This Liminal Stillness

June 3, 2012

Last year on June 5th I wrote “Just A Small Note to Note A Year of Still Sundays “.

Today June 3rd is close enough to mark two years of writing and sharing (on the web) essays destilled in the brewery of stillness.

I began last June:

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. […] Time runs through me as I run out of time. […] 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.  [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.

It has been suggested to me that I ought to organize my Sunday’s essays into different categories: writing, art, death, dreams, family, homelessness, New York City, and so on and so forth. Or that I need to hire an editor who will do that for me and then the essays can perhaps even be published. I understand the rationale for categorization beyond just quick accessibility to specific topics of interest for the reader. On which shelf is this going to go in a bookstore or under which keywords on Amazon? Self-help? Meditation? Philosophy? Commentary? Non-fiction stories? Politics?

My hesitancy has been that in extracting parts from the different essays so as to place then in some organized fashion, even if just on this web space, I will be removing a very large part of the essence that only lives when inside Stillness.

I offer today as an example.

I woke up this Sunday morning without the recollection that it has been two years I have been formally sharing my Sunday’s writings on here. I decided to begin writing this Sunday morning with the news about my yoga instructor of many years, Marco Rojas, being fired from the corporation that claims to be about yoga. I glanced outside my windows to the same view I have taken in for many years and thought: what is it is about sunlight hitting a building that makes it a new experience each time? I put on water for my tea, felt a breeze that can only belong to June, and decided I really am not ready to comment about last week. If I wrote about events surrounding Marco Rojas this Sunday at best it would be a solid piece about yoga and at worst it would be a charged reaction against yet another corporate disregard for a human being. The events of last week in my own non-writing professional life as well as what happened to Marco Rojas demand something more. As I thought the aforementioned thoughts another new one popped up: you have never sat down to write with a topic in mind, you imposter!

When I actually sat down to write I noted the date and realized it has been another year of Sundays. And when I finally began writing I realized I had forgotten that I was supposed to be somewhere else this weekend, a much anticipated writing retreat. I cancelled it for multiple good reasons.  I concluded that my forgetting meant I was indeed supposed to be right where I am: on my bed writing (where my body reminds me to move to a desk because of the bad posture).

My point:

If I wrote about all that I think I should write about I would never want to read my words again.

In stillness I tap into some place where I am humbled and empowered at once. In stillness I realize so much of what I and others think they should write about is just the mind—that funny monkey!—telling us stories. Oh look at that “important” thought go: a shooting star made of glitter that doesn’t glow in the dark!

In stillness we can’t help but note a rhythm and synchronization that is truly beyond our own doing.

In stillness you want to touch your grandmother’s skin just one.more.time—soft and lacking elasticity— even though you never really liked being around her when you were younger because she was such a difficult and unhappy person; but man, did she always smell of some fresh, flowery powder that made you think that being able to smell was a superpower! In stillness you confront the fact that the woman, a stranger, that you randomly decided to hug at the flea market yesterday, who hugged you back with same love, really reminded you of your grandmother with such intense undertow of memories that you  didn’t think existed since your memories about your grandmother are really not the best yet you missed her because of a scent.

In stillness you can’t help thinking again and again about the cab driver from Ghana who gave you a free cab ride because the print design of your odd pajama-skirt-pants which you bought in Paris brought him to tears because the colors and design reminded him of his mother, which in turn reminded him of his sister who died in a car accident recently, and he couldn’t go home for the funeral. And he has tears in his eyes that you see in the rear-view mirror and all of a sudden he has been reduced from a big, bulky, grown man to a very young kid who just wants to go home. He doesn’t want to charge you for the cab fare ($10.00)  because somehow looking at another person took him back to what matters most to him and he doesn’t know how else to honor that.

Another year of writing in stillness has taught me that the best of what we do, what we create, with whom we spend our time, the little and not so little choices we make, come from a place beyond ‘I think I should’. If what you have to offer is relevant only because of social media, if what you have to offer is relevant only because of publication, if what you have to offer is relevant only because of a certain amount of sales or a paycheck, let me state it as explicitly as possible: you have missed the sweetest nectar available.

It’s never too late to begin again to experience life as you have always desired. It never looks like what you thought it should look like because frankly, what you thought it ought to look, feel, sound, like is much smaller than what’s actually available through Stillness.

I leave you with a following passage from a wonderful book that a dear friend of words and friend for life gave me as a gift. It has been reading this book that has helped me understand much of the last year of my essays. I share an excerpt from one of the essays that deeply resonated with me.

The essay is the centaur of literary genres. An inspector of centaurs will not be able to understand the game if he believes that a centaur is a man on a horse; if he believes that the horse is simply a means of transportation. The essay is both art and science, but its science is not in the content it conveys, but in the wheelbarrow; it is not the professor’s science (even if it takes advantage of it, illustrates it, or opens new venues for it). Its science is that of the artist, who experiments, combines, searches, imagines, builds, criticizes what he wants to say, before knowing it. In an essay, the knowledge that maters is the one achieved by virtue of writing it; the knowledge that did not exist before, even if the author knew many things, both from his own experiences and from that of others, that helped in his essay.

From “Alfonso Reyes’ Wheelbarrow” by Gabriel Zaid in Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time

In real stillness we move beyond the threshold of what we think we know and what we have always known. Often the words come many, many weeks later to transcribe that understanding, but we are offered something nonetheless.

I am grateful to the Source that supplies me with words every Sunday.

I am grateful  for your reading and sharing with me every Sunday.

I am grateful for all those those who remind me no matter what else happens, this writing, no different than what Marco Rojas said yesterday about the practice of yoga, must continue.

~a.q.s.

Related posts:

Still Sundays Lotus Sunday Still Sundays Still Sundays Essay by Vince L. Wilson