Just a small note to note a year of Still Stundays

June 5th

Last year around this time, June 6th, I wrote:

I have never been able to articulate the stillness of a Sunday. Those quiet hours of the early morning before a city, town, or village takes a big yawn and stretches itself into your routine which may include bills, laundry, emails, phone calls, errands, groceries, etc.

These mornings are especially unique in New York because the City doesn’t sleep but she just takes naps. And the longest naps are on Sunday mornings. […] Some mornings I  simply wrap the stillness of a Sunday morning around a pen and put fragments on a paper.

I have been asked by a few people to share more of my own thoughts on this blog, website. Usually those are reserved for my circle of friends via email, not necessarily for privacy concerns but because when I created this space last July my intention was: it is not about me–but for some thoughts on the process of writing. So this new category, Still Sundays, is my attempt to merge the two without betraying the original purpose. To allow for a fluid evolution of my intention.

Well, a fluid evolution it has been!

When I began writing, or rather finally sharing my thoughts on a Sunday on the web given I had been offering these thoughts to a select few offline for much longer than a year, I did not look up the word ‘stillness’ in the dictionary. I went with my personal understanding of what it meant and what I saw and felt when I said “stillness.”

Here’s what the dictionary says:

still

adjective

not moving or making a sound

• (of air or water) undisturbed by wind, sound, or current; calm and tranquil

• (of a drink such as wine) not effervescent; compare with sparkle .

noun

1) deep silence and calm;

2) an ordinary static photograph as opposed to a motion picture, esp. a single shot from a movie.

adverb

1) without moving

2) up to and including the present or the time mentioned; even now (or then) as formerly.

• referring to something that will or may happen in the future

3) nevertheless; all the same.

4) even (used with comparatives for emphasis)

verb

make or become still; quieten

A year of resting my mind’s floppy elephant ears on the chest of stillness as it exhales and inhales from some well that is beyond me I can hear a rhythm that will never stop in any of us.

The western (and now fairly global) concept of stillness is fixated in some idea of ‘stopping’. My understanding has led me to view stillness as a constant movement that leads to evolution. It is intentional, conscious, truthful, and daunting.  Sometimes it is  filled with darkness and other times so much brightness that it can frighten our senses of what is possible!

I have woken up at 3:oo a.m. on a Sunday to write in Prague before catching my flight to New York City and found my thoughts swimming in the stillness of a faraway rose garden in Lahore, thinking about the milkman on his bike and then resting in the corner of stillness where I recall how the ocean literally rises in the air at dawn in Durban, and soon enough I will be hearing sirens in New York City.

Time runs through me as I run out of time.

On a different Sunday morning in New York City I have thought about a friend I had in 7th grade with whom I would sometimes go  to the Synagogue if she stayed the night (she was Jewish and had to go on Saturdays and my parents have never been afraid of other religions given they have always believed their values would trump any indoctrination). Yet when I have actually sat down to write about that memory what has come out is rage-filled tears at all the unnecessary hurt and killing between people of different religions.

I have shared others’ quotes, articles, thoughts on Sundays given I do like to find myself close to words on a Sunday morning and if they have somehow provided some clarity for me, I have offered them here.

I have had more questions some Sundays than answers.

I have had readers come and go. I have had many comments and no comments on posts.

I have offended; I have been embraced.

I have gone to bed thinking I am out of words and found a flood the next morning that I can’t control.

I have had to be conscious of what I dislike in others’ writings: sensational pretentiousness that can be readily ignored as such because it wears a sensual mask created by another who too is a lover of words—but desperate attention too. But I have found solace in the fact that the hairline fine difference will always show.

I have had to accept I must continue to write even if it is not a novel or other stories.

I have been delighted to discover the energy of words. They keep me warm at night and cool me when it is blazing with or without another.

I began on June 6th 2010 by stating I have never been able to articulate the stillness of a Sunday. I think by bringing myself to it every Sunday, I have done more than that: I have defined it for myself.

And regardless of what the reader’s definition was and is, I hope if there is anything any reader has taken away is the joy in defining things for oneself. This is no easy task for it demands a constant dialogue of deconstruction. But a glimpse of something beyond words awaits when we step in this magnetic field of stillness…where everything is in constant motion, but only what matters rises to view.

On a Sunday…everything and not much….

Sitting with the least and most significant story: yours.

~a.q.s.

Related posts:

Still Sundays This Liminal Stillness to really understand is divine Still Sundays