Un-stillness

Un-stillness: a quiet pool in the still green woods.

“Once I knew only darkness and stillness . . . my life was without past or future . . . but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.” Helen Keller

We are guided by those whose precepts we follow to be still. And even those from unexpected places admonish us, such as Morgan Freeman who says, “Learning how to be still, to really be still and let life happen - that stillness becomes a radiance.”

And here I find myself this morning, Pandora playing spa music, breathing deeply, sitting quietly, focusing on this moment, and yet, much is churning inside me. It’s the right place, the right time, the right moves, and I find myself reaching out for the future, leaning into my past.

I remember a still green wood I took a walk in while visiting a sister in Washington State. A thin breeze made soft chimes of the leaves. The trees, dark silent silhouttes after a rain, stood in clusters, letting me pass. In a covey of saplings and vines, I poked through and found a pool, arising from nowhere I could find and flowing to nowhere that I could see. Yet it’s surface was laced with delicate ripples. Light reflected from it, obscuring any life hiding beneath its edges.

This is how I feel this morning. In a still place, resting quietly in it, gentle music filling the room, yet I am restless, feeling helpless. This woman, a perpetual doer, is helpless and cannot do anything about this crisis in which we are living, and besides making a few masks, can do nothing to help anyone. All of us, all people on this planet, face this thing, this virus, that we cannot even see. And so, I hover in this moment, searching for that moment of stillness, peace, rest, and find I am tethered between the past, the way I used to live, and the future, the way I hope to live. And it occurs to me that I may not know what that way of living that will be.

I am changing. How I pace through the hours of the day is different. What I do is different. It has been more than three weeks now, the length of time some say it takes to form new habits, that I’ve attempted to contain my life within these walls. If I am very still, sometimes the walls fall and I am just here in a place without walls. And here, Helen Keller’s words come back to me, and as she said, like “a little word from the fingers of another [falling] into my hand,” her words fall onto my lips. She, who found joy in moving outside stillness, guides me to move beyond the “darkness and stillness” that these walls of fear and doubt clutch at and simply acknowledge the unknown of the future. Her words, on my lips, in my hand, nudge me to just notice what is in my hands and let it open my world, too.

I love that woman, who faced unknowable limitations and confinement, and yet reached beyond them into the unknown to me . . . and to you.