Choice

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Buddhist, meditation, Meg Wheatley, noise, perseverance, silence, sound, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

I just read something that I first thought quite amusing but then I began to think about it as something more than a whimsical quote from Meg Wheatley (see Perseverance, p. 102) and it became a challenge to my way of thinking that puts me at the center of things. Here’s what I mean.

I love the times like yesterday afternoon when everyone who lives in our house is home doing whatever we do in an atmosphere of silence. It’s a very peaceful feeling of a communal spirit. (Ironically, some geese just flew by outside cackling wildly to disturb the morning silence.) I’m not saying I long for the days of enforced silence for most of our waking moments, but hearing the hammering of carpenters on our land or 18-wheel trucks zooming down the road can be disturbing. Then there’s the vacuum cleaner that makes me think I should be doing some household chore instead of reading in my room…but that’s another matter…and I digress. Here’s what I read:

A Buddhist teacher caught himself complaining about the loud party nearby that was disturbing his meditation. And then he had this insight. “Oh, the sound is just the sound. It is me who is going out to annoy it. If I leave the sound alone, it won’t annoy me. It’s just doing what it has to do. That’s what sound does. It makes sound. That is its job. So if I don’t go out to bother the sound, it’s not going to bother me. Aha!”

Stillness

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absence, hush, movement, prayer, silence, sound, spiritual practice, stillness, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

When I was leaving the kitchen with my coffee this morning, one of my housemates asked, “What today’s blog topic?” My answer was as simple as it was true: “I won’t know till I get back upstairs.” So up I came. I sipped my coffee. I looked out the window. I wondered about a lighthearted line or two from the Sufi poet Hafiz. I read Alan Cohen’s entry for this date…Nothing felt right.

What finally came was a distinction that I have been experimenting with for awhile now: the similarity but difference between the concepts of silence and stillness. The dictionary makes quick work of the definitions. Silence is the absence of sound. Stillness is the same but more; stillness is defined as the absence of movement and sound. I think of hearing people when I was a child telling their children to “keep still.” I thought they wanted them to stop talking. I wonder if they knew they were telling them to stop squirming. As I think back, I recall how strange a directive that would have been in our family. My parents never told us to keep still. I guess we were a rather placid trio, not too fidgety.

My purpose now in bringing up the topic is the benefit of adding stillness to my practice of silent prayer. Although it’s more about the mind than the body, I realize that quieting my body is much easier than stilling my mind but if I do bring my body into total stillness, my mind seems more able – or at least willing – to let go of the torrent of thoughts as well.

Just one more word: hush. I have begun to say that word quietly but aloud as I begin to quiet down. It has – for me – the quality of a mother rocking her crying child and the miracle that happens when she practically croons the words…”Hush, now…Hush…”