which includes the day-blind stars phrase referenced above, ends with this line: "I rest in the grace of the world, and am free." I rested in that grace on this morning's walk. I rest in it now.
No matter the challenges that come with this day, I send wishes that you will remember that the grace of the world remains, that stars continue to spin in the vastness of space, and that our small lives are held within a whole so much greater than our minds can comprehend.
And resting in that knowledge, may we all be soothed.
💜
Leia
