Silence

Silence has its own way of showing me things that have nothing to do with language, vision, or anything I could directly name. I don’t know how to articulate it. Perhaps it’s one of those things that words simply fall short of being able to describe.

So, with that said, I’ve been thinking about silence a lot today. I went out on my deck and leaned into the space my mother used to call the portal, the space just before the forest begins. Last night after the rain finally ended, the clouds surrounded Sharptop and showed me gradations and spectrums of color I haven’t seen before. The light there is always different. A blessing even in times of grief and fear. But silence and solitude can be so kind here. They can also seem like a desert of sorts, I confess. There’s an emptiness I feel here that is both frightening and beautiful. I don’t think emptiness is the best word for it, but it will have to do. It’s related to silence, I suppose. In the silence here, there are of course forest noises, and occasionally the sound of a car going by on Cove Road up above my property, but there are not the claiming and clamorous voices of students or friends or family. I love those voices most of the time. But here I feel like I’m standing on the edge of something more than just my deck. I think I am still afraid of it. It doesn’t just show up here. It likes to save itself mostly for the woods and swamps. It isn’t trying to disconnect me from community or anyone else in a tangible, literal way. But it does sure enough want something from me. Perhaps by “it” I mean God. I suppose that’s true, since I believe (even when I don’t feel it) that God is in everything, all of us, all the time. I think of Maurice Manning’s beautiful poem from the Bucolics collection, the one where he’s talking to God and says “what I want from you is nothing Boss compared to what you want from me”. That feels very true for me too. It doesn’t feel like a scold, though, even when I haven’t been meditating, praying, reading, or working in the ways I feel like I “should” be. It is much more of a promise. It’s exciting, actually.

I don’t think it will ever be what I think it will be, that “experience” of being claimed and held.

For me silence is as much about seeing as anything else. For me to see in a way that recognizes the ordinary holiness and beauty in absolutely everything, I need silence. I don’t recognize that beauty all of the time, but when I do it seems to permeate everything and everybody. It can be very intense, even tiring. It doesn’t “play favorites” but it isn’t aloof or remote. It holds everyone’s soul to its Heart, this silence. It sees everyone as its favorite. I want to trust it more. I don’t need locutions or dramatic conversations with God, though I hope I would be open to them if God wanted me to be. I want to feel the Heart of silence, which I tend to feel as the Heart of Christ and of Jesus. I am kinder and more patient when I try to put myself in this “space.” Sometimes it comes to me of its own accord, thank God. I am thinking of so many times at the land off of Griffith Road or over by Hidden Pond. Times when I feel a poignancy to the edge of everything, from the sudden appearance of a rabbit at the edge of the path to the sound of a whippoorwhill before it’s gotten dark. There can be a melancholy present, I guess, but I don’t know that I would really name it as such. It’s some sort of alloy. It’s something like what Rilke wrote about in the Tenth Duino Elegy when he wished he could have received and surrendered to his nights of suffering more closely. It’s Lawrence’s three strange angels. It might even be a cousin of Pascal’s FIRE…God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob. It’s what held me in place for unnoticed hours that summer afternoon in Kentucky, overcome with joy and love beside the statue of Jesus and his crimson heart. I think it must be with me all the time. If I can begin---continue?---to be able to recognize it in any given moment, to let it open and share its silent heart with me, I will be---what? Happy? Not that, necessarily….maybe grateful? Actually, “present” is the best word I can find, which is paradoxical because what I’m talking about is really, I think, more about absence than presence---it has often felt that way, anyway. I can sometimes conceive of the absence as a benediction, a presence, even when it feels like emptiness, and that is a huge grace. I can’t think of anything more—or less--I would want to pray for. 

when?

Beside this big old bed is a paper lamp. It is a column of orange light whispering to someone I can’t see as I sit on the edge of the bed and wait for my thoughts to stop. I know something I cannot say, can’t even begin to articulate, and the orange light holds that knowledge in its secret supernatural voice like clear water in a metal bowl. The story of light has been trying to let me know something in my dreams. I have been resistant to it, like everyone else before me. But there is no denying the reality of its narrative, its power, its tricky strength, its trajectory of claiming. Filaments of orange light peer through little holes in the paper lamp’s cylindrical body and I think of a column of fire, a tongue of flame dancing and insistent. Something burning but stable and unchanging. When will I know what to do? When will the silent fire decide to speak my name? I sigh and slide between the cool white cotton of the bedsheets. The lamp’s glass bulb flickers like a candle, goes out for a second, then reappears, tinged with a purple undercurrent that is impossible to identify with my eyes but is somehow undeniably present nonetheless. I sit up and listen for the wind, for the way the branches of the shedding red oaks sound against the glass of the big windows that open onto the forest. A shower of acorns pelts the tin roof and the lamp gutters like a torch and goes out. Breathless but not exactly fearful, I close my eyes to hear what the fire has to say, adding a layer of chosen darkness to the hologram of orange and purple that inhabits the new dark of the air around me. 

