You may have noticed that I have not written a blog post in almost a year. This past 14 months has been filled with family needs, and huge changes - the death of my father and all of the “estate” details that went with that, and the moving of my mother into assisted living and dealing with the ever changing reality of her continuing descent deeper into dementia and the slow failing of her body. I had to set aside my writing practice almost entirely to attend to those parts of life.
With my mother very near the end of her life, this seems a strange time to be picking up my blogger’s pen again, but two things landed in my inbox last week which sparked me to scribble for a while in my journal, and seemed to ache to be shared. So here I am. :-)
When I started to write this post, I found myself writing two posts at once, as I so often do.
I notice again and again that my own nervous system, heart, and mind, are almost always trying to integrate two or more themes or lenses, as a way to understand what I am seeing or experiencing. To sort out how to write about all of what I’m integrating in few enough words to make a good blog post is often super challenging.
So I try to follow all the advice about blogging and break the long thing I am wanting to write into pieces, and then I find myself concerned that each of the lenses I am looking through will appeal to some of you but not others, and want to include it all – so everybody gets something out of the post.
But I don’t have much time to get posts out right now, so here I am plunging in with two separate posts, one on the Chinese medicine take on winter as a time for slowing down (not acting on a bunch of New Year’s Resolutions), and the other (this one) on a larger invitation rising up out of this winter-season energy. I hope you, too, will enjoy integrating the two.
KEEPING QUIET by Pablo Neruda
Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth, let’s not speak in any language; let’s stop for one second, and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines; we would all be together in a sudden strangeness.
Fisherman in the cold sea would not harm whales and the man gathering salt would look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, wars with fire, victories with no survivors, would put on clean clothes and walk about with their brothers in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about; I want no truck with death.
If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve and you keep quiet and I will go.
Here is a link to Syliva Boordstein reading this poem.
I love this vision, this imaging of what might happen if we all embraced this invitation.
I want that for this world.
And, while I cannot create that, I can reach for the wondering about what might be possible.
I can choose to pause, myself (even if it’s only for three breaths amidst all that life is asking of me), and choose to notice what happens when I keep quiet.
I can listen for the clarity about what the earth is teaching me, what this life is teaching me, and what I value most – clarity that is sitting there, quietly, under all the noise and all the doing, patiently waiting for me to notice.
I'd love to hear what this poem brings up in you, or what emerges when you get quiet.
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