The Quiet In My Life….

It has been a year and six weeks, since I lost my job and began this daily vigil. As the days lengthen and the hours require so much of me, I have come more and more to know the meaning of acceptance and the cost of resistance.

I compare this experience to the first year I took time off from working and the difference could not be more striking. That year, a quarter century ago, I was broken in spirit, challenged in mind, and ruptured in heart. I spent my time reading the masters, studying with a master, riding a bicycle and trying to remain at least reasonably calm. I did not know at the time that my identity was dying, but I had all the anxieties and fears of someone diagnosed with a terminal illness, so I suppose I should have known that some part of me was in fact, dying.

Recently I saw a 60 Minutes report on a Female Buddhist monk who has been living in a small, single room on a wind swept mountain for more than thirty years. Now when I say small, I mean it was the size of a coffin times a half bigger. Reportedly she did not leave this small enclosure for more than thirty minutes a day. Her food was delivered to her by the villagers, who respect and revere the devoted and their pursuits, and the reporter who was capturing her story was the first outsider she had spoken to in decades.

Now my home is larger than a coffin, to be sure, but the principle is the same. Unlike the first time this process was required of me, I experience no phantom and psychological fears of dying, as much of my ego has long ago let go of me. I no longer use my imagination to torture myself with fantasies, of a cataclysmic future filled with shopping cart pushing and cardboard box beds.

I live in harmony with my circumstances doing what I can to join with, rather than run from.

I swim everyday, which helps a great deal. I have made dramatic changes to my diet becoming a somewhat flexible vegan, (the flexibility means that now and again I will have a bite of cheese or a slice of bacon in my spinach salad but the amounts are so small that, for all intents and purposes I am animal free-I know those of you who are VEGANS would argue with me-and thus I apologize in advance.)

But the most important change in this year’s sabbatical from the normal American life is the great depth of subtlety that has entered the playing field. Not only can I watch my mind with the patience of a cat watching a mouse hole, but also I have each day gained additional grace and humility in the process.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, my very favorite author of all time- a century ago-wrote these most inspiring words, which fuel my daily commitment to harmony and willingness…

“I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact that I am here, certainly shows me that the soul had need of an organ here. Shall I not assume the post? Shall I skulk, and dodge, and duck, with unseasonable apologies and vain modesty, and imagine my being here impertinent?”

“Here” is where I am supposed to be, like my kindred spirit living in her tiny, weather worn coffin, hanging on the side of a mountain in Nepal…I just didn’t have the consciousness to choose my confinement as she did.

As an American we are not allowed to choose solitude, over success and winning. In American culture there is nothing but disgrace, shame, dishonor, and ignominy to be heaped upon the head of the “unproductive”. Success and winning are such ingrained attitudes that anything less than full out commitment is viewed with suspicion and disdain. If that small and quiet female monk were living in America, the authorities would be called and something would be done about it…damn it!! I might add here that the reporter, whose name I have forgotten, made mention that the very air around this woman seemed electrified with a kind of quantifiable peace, something he could feel, almost tangibly, and something he clearly admired.

Conversely I have a friend I have known for more than thirty years, and she once told me that being around “someone who doesn’t work made her uncomfortable”. I understand that.

In our culture speed is the only thing that matters, speed and acquisition, and it has made us partially insane. Someone, whose revving motor has been quietly disengaged, creates an echo of emptiness, which bounces around the room like a call echoes off canyon walls. So I understand her distance, and her opinion.

As for myself, the same cultural dictates that I have spent a lifetime immersed in are letting go of me, as surely as my ego mind once died an anxiety-ridden death. And like Emerson, (I take pause comparing myself to him-even in a literary fashion), I have found myself comforted by the notion that the “Soul has need of an organ here…”

The sound of my home’s air conditioner, which in our unrelenting 115-degree summers runs almost non-stop, and often sounds like wind on a high mountaintop. It often has me thinking of that tiny wise woman, living in her small shed, eschewing the world around her so that she may make an invisible contribution, to the human spirit’s evolution and ongoing development.

My Teacher, a master on Emerson’s level, often compels us to end war in the world by ending war in our individual heart and mind. I am coming to the very edge of that personal level of peace. Each day I get closer and closer. Each day I ruminate less and less, on my circumstances and open my heart wider and wider. Each day I find more peace in my interior landscape than I had any right to expect, given where I started. And each day, my gratitude stews me gently in its juices until I am near perfectly done, and ready to be served up to some greater purpose.

I have come, thru the quiet in my life, to be capable of understanding the notion of finding the world in a grain of sand.

The great soul has need of an organ here…I will assume the post, and stand the ground. I will bow before the unyielding sovereignty of the What Is of my life, and accept with grace, equanimity, and some small measure of nobility, the circumstances given me.

If someone is out there, reading these words…I thank you for your silent companionship. If not, and I am writing these words for my ear alone…still I am grateful to have had the journey that brought these words forth from my heart, even if they are for mine ear alone.

God bless you, and keep you….

Until Tomorrow…

R.

Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com

The Quiet in My Life…essay by Ronni Miller copyright 2009 all rights reserved, reprinting available with author’s permission. If you wish to contact the author you may do so at ronnidmiller@aol.com