a place in the family

There’s a slender lavender cloud hanging in the sky of dusk here. The hornet’s nest, still sizeable despite its collapse in the snow this past February, seems to have taken on some of the purple-ish hue of the cloud. When I get up to let the cat out I can’t even see the purple cloud from that angle. When I sat down again the cloud was almost gone, its edges already blue and deeper than its heart.

The feeling of silent accompaniment has been powerfully present the past few times I have gone walking at the church property off Griffith Road. There was that one evening about three weeks ago before anything had started greening up----I felt the accompaniment so distinctly that I called out “Hello?” several times. I was walking the Stations of the Cross but did not finish them. Then on Wednesday of Holy Week I went out there again but didn’t even kid myself about finishing all fourteen stations. At least I know how many there are now. Tonight I walked around the little memorial garden, pausing at my mother’s marker, and took some pictures of dogwood blossoms coming apart. I felt the accompaniment strongly. I attributed it to the fact that I was near Mom’s grave, and that could have been it. But the feeling grew. Finally I went down to the pond, the one I call Snake Doctor Pond because of the hordes of dragonflies that gather there in summer. I noticed a single Canadian goose in the middle of the pond, seemingly perched on top of the water, with its neck drooping over so that it appeared to be sipping from the pond’s surface. I think there is some metal contraption out there that has some sort of function. Probably that’s what the goose was perched on. But the goose was so still that at first I thought it was some sort of decoy. It didn’t move for a long time. It didn’t make sense that it was a decoy, but it was so perfectly still, with that arched neck. So I took some pictures of the corner of the pond with its brassy golden light turning into glitter on the water. When I turned back the goose had moved its head up so that it was peering at me. I coughed and the goose kind of flinched but only a little. It reminded me of a lone goose I saw on Holy Saturday at the monastery in 2012, that liminal and intense day. I had just read the Mary Oliver poem Wild Geese when I saw that goose perched on a fallen sapling in the pond shallows. I mean that I had been sitting by the pond reading it in Mary’s Best Of Her Poetry volume two.  "Announcing your place in the family of things. " Tonight my mind felt much calmer and quieter than has been usual lately, especially for a Sunday. No anxiety, no angst, no worry, no fear. Sundays sometimes present me with that stereotypical diffuse anxiousness that I suppose many people have right before the work week starts back up. I thought of a couple of things----again of the Eliot lines, “But who is that other who walks beside you?” from The Waste Land. I think of how I looked those lines up at the monastery a week ago yesterday, in the little retreat house library. I looked for them in The Four Quartets for some reason first and ended up rereading almost all of the Quartets.  "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." I had forgotten how much I love those poems, especially Little Gidding. The next morning, which was of course Easter, Father Tom Francis began talking about The Four Quartets at the final conference of the retreat. I think it was in the context of talking about transfiguration. Fire, rose, heart, shirt of flame, be still.

The other thing I thought about tonight at the pond was a scene in the Franco Zeffirelli miniseries Jesus of Nazareth, which I have watched one and a half times since I bought the series on DVD just after Ash Wednesday. I keep skipping back to watch scenes of healing, conversation, and challenge, to see Robert Powell’s handsome English Jesus look happy to hang out with the little kids, to listen to him rage at the Pharisees and draw one small circle carefully in some sand. He puts a little dot in the center of the circle and looks up to speak to the people about to stone the adulteress. I am being avoidant in not watching the Passion scenes again. At any rate, the scene I thought of was at Gethsemane, when Judas approaches Jesus. Jesus says, This is your hour, Judas. The hour of shadows. I found myself trying to recall if those lines were in the Gospels. I still don’t know those texts as well as I might. There is poetry there, though, even so. No allegory necessarily, just words that hold sound. Maybe a kind of paradoxical nod to the darkness, calling beauty into it. Beauty was of course already there, but it needs speaking to sometimes very deliberately.

