Still Sundays

Da Vinci’s Notebooks. Conch of stillness. “the bourgeois idea of reality.” Learning to die to live at the speed of life.

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.

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I wrote “Still Sundays” before it was a title of these posts and long before I had this website. It was still and it was Sunday and I liked how New York City felt in the early hours. That is all. The handwritten notes were short and only relayed my awe at stillness in the locomotion of New York City. Some pieces included my obsession with describing—always inadequately (or so it felt and continues to feel and hence the numerous attempts)—how sunlight drips on buildings in those hours. The buildings, a coloring book, filled by slow motion animation spreading every second.

Some Sundays recorded a paragraph or two on a musing that the net of stillness caught. They are not journal entries. I never had a ‘journal’ after fourteen or maybe even before then. Even when I did I can  distinctly recall that the writing felt as if for ‘someone.’ I read a humorous article in The New Yorker once (can’t seem to find it) some years ago that mocked those who kept a journal—that everyone writes with the hope that one day it will be read. As far back as I can recall, I never felt the guards of privacy would be loyal to the castle of my deepest thoughts so I never assumed anything for “my eyes only.”

Now that I write my thoughts here what perplexes me is that there are others who are expecting to share what stillness catches. Theirs and mine. I certainly don’t prepare in advance to write these thoughts. I have even attempted to write on a Saturday night when I can’t sleep or when I wake up in the middle of the night but words fail me—no, not words, but coherent thoughts. I am too busying deciphering memories from dreams. Some nights I even decide I am not going to write Sunday morning. I don’t owe anyone any explanation. No one is paying me. And after a few inquiries life would go on…people move forward…and no one really writes consistently so a temporary hiatus is an expected stop-over on a never-ending journey. Before my eyes close I have stretched the thought who are you writing for into a backbend without an end.

And morning brings a veil of light.

I wake up to Sunday’s stillness and stare out the windows. Some Sunday mornings I feel I have slept for an entire week and I am grateful. Other Sunday mornings I can’t recall when I last slept well. I don’t plan on writing. Anything. I want my tea and that’s it.

But if I continue to soak in this precious stillness with thoughts that spear my reality to confetti feelings, I become curious, not for an answer but a better question.

I bring myself to write because I am curious. I have gained as much as I have lost for my desire to explore. On and off the page.

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This morning I woke up to another cold day in New York City. Spring seems like a train that just won’t come no matter how far down you look the tunnel.

Some Sunday mornings stillness feels like a dark cave where I can’t hear myself echo. You have images but no words. Like a mouth that moves without producing sound yet it doesn’t feel like a nightmare given the lips are moving, just the audio is off.

Leonardo Da Vinci interpreted man’s highest aim to consist in seeking to know and to hand on the lamp of knowledge. I have been reading his notebooks lately. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what that man knew despite him sharing all that he knew.

In a very short but mandatory reading for all, but especially educators, Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice Mary Rose O’Reilley writes:

When I was eighteen I started studying yoga with a Catholic monk who stood on his head every day to remind himself that the world could be seen from a different perspective. I have never mastered standing on my head, but I think each of us needs to remind ourselves daily that we are seeing only a very limited reality. The poet William Stafford used to rise every morning at four and write a poem. Somebody said to him, “But surely you can’t write a good poem every day, Bill. What happens then?” “Oh,” he replied, “then I lower my standards.” Three great lessons here—practice your art every day, lower your standards, and claim a time or place or an attitude that will challenge the bourgeois idea of reality. Four A.M.! I told this story to my friend Peter, who immediately began getting up at dawn. He called me long distance from Berkeley. “It shakes up your whole soul,” he said of that time of day, “it changes things better than Prozac.”

The point here is not that you should be getting up at four A.M., but it is a bottom-line question: what are you going to give?

The first time I saw a photo of the painting “Mona Lisa” I was struck by its energy. The child me who didn’t know “art” from an academic or critical standpoint couldn’t understand how something so ‘average looking’ be so attractive.  I tried to buy into the whole “mysterious smile” is the reason as a teenager but it didn’t fit my sensibilities. Now I understand a little better: the energy that “welcomes a silent communication” is eternally beautiful. I know of nothing more beautiful and mysterious than that energy. But it takes two to communicate even in silence.

I have to bring myself to this—this ‘it‘—this conch of stillness to hear music and not noise.

Sometimes the little lamp of knowledge I have to offer needs others’ hands to shield whatever amount of light  from the gales of receptivity. I thank those hands who read even when the warmth in the lamp can slightly burn.

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“While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die,” wrote Da Vinci.

Marco Rojas repeatedly says during yoga practice, “Yes, I want you to die.” Many are not comfortable upon hearing this. We all have lost someone close to us and the sound of “everyone dies” or “is dying” is not quite welcome. But he says it during the most strenuous poses when we stop to breathe and are fighting against gravity or feel we literally can’t continue. “Don’t forget to breathe, unless you want to die.” And we are surprised to learn that only in breathing do we let go, die, so we can carry on.

I am learning to die quicker so I can live at the speed of life.

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