Sunday, November 5, 2006

Silence.

Note (1/22/10): This was first written as part of an early draft of the post, "It's Time to Go Home," and this version was not posted back in 2006, but there was a significant amount of reflection here on silence that I felt it merited its own posting. It was actually written in March, when I was working on "It's Time to Go Home," but I gave it an arbitrary date here and moved it earlier so as to not have too much repetition, if this one were to appear right next to "It's Time to Go Home."

When I first arrived in Omaha for the Resurrection House internship program back in late August, the first thing they did was take us on a retreat out at a Benedictine retreat center in Schulyer, NE. At the end of the first day of the retreat, our director announced that the second day of the retreat would be a silent day.

"Now, there are two ways we can do this," he said. "We can be silent all day except for meals, when we can talk, or we can be silent all day, including meals. What do y'all prefer?"

I was horrified. A SILENT day????? I'm supposed to NOT TALK, ALL DAY??? How would this be PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE for me? (Many of you know my reputation for being able to talk a million miles an hour, to a brick wall if it would listen to me.)

"Well, we HAVE to talk at meals," I said anxiously. "I mean, I can't NOT TALK for an ENTIRE DAY!"

So, it was agreed. We would talk at meals.

So, our day of silence started. And I found that after about an hour and a half to two hours, I was finally able to quiet the inccessent internal chatter in my mind (using some techniques I'd learned from Buddhists, actually) and to just BE. By the next afternoon at lunch, I was actually a bit reluctant to have to meet up with the rest of the crowd and talk to them... and by dinnertime, I didn't even want to SEE them.

I soaked up the silence and began to notice the little things that I usually ran past at 100 miles an hour. The wind blowing through the fields of corn, the birds and grasshoppers and the life that teemed throughout the landscape. I sat and watched a sunset over the vast fields and stared at length at a bird perched on a corn stalk. The image was so imprinted in my memory that when I went inside, I was able to recreate that image in a drawing (using the crayons they had provided us as an essential tool of our retreat :o) simply from memory. I wrote in my journal next to the drawing,

"You have to really see things to create art. To observe the details and intricacies of life. To listen to the earth. To be able to create from the mind, and not just mimicking or copying what is before your eyes. Create from memory, not from a photograph or live scene... in order to do this you have to really see."

I think was I was getting at here was how intensely I was present in the moment that I was able to remember the details of that scene in order to draw it; that had I not taken the time to slow down and look and listen and watch, I would have completely missed the fact that the bird was even sitting on the corn stalk in the first place. This idea of being present to the moment is what Buddhists mean when they speak of "mindfulness."

By the end of the retreat, I was sold on silence. I still don't seek it often enough, and my life is still too filled with chatter, literal and figurative, but that retreat taught me the value of simply stopping to be. In a very real way, it changed my life.