I still kind of feel the accompaniment, even here at home. The sky is dark now, the lavender cloud subsumed by the night. The mountain is the same color as the forest. One roseate manmade light winks halfway up it. That in turn reminds me of something I read in a book about the mountains and forests around and on the Qualla Boundary, how there are these mysterious lights that move and appear in a ghostly way, like foxfire about to become airborne. I think of the place at the convergence of those two rivers where I stayed this summer and of watching the geese navigate the green and silver water as the river currents came together. I have always felt a heart of gentle sacredness in that place. The geese seemed silent witness to that, reminding me of my place in that family of things, of how it is no place and every place. A body, an accompaniment, one quick light, a cloud becoming sky.

the secret changes

My pilgrim heart
waits for you
in the middle of
its own unrecognized
silent compass.
Your wordless psalm
lets me pray along
with it, all of us
alive together
here in the secret
changes of faith's
transfiguring night.

©Laura Sorrells 2015
all rights reserved

first wish

When the thirsty wish
of first daylight
shows its strange
and silent wonder,
you wake in the kindness
that anything can show
you, to the splendid
experiment of Nothing,
countless and singular
with the task
of loving.

----©Laura Sorrells 2013
all rights reserved

a season of smallness

Christmas is coming. I’m not feeling it. It’s been years since a truly childlike joy has pervaded my experience of Christmas, but this year there is an emptiness that frightens me. A few months ago I wrote about the “experience” of emptiness that I had at Arabia Mountain in June. It was really more of an experience of joy at being opened up. This is not like that. This is scary. There isn’t the whisper of silence to comfort me. The breath, the textures of the silence I’ve known of late aren't exactly those I associate with "true" silence but of a defiant,willful, stubborn wall. It feels alive almost at times. Right now when I write poetry, or try to, I struggle immensely with the words. The tenderness I have felt so strongly for God these past two years is reluctant to help me. Indeed it almost isn’t there. Being in the woods, alone with my camera and notebook, is a way of being with that tenderness. It doesn’t mean I feel it. The closest I do come to feeling it right now is when I’m teaching. Last week my students turned in the poems they wrote. Found poems, like the ones on my blog, and metaphor poems. “this mountain, this fire, this pencil, this song.” The poems shout and murmur with beauty. With the unexpected. Their courage takes my breath away. That is the closest I am coming to praying right now. Reading those and feeling gratitude that I helped birth them. I do say “thank you” many times a day, and I mean it. I don’t think I am angry at God. Perhaps I am, but that doesn’t feel like an explanation for this flatness. I know there is so much grief still there in my heart, mostly for my beloved and complicated mother, who died in 2004, but also for the failure of love. For my inability to love a man as I have wanted to. I don’t seem to be cut out for living into that love. I suppose part of what that’s about is that I am too selfish. But it is also beginning to be about thoughts of the frightening but sometimes compelling possibility of some sort of solitude in a protracted, long-term way. Still, I try to live in the moment, to be present to it, and when I can that is a grace. I wrote something years ago about wanting to be with a man who could “endure my solitude,” as the singer Nanci Griffith put it. I have yet to find this person. And I have put some energy into yearning and search. So possibly that is part of the hollowness this winter.

At any rate, what I do with this wall is what seems to be important. I think it is crucial that I do not pound my fists angrily on it. I can even name it. I have at times called my longing for God, for Christ, for Spirit, into it. I did that tonight driving home down the mountain in the rain. I thought about the cinnamon color of the sky around the browning forest’s top and I loved it. I felt a pang of passionate love for God just watching the rain fall on my pickup truck’s windshield. And then it went away and I began to cry. I found myself wanting the cheer and the abundant spirit of Christmas. The celebratory largesse of it. In truth I don’t want that, though. I suppose I think I should want it. But really what I love on Christmas is silence. Simplicity. Last year I went to the monastery for Christmas Eve and spent the night there. I put my bag down in the little room where I slept and loved its smallness. It felt so right. Little, austere, humble. Almost vulnerable somehow. Christmas felt then like a wreath of simple winter branches unadorned, like the receptivity and yearning of my favorite Christmas carol (actually an Advent song): O come O come Emmanuel. O come, thou Day-spring, come and cheer our spirits by Thine Advent here. I loved Christmas in the slowness of those syllables and of their dance with Advent candles in the secret part of the night. I have felt such resistance to the glitter and pomp of Christmas. For me the time is more about smallness, longing, hunger, emptiness, vulnerability, simplicity. Receptivity. Waiting. The love that has yet to be born, or borne. The child. Incapable of celebration in human terms. Naked, probably, or close to it. Just present in the human world, incarnate, hungry, breathing.

kindled

Listen for the secret name
of God
that the sky prays
in April.
Something wild
and shining follows me
across the dark roof
at night.
My kindled heart
cracks into
lace and marble,
a silent room waiting gladly
for the auspicious weather of Christ
to meet me,
carrying nothing, new-born and
empty as light.

©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

I got this found poem mostly from Annie Dillard's beautiful book Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, which I just ran across while looking through some old books of my mother's.