The Quest for an Inner Quiet
All the poetry takes on new meaning now. Contradictions accumulate. Everything that I have been working on for years comes to bear on the present moment and even so, I’m failing. My quest for compassion, patience, an inner quiet, equilibrium, equanimity, a peaceful aura – all are certainly being put to the test. And of course it’s difficult and of course I’m failing. Every day it’s all, I pick myself up, dust myself off, start all over again.
No one said any of this would be easy. This mortal life, the startling beauty, the suffering seen from afar. The suffering we see close up. I turn to Simone Weil:
“The capacity to pay attention to an afflicted person is something very rare, very difficult; it is nearly a miracle. It is a miracle. Nearly all those who believe they have this capacity do not. Warmth, movements of the heart, and pity are not sufficient.”
– Simone Weil, Waiting for God
So what is sufficient? How to pay attention to those who are afflicted when we ourselves are suffering?
How to get quiet?
Let’s turn to poetry:
This one by Mary Oliver is being passed around:
Today
by Mary Oliver
Today I'm flying low and I'm
not saying a word.
I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.
The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.
But I'm taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I'm traveling
a terrific distance.
Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.
Here’s one to get us feeling very quiet:
Mum is the Word
by Hans Ostrom
The League of Quiet Persons meets
monthly. Its quarters are a cavernous
warehouse away from traffic. Its
business is not to discuss business.
Minutes are read silently and tacitly approved.
Members listen to rain argue with corrugated
iron, a furnace with itself. Glances
are learnéd. It is not so much refuge
from noise the members seek in such company
as implicit permission not to speak,
not to answer or to answer for,
not to pose, chat, persuade, or expound.
Podium and gravel have been banned,
indeed are viewed as weaponry.
A microphone? The horror.
Several Quiet Persons interviewed
had no comment. A recorded voice
at the main office murmured only, “You
have reached the League of Quiet
Persons. After the tone, listen.”
Maybe instead of Zoom calls, we could, after the tone, listen. Maybe we could just send each other photographs of trees. Or clouds. The quietest moments we experience.
I’m fond of these words by the photographer, Consuelo Kanaga: “If I could make one true, quiet photograph, I would much prefer it to having a lot of answers.”
I’m drawn to quiet poems. But I’m trying to get at the truth of all this suffering, all this hope, through the fog that’s building up like plaque on my brain. Here’s one by Anna Kamienska:
Difference
Tell me what’s the difference
between hope and waiting
because my heart doesn’t know
It constantly cuts itself on the glass of waiting
It constantly gets lost in the fog of hope
And another one by Kamienska as we think of those among us who are doing all the heavy lifting for us all right now, the health care workers, the grocery store workers, the essential service workers.
Those Who Carry
Those who carry grand pianos
to the tenth floor wardrobes and coffins
the old man with a bundle of wood hobbling toward the horizon
the lady with a hump of nettles
the madwoman pushing her baby carriage
full of empty vodka bottles
they all will be raised up
like a seagull’s feather like a dry leaf
like an eggshell a scrap of newspaper on the street
Blessed are those who carry
for they will be raised
One more by Anna Kamienska:
Don’t Worry
Don’t worry there’ll still be a lot of suffering
For now you have the right to cling to the sleeve
of someone’s blunt friendship
To be happy is a duty which you neglect
A careless user of time
you send days like geese to the meadow
Don’t worry you’ll die many times
Until you learn at the very end to love life
We are all living in the multiple registers, processing all the different realities, simultaneously. Obviously, I’m on a computer writing this, at home, safe, with my wifi, so that means that I’m in the privileged class, even if I have lost my job and am living with uncertainty. I can also be hopeful, which is a privilege, too, I don’t lose sight of that. By the end of this we will all have suffered loss of one sort or another. And yet, there will also be pockets of happiness, and we will learn to love life in all sorts of new ways, too. We won’t neglect our sorrows and we shouldn’t neglect our duty to happiness, either.
Probably you’ve read by now Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights? I won’t quote at length from it, but remind you of the chapter where he talks about how we might join our sorrows, and in doing so, he asks, “What if that is joy?” What if we were to knit our sorrows together now, our worries, our waiting, our hopes and our fears? What garment would we make?
What if you could extend your quiet outward? Though we hardly move we are close to the door to the temple….
Well. We will possibly fail, but we can try. Another way that I find helps me to get quiet is to assemble and work on this still life series of mine. Whenever I have a melon in a still life, I think of the painting “Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber” by Juan Sánchez Cotán. There’s a lovely video of it here. It is quite possibly one of the quietest still lifes ever painted